How I started my novel!

So, who’s on first, or more literally what’s on first?

 Not baseball silly .just the first page of a novel, the author’s critical decision: Begin with  a gripping plot point? Or gently introduce all the characters with a few warts and wrinkles.

 Choices must be made but they can take time to sort out.  I was at a literary conference  in San Miquel de Allende  in Mexico 2009  when the great American writer Barbara Kingsolver was asked how she began her famously successful novels: door A or door B?

“Neither” she allowed. As I recall, she told us she begins with a simple idea of what her next book is about. “A person, a place, a crisis of some sort - and write a first draft very rapidly in a few months. Then I take a break”

 In time, when she returns to writing: “I generally find that my first page is somewhere in the middle of my first draft.”

 I confuffled around too with Bearwalker Alibi  - the batting order or on the game? In the end,  I listened to my muse, asking myself what would I prefer as a reader. What’s the first question about a book called the Bearwalker Alibi.  Most folks know what an “alibi” is but a Bearwalker?  Huh? Old myth or what, for good or evil?

You decide. What follows is my choice, a very short Chapter One:

 

Mid-winter, 1996

             Fergus Fitzgerald suddenly found himself stranded by a small frozen lake, near Sudbury in Northern Ontario.

        
            Without warning, his big Ford Escape had died silently, no herky-jerky death rattle this time. He still had lots of gas and no warning lights were flashing on the dashboard. This had been a short trip to visit a newspaper buddy, home-bound and recovering from knee surgery.

             Looking around for help, he saw no traffic on either side of the road, just endless rows of tall trees and rocky outcrops, and the overwhelming ache that he had been here before, a flashback – a shaman would say a curse – that overrode every other memory.

            It had started several years before with the sight of a ferociously large black bear rearing up on its hind legs, and staring back at him with almost luminous eyes. Fergus had been driving north to escape Toronto after his young wife had died of cancer, and had stopped to ski along an isolated lake. The only sound came from the whistling winds of a snow-squall out of the northwest that blurred his vision.

             There was a brief moment, however, when he could make out the  torn carcass of  a deer about a hundred meters ahead, ribs with bits of skin still attached, sticking out of the hard frozen ice, and blood spattered over the cold white surface like an urban crime scene

              As the winds eased for a moment, Fergus’s perception seemed to shift, and he saw the bear as almost human – certainly a different shape now with a smaller head and an arm that point at its kill, and then raised an angry first at him. This transformation startled Fergus, not knowing or accepting that really had happened: was it a quick flurry of blowing snow like a looming northern mirage, or perhaps was it something more primordial, left behind from an earlier time in the ancient forest. The image, or images, took root in him as the bear walked off the ice onto the green-grey granite shoreline and disappeared into the woods.

                              Instinctively, Fergus sided with the deer, angry at the bearwalker, but equally at himself for taking pleasure at the savage beauty of the scene. But, he told himself, this is nature, this is the natural order of life, so just ski away, and don’t look back.

 

                        That, of course, was several years ago. Alone, again, Fergus gulped a quick belt of scotch, savored its warmth from a flask, and turned the ignition key. The engine quickly started.
With a last look at the lake, he drove away.

     Strange, he thought, if those images were real then, where is the bearwalker now?
 

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If you enjoyed Chapter One, why not read the whole book. Buy it now on Amazon

 

How I found, found...my voice at age 78

If you think that’s strange, given how much I talk, you’re right. I had been thinking about my voice as I prepared for the launch of my new novel, Bearwalker Alibi, at the Ginger Press in Owen Sound.

 But if you have stuttered as long and often as I did when I was much younger, then your voice can never taken for granted. Not knowing what would come out of your mouth was both embarrassing and draining. My working and easily accessible vocabulary had became narrower and narrower.

 Even as a journalist, I was frustrated by almost never being been able to write what was running through my head, awkward at worst and flat at best.  Frequently, writing the simplest of news stories felt like I was chipping away on a block of granite.

Finally as I turned 30 about in the late 60s, my late wife Monique convinced me it was time to try speech therapy again.  A clinic at the University of Toronto said there was no simply cure, no magic pill and no inner ear surgery.

So we practiced stuttering in the most embarrassing of places that I would have normally avoided. Like crowed elevators and busy restaurants. I even enjoyed the rich irony of embarrassing the non-stuttering folks around me. Why? Faked stutters that I could turn off or on gave me control and control produced confidence.

Enter Henry Ford III. That Henry, auto tycoon and economic adviser to then U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. Mr. Ford was speaking to a  hall full of industry leaders and a small group of journalist like myself  who covered the auto industry.

I had convinced myself that if I could fake a wild stutter while being introduced to Mr. Ford, then I  could fake it anyplace. But when it was my turn to shake his hand, nothing came out all, just a long speechless stutter.

I stayed for dinner but slunk away quietly, quite defeated. About a month later, however, I was invited to Henry’s annual year-end press conference in Dearborn Michigan, and rose to his invitation to ask a question to a crowded room.

 Very quickly I attracted television cameras, tape recorders etc. and, as planned, hit Henry with a wild barrage of faked stuttering.

 It worked splendidly. No more cameras, no mikes, just me and Henry. And I went forward with a wonderfully and deliciously modulated question. That was Jake’s Speech and I haven’t stopped talking since. Or writing.

And yes, I have seen The King’s Speech several times.

 Had it not been for that important redemptive moment with the late Mr. Ford, I would never have had the courage to write fiction and to pass along the lyrical moments that I now hear when I   welcome the voices of my characters romping through my head.