This is where I explain how I am doing my novel.
Today I begin a series about how I am pulling together the largest and most complex project I’ve ever undertaken: writing a novel. I hope my experience will be useful for your own creative endeavors.
I recognize that writers don’t often do this sort of thing, particularly when they haven’t even finished the book. It’s a bit like showing how a sausage is made. But what the heck. All my life I have encouraged writers young and old to embrace the process and be open. So why not watch me learn?
The novel, by the way, is located at https://geoffreygevalt.substack.com. (You can see a couple of excerpts — text and audio; full novel expected in late spring 2023.
I’ll be posting every few weeks so pop in when you have a chance, or I’ll post on my Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/web/@gg.
All my work on this project is presented for free (except for the ebook and paperback at the end which will go to support independent bookstores. No Amazon for me!). If you find value in what I do, please donate whatever you can to one of the four nonprofits I’ve outlined here: https://geoffreygevalt.substack.com/p/hiram-falls. All of these nonprofits — and a host of individuals — are helping me with this project.
I would love to hear from you. Tell me what you think. Comments are the lifeblood of writers.
So on to the first entry, which I will keep short:
All projects have a beginning. Even if you didn’t know it at the time. This is how Hiram Falls The Novel began.
In 1999 I led a yearlong project at The Burlington Free Press to commemorate the history of the 1900s — the last century of the millennium. We had monthly installments shaped around a single topic — such as intolerance, natural disasters, The Hippies, etc. — and an accompanying graphic spread of details of a particular decade of the 1900s. Each month, I asked readers to share their history and stories from the 1900s.
One day a man came into the newsroom with a leather diary of an 18-year-old girl in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont written in 1892, a diary he found at the bottom of a box of books he bought at a yard sale. Here is how it began:
“January 1, 1892. 4 degrees. Cloudy. Today was the day for Uncle Lyman’s and my trial but it was again postponed. The men folk went into town anyways. Oh dear me. Oh dear me. How can I bear it all.”
Oh my gosh. What a beginning. I read on.
But the diary makes no further mention again of the “trial” and in a June entry makes only vague reference to a resolution of whatever was going on. The young woman goes into great detail, however, of the drudgery of her life of chores and isolation and hardship until, one day, she meets a young man, falls in love and then gets married. Her last entry makes reference to her going to meet her husband’s family in Quebec. The diary then ends.
I thought it might be a journalism project; perhaps we could publish excerpts and then ask readers to finish her story and the best entry would get published. But I wanted to protect her privacy so I began searching for any records on her or her relatives.
There were none. That was not unusual, I was told, because in the late 1800s many families didn’t bother with birth or death records.
I did, however, find a person in the area where she grew up with the same last name (but no relation) who had done extensive research on teen girls of that time. He was a judge in Vermont Family Court and he was curious as to whether the cases he was seeing today were different than those from a 100 years ago. They weren’t, sadly. Then and now they centered on domestic abuse, alcoholism, incest, sexual assault and all were and are punctuated by poverty and illiteracy. Dreary stuff.
He also told me that an 18-year-old girl living at home and unmarried would have been considered a “spinster” — a term of the time — as she would be seen as almost beyond marrying age. And he said he also discovered that fathers, to pay off debts, would loan out their daughter to do household chores — or, gruesomely, to serve someone’s sexual needs as well.
Even drearier stuff. I set aside my plans to do something journalistically with the diary.
The girl’s story stayed in my mind. It haunted me.
In 2017, I was asked to write a story for Vermont Stage Company’s annual Winter Tales production. I decided it was time. Here’s what I wrote and audio of how it was performed: https://geoffreygevalt.com/writing/ten-days-of-winter-1892
The piece, of course, was entirely made up and was a much different take on the original journal since the intent of Winter Tales is to make the audience feel warm and fuzzy. And, frankly, I was fine with that because I really didn’t know how to handle the darkness of the story.
I cannot describe to you how exciting it was — and terrifying — to hear my words presented on stage, to hear the silence in the audience as it was being presented, to hear the loud applause at the end, to have so many people come up to me after the show to tell me how much they appreciated the fictional character of Carrie Eastman.
For the next year, I kept thinking about the story, about the community in which Carrie lived. I also did a little more digging in the Vermont Historical Society archives, in local collections of old letters from the 1890s. Other characters began to emerge in my mind.
By the fall of 2018, I learned my first big lesson of writing fiction: Let your brain do the work, let it wander and explore and imagine. So I wrote another piece for Vermont Stage, a story about a wholly new character, Doc, in a wholly different time, 1947.
And that’s when I learned another lesson.
I’d love your feedback. Comment below (if you see it) or send me an email at ggevalt(at)gmail(dot)com.
Next: How a typo opened a door to a wholly new idea.