A Story about a Story
It All Began with a Ride Through the White Mountains of New Hampshire
Long before my musings turned political, I wrote “other things.” Unpublished things. Everyone who writes has them, and perhaps they are awful (in the author’s estimation), just awful, or works in progress. Works that never quite progress.
Or maybe it is, as Paul Valéry wrote in (1933),
In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned; and this abandonment, of the book to the fire or to the public, whether due to weariness or to a need to deliver it for publication, is a sort of accident, comparable to the letting-go of an idea that has become so tiring or annoying that one has lost all interest in it. -
I have heard of painters who, like authors, must deliver work for “publication” that is never truly finished. A trait that does not seem to apply to what passes for modern art - all of which appears unfinished (to me) and should never have been made public.
Yes, everyone is a critic.
Unpublished Things
Among my own unpublished things is what might be a series of novels that started as a short story that got out of hand. It is not yet in hand, but I think about it quite a bit. But some of the things that made sense early on no longer do, and the project cannot “be” without fixing them.
Perhaps I should first share some backstory about how the story came to be.
I was a passenger in a vehicle headed to or from the White Mountains. I don’t recall which direction.
I didn’t live in New Hampshire yet, so this was probably 1989. I habitually took long weekends to go hiking with friends from high school. We were all in our mid-twenties. As was often the case, to kill time during the drive (to or from), someone would bring up some story they read or suggest an idea for one. In this case, it was the latter.
A man loses his wife during childbirth. That was it. Go!
We talked about the mother and her backstory. Did the child survive? Did the child die? How did the dad/widower cope? I feel confident we were looking at the psychological journey of the husband without his wife or child. However, I don’t recall specific details of that conversation, even though I can still picture the car, the occupants, the faded blue interior, and the sun warming us through the windows as we traveled down I-93.
It turned out that these exact details never really mattered. At some point, the subject changed, and the ‘exercise’ was forgotten - until it wasn’t.
A few weeks later, back in Buffalo (I had been living there for a year or two), I wrote four pages, in short-story style, about a man who lost his wife in childbirth and mailed it to my friends. Remember, this is 1989. We had monochrome-monitored computers, dot-matrix printers, and local networking but no internet.
Snail mail was not yet a designation. There was no other kind, and while FedEx had been around since 1973, and the "Absolutely Positively Overnight" slogan began in 1978, it was relatively expensive to send things this way and impractical for destinations not near a large, local airport.
Greiner Filed was the Manchester Municipal Airport until 1978 when it was officially labeled the Manchester Airport. It was still a tiny thing (until only recently) and still is in the grand scheme, so snail mail it was!
I sent it, and they LOVED IT.
It seemed they’d forgotten about it altogether, but when reminded, it had never occurred to them to set it where I had or to create the tension that opened the story. Setting, period, genre—it was all unexpected but comfortable, given our shared reading preferences.
They wrote more and sent it back, and we did this for a while until I moved to New Hampshire in June of 1990. While looking for work (yes, I moved here, jobless), we fleshed out the details. We would meet regularly to discuss the backstory, themes, plots, etc. Things (very quickly) got quite complicated - and not just the backstory or the tale itself.
One of my co-authors moved away for work, and the other fell in love and got married. I fell in love and got married, and the guy who moved away fell in love and got married. We all had kids, jobs, lives. We were happy, and while the project stood waiting on the edges of awareness, it did not move in any direction for a very long time.
Decades Later
It has been thirty-five years since that ride through the White Mountains. We are all still married and love our wives, but the story we started received little attention for a long time. At some point, they bequeathed all ownership and responsibility for it to me (hoping it might at least get written). I have not been an adequate steward, but that may soon change.
The characters infringe on both my dozing and waking mind, asking to be given purpose. Why did we create them if not to share them? When will they be unveiled to the praise or punishment of critics?
After seventeen years of political blogging, my skin should be thick enough.
I’m not sure it is. This feels different.
I still have those original four pages and all of the pages that followed.
All I need to do is make it a priority. It will never be perfect, but perhaps it can be “perfect enough.”
Note to Readers: Excerpts from this story will be made available for free (in the coming weeks and months), with longer versions restricted to paid subscribers. It is my hope that this audience will be my critics and assist in making it “good enough” for publication beyond this platform.