wrest rest from the grisly grizzly that is the daze of these days in order to write right
I've always fancied the idea of writing a novel. Many
readers, at one time or another, get this tickle -- just as watching a movie
lends itself to wanting to be an actor. What kind of novel shall I write? That
is a great question -- and prompts this primordial type of hopeful feeling in
me; of potential being manifested and worlds yet unimagined being born.
I like interesting. And while my life is enhanced by finding
interest in just about everything I come across, it means my threshold for
holding my interest is low, which means needing to work to ensure optimizing
just how interesting I can make it. Subjective as it is, the best part of
"interesting" is that seeing as how I'm in the middle of becoming an
physician, I have relatively little pressure to move expediently nor is there
any reason to write a novel other than for the pleasure in the pursuit of creating
something that I can take pride in. Simple as that.
On an ongoing basis, I plan on developing the novel here on
this blog. The goal today is to develop a summary sentence describing the
novel. From there, the sentence is expanded to a paragraph, and from there the
characters and story line will be fleshed out. Using design principles to build
a story makes sense. Even with short stories, I've written myself into corners
that were difficult to escape, and often unnecessary had proper planning been managed
from the start.
So here we go:
_______________ is
the first offering from JLP, and is a thought provoking and moving novel that
proves that ties to ones past can be more difficult to escape than it might
seem; it is set in various times and settings, including the wild west as it
played out in the "Shanghai Tunnesl" of Portland, Oregon and in the
Coastal Native Americans who find themselves in the middle of the biggest
natural disaster in the Pacific NorthWest in the post-ice age
and in the old folks home in the city of Netanya, Israel that suffers
through a suicide bombing in the early
21st century and the hospital staff who treat the bomber who survived.
A theme I wish to explore will be made obvious by having
this verse as an opening epigraph:
Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and
transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear [the guilty]; visiting
the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's
children, unto the third and to the fourth [generation].
Ezekiel 34:7
Assuming I use these 3 settings, which I will already find
superbly intriguing and dripping with mystique and potential, the furthest
behind in history will be the Coastal Native Americans who are making their way
up the Colombia River when the earthquake which triggered the "Bridge of
the Gods" in the Bonneville Slide, which occurred between 1060 and 1280,
and actually damned the river for a unknown period of time. The next setting
will be in the rough days of early Portland Oregon, when shipping from the Far
East prompted a horrible term known as being "shanghai'd," meaning that a young man who, perhaps had too
much drink, or perhaps too much opium, or was beat up -- ends up on a trading
ship to China as an unwitting member of the crew. There were (are) some tunnels
beneath the streets that dead end into the western shore of the Willamette
River as it passes by Portland to join with the mighty Columbia as it marches
to the Pacific. One of my favorite bars in Portland (circa 2001) was actually
called the Shanghai Tunnel, and was in one of these spaces under the street and
building. The next time would be March 27th, 2002, in what is referred to as
the Passover Bombing in Netanya, Israel, a pleasant seaside town 20 kilometers
or so north of Tel Aviv. I am inclined to make the main character a young
American physician from Oregon who is training and in residency and during a
global health medical training trip ends up treating the "suicide"
bomber who was not wholly successful with the suicide part, and all the ensuing
hilarity that can be had from such a pleasant position.
What do I want to say through writing this? Hmm. I do harbor
this opinion that all created pieces of writing exist as propaganda serving the
worldview of the author. I like my worldview, and I like to think that my
personal creed is built to serve others as much as it serves myself -- and at
times, more-so. I want to communicate this. And as much as I have principles
that I stand on to live my life, I want this novel to be in large part a
worthwhile piece of art that performs well as entertainment.
All of this literature stuff especially the subtle
connections that English students (I did get a minor in English with my
Bachelor of Science degree, and while I enjoyed the writing classes immensely,
at times the literature classes were worth some chuckles when realizing the
thread-bare arguments students, instructors and textbooks would make when
arguing for exactly what a particular author was meaning to say or express. I'm
reminded of Ray Bradbury (who I spent a semester researching and crafting a
dissertation on what his writing meant not only to the world of literature but
in shaping public opinion concerning technology and the dynamics between
progressive and luddite perspectives. He once walked out on a lecture where his
work Fahrenheit 451 demanded to be seen through a lense not about the effect of mass media on the populace but
about censorship. As alluded to earlier, writing a novel is like giving birth
to a creation, and just like human babies, they grow up and take on a life of
their own -- and in light of this, I could argue that Mr. Bradbury had birthed
this seminal work of fiction and had become something beyond what even he could
hope for his creation's future. kind of like having a kid whom the dad wants to
be a baseball player and the kid goes on not only to dislike baseball but to
eschew team sports altogether and becomes a successful skateboarder.) On
another parenthetical note, I just took some time to look for the Bradbury
paper I wrote in the last year of undergrad and I couldn't find it. I think a
lot of that stuff I wrote from then is gone forever as I had pulled the hard
drive from the laptop that I used but eventually crashed in hopes of pulling
data off of it, but I probably don't have it anymore. Kind of a bummer.) such as
myself come up with is just the brains desperate attempt to recognize patterns,
as it seems wont to do.
Oh to have such problems as having a novel being discussed
in university classrooms.
Since this is doubling as a blog post and my first effort to
bring a novel to life, I'm going to paste helpful links to each timeline so I
can start the actual research of how to construct each world.
The oldest timeline will probably be set on the Colombia
River where a big landslide occurs and damns the river for easily decades. I
was also thinking of pushing the timeline further back in history and using a
certain event that I remember learning about in a geology class. At the end of
the last ice-age, there remained a humongous lake in the western part of what is
now the U.S. When this lake drained westward it was what we call the Missoula
Flood. There is a great PBS show about how this was discovered and the weird
ground formations that spurred research into just what went down when the
flooding happened. One of these events I'll use, but, as I'm also contemplating
using Oregon as a geographical tie in and as one of the connections between
these people spread apart by thousands of years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7iC1fBREPI (pans the bridge
from the Oregon side, short)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arQ0RY-jwVI (kite-boarding
contest which clearly shows the remnants of the landslide from the Washington
side)
http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=8018
(Detailed story of Indian lore surrounding the events of the bridge's
formation, destruction and Mt. St. Helens as the birth of the youngest
mountain)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mIszJv_Qow (Brief Oregon
geology Hx video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzxtb4bJObA (Video showing
the rapids that used to be on the river before the damns)
http://www.oregonpioneers.com/tribe.htm (Blurb on Coastal
Tribes)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/megafloods-of-the-ice-age.html
(Worth watching for general edification no matter who you are or what you're
interested in)
http://hugefloods.com/LakeMissoula.html (Well done website,
if not a little outdated, about the Missoula floods)
http://www.shanghaitunnels.info/ (Tours of modern day
Shanghai Tunnels)
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/or-shanghai.html (Blurb
about Shanghai Tunnels)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THJNPIGT6xc (Shanghai tunnel
video -- 20min)
http://lostoregon.org/category/portland-history/ (Less about
Shanghai but awesome blog about PDX Hx)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passover_massacre (Suicide
bombing in Netanya by Hamas in 2002)
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/28/israel1
(Passover Massacre)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkib03PpARA (Video from
first responder POV in Passover Massacre)
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