There's this scene on The Office where the CEO, played by Kathy Bates, gets all sorts of excited when she hears that Toby has written a novel. She offers unsolicited advice and ideas, and Toby nods along at every insane suggestion. She leaves and when the camera turns back on a stoic Toby he mutters, "Write your own damn novel." It was one of those moments where my relating to The Office had nothing to do with having a well-meaning-yet-incompetent boss and a gaggle of coworkers that make me long for the days when three-martini lunches were acceptable.
Write your own damn novel. I dare you. It's not as easy as it would seem. Aside from the actual work of putting words on paper, there is the task of choosing every single word, constructing every sentence, every scene, every character, every subtlety. And then there comes a weirdness when these characters of yours take on lives of their own. At some point in the writing process, they start fighting with you...telling you you're an idiot and they would really do things quite differently. They argue about the words you put in their mouth. They won't shut up until you shut up and just listen what they tell you.
The Prairie Dance is my second novel. The first sucked monkey. But it was my own damn novel. This story started off as a screenplay, a western/frontier story that sprang out of someone making the comment "Who ever heard of black cowboys?" After doing some research, I found that about a third of all cowboys were freed slaves, set adrift after the Civil War ended. A few yarns and anecdotes caught my imagination...and few characters grabbed my heart. Ex-slaves, cowboys, con artists, cattle rustlers, and outlaws so dangerous it was actually against the law to attempt apprehending them. Wonderful characters.
When the screenplay was finished, I searched for an agent...and the feedback was very positive, yet usually shot with a familiar inspiring comment. "Who ever heard of black cowboys?" Ah, well. I put the script aside for other projects. And then some years later, while I was in the shower, Clara began talking to me.
A beautiful slave woman stood on the back porch of a southern mansion. The sun shined bright. She stared out over a hill of green, past the slave cabins, into an endless reach of cotton fields and straight into my eyes. "It's time," she gently smiled, her dreamy eyes darting about and then back into mine. "You need to hear my story." Thankfully, she gave me all the important details before the hot water ran out. Weirdness. Over the course of about a year I wrote what Clara told me. She introduced me to her friends and family, and they told me their stories. And all the while, I wondered, what any of this really had to do with my original screenplay. The screenplay took place in the Wild West, after the Civil War. Clara’s story took place in the Antebellum South. Yet, from Clara’s perspective, it was all the same story. She was cleverer than me in how she stitched together the patchwork.
In the end, though, a novel, and its characters becomes an abandoned thing. You either don’t finish writing it, and it is abandoned. Or you do finish it, and abandon it. Someday I may actually sell it, give the novel a life of its own, and I might feel differently, but in the meantime, The Prairie Dance is just another damn novel.