The Chicken or The Egg

I just finished a novella, set during the Battle of the Bulge.  I’ve been working on it for a while.  I realized that I can’t pin down my original impulse, that glimpse of something, the orphan intuition that tugs at your sleeve or plays hide and seek in your peripheral vision.  

Sometimes you know right away when you’ve got a workable idea, and once in a while not just workable, but inspired, and the fuse is lit.  We’re all familiar with getting in the zone, and the feverish clamor of momentum, but genuine inspiration comes from applying your ass to the chair.  You have to be there for lightning to strike.

Now, in the case of “The Lion of the Chama,” another long and time-shifting story, I can tell you exactly where it sprang from.  I read an article in the Santa Fe New Mexican about a local criminal lawyer who was retiring after forty years, and the interviewer asked him which was his most memorable case.  The guy said, I defended Reies Lopez Tijerina after the siege of the Tierra Amarilla courthouse. My mental ears pricked right up.  What siege was that?

Which is actually pretty widely-known history hereabouts, but I was only a wash-ashore in those days - as former Santa Fe mayor Debbie Jaramillo used to say, “You just got off the bus.”  I began to dig into it, and as research made the narrative more concrete, it also began to veer off in unexpected directions.  This itself is not unexpected.  But the more I learned, the less wiggle room I had.  In a way, it mirrors the writing process.  You begin with an empty canvas, but as you fill it in, your avenues of choice close off.  The narrative funnels down.

The expression is: Don’t spoil a good story for lack of the facts.  I stopped researching the facts of the courthouse siege, because they got in the way of the story I wanted to tell.

Now, coming back to my WWII novella, The Kingdom of Wolves, we have almost the opposite dynamic.  I knew I wanted the wider backdrop to be authentic, so I tried to stick to the chronology and movements of the fight, and who was actually where on the big map.  Patton and Bradley, for example, have cameos.  So does my Uncle Charlie, breaking down the ENIGMA traffic, back at Bletchley Park.  (My primary source was Antony Beevor’s terrific book, Ardennes 1944.)  On the other hand, I wanted my own story to slip between the cracks.  I had to make room for it, without playing the historical record false.  What happened in this case, is that I didn’t have a story of my own until I’d straightened out the facts.  That background determined the story.

So, here’s the question.  Or, at least, a framework for discussion.  Sometimes you have a situation, and you work from that; sometimes you start with a character.  But almost always, you have a difficulty to surmount.  The ring goes back to the fires of Mount Doom, where it was forged.  Not every story is a hero’s quest, of course, but is the narrative engine the hero or the journey?  Clearly the two influence each other.  I guess what’s interesting, and probably unanswerable, in this context, is whether we start with Frodo, or the Ring? 

It also probably doesn’t matter.  What counts is that we got to the finish line.  Still and all, I often wonder why and how.  The sudden and exact detail that shows up in high relief, and we say to ourselves, Now there’s a story!