At 3 o'clock in the morning my head woke up full of ideas. It was saying to me I could explore various ideas in depth as the structure. Exposition, Rising Action, Climax/Catastrophe (repeat the last two if it's an action story), Falling Action and Denouement. How often have I mapped that out...
Exposition has to do with setting (which equals time and place), starting in the middle of things, while giving clues to the protagonists deepest desires or motivations, the other characters who either enable or disable this protagonist, and grabbing the attention of the reader.
Last night, I woke up thinking about Setting = Time + Place. How one place at different times (seasons, stages of life, hours of the day or night) would suggest a wildly different set of expectations and directions to my story. Bolton from zero to 10? Lincoln from 10-16? Maine at the age of 4, 14, 24 or 34? Living on a cement sailboat at 17-19 in the Gulf of ME and St. Croix and having sailed between the two through a hurricane? Visiting NYC at puberty, living/working there in my 20's? Being in Copenhagen with the first terrorist bomb went off in 1985? Being in Belgrade at 23 and fearing being arrested for singing "Summertime" too loudly after midnight? Doing business in NYC while living in SF my 30's & 40's? Or visiting NYC post 9/11 with my own kids and later students?
Place has been very essential to my identity. New England, regionally and Maine in particular. But also my first home of Bolton, MA. It was truest home, from birth 'til I was 10. Leaving it made me heart and soul sick. It meant the true end of my nuclear family (although that had really come unravelled by the time I was 5). It also meant the end of living on 50 rural acres, in which I'd explored every inch with my dog, both of us untethered and unfettered. Running through fields, granite outcroppings, bunny circles, over the pipeline and skating on the pond. From there being moved to the confines of a quarter acre lot smack in the center, complete with a five-way intersection outside our picket fence, of a Boston suburb that although it had plenty of conservation lands, still felt like a slap to my sense of self. My dog, Tiger, ran away. He ran all they way back to Bolton. Through at least three towns. I'd never been more proud of him. He would have covered 18 to 25+ miles depending the straightest of driving routes. Goggling the route we usually drove, and where he would have known the scents, it was the marathon distance he most likely ran!
When I first moved to NYC, all I did was discuss the perfection of Portland, ME. New acquaintances wondered aloud, why did I every leave. Simple: one couldn't learn about publishing and the business of writing in Portland. At The Radcliffe Publishing Course, after 8 weeks of working 20hrs a day, with one day off and having produced three magazine proposals and five books proposals prior to our arrival (which were judged/graded by the Who's Who of NY Publishing world), the Course informed us that we all had move to NYC and must attend a job fair at The New Yorker.
No pressure. Yet I pined for Maine (pun intended). The one writer/editor/mentor I knew in Portland was the person who recommended that I apply to Radcliffe, John Preston. Much to my amazement I was accepted. I was even more amazed when I arrived to learn that of the 100 students (out of thousands who applied), I was one of five who had attended a State University, and not the flagship at that! By the end of the summer we were down to 75+-students. Many of the myopic Ivy league kids couldn't cut it with the group work and the hours. Having done nothing but deadline group work (cabinetmaking, salvage diving, reporting, waitressing, crewing on boats); I was used to delivering my piece of job in a timely fashion so that the whole of a project could work.
I would then go on to live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan. Very few friends would trek to Brooklyn to visit me then, yet now many of them own houses there! My how the times have changed. New York was so different then in the go-go 80's when the streets were still lined with used needles and not brass kick plates along Thompson Square Park. I would go to work at the agency that represented my friend John, Curtis Brown Ltd. It was there I did an apprenticeship and paid my dues that allowed me to start my own agency later in SF.
So if I were answering the question of structure only from the point of view of where and when, what is the question:
Where and when was I the most miserable and how did I climb out of it (ala Wild)?
Where and when did I realize the drama and dysfunction in my life was due to coming from a long line brilliant depressives and that I was just the next in line (ala too many authors to count and I'm directly related to Meriwether Lewis and one of the first Directors of McLean)?
Where and when did I accept that I wanted to be successful, even with my failures (ala many motivational speakers)?
When and where was I in extreme elements where I thought I could die, and others did or may have (ala books from the pages of Outside or War reporters)?
Where and when did I feel like I had arrived "home" after being "gone" for so long (ala either a love story or the lure of the local or a heroes journey).
Where and when did I know I could never go home again and could only create it in words or stories (ala T. Wolfe (perhaps soon?), many songs, nostalgic novels and immigrant memoirs)?
I have answers to all the above questions. I'm just not sure which is the deepest mine and which will set me on a fruitful path. Time to make dinner....Good Night patient reader, G'night.
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