On Writing & Storytelling: ‘Reunion: A Story’ – Genesis of a Novella

Like most writers, I’m often asked questions along the lines of “Where do you get your ideas from?” and “How did you write this story?”  So, to give you some idea of how Reunion came to be and what it’s about, here are some questions and answers related to my novella. 

The Premise:  It is February 1998. 33-year-old Jim Garraty is a respected history professor and bestselling author who lives in New York City. Popular with both students and readers, Jim seems to have it all. Fame, a nice apartment in Manhattan, and a reputation as one of the best World War II historians in the U.S. But when he gets a cryptic email from his best friend from high school, Jim is forced to relive his past – and a trip to his hometown of Miami reopens old wounds he thought had healed long ago. 

Q.: How did you come up with the story in Reunion? 

A.: Reunion has an unusual “origins” story. In its first iteration, it wasn’t a novella or even a short story; it was a three-page fantasy sequence that I wrote in the late 1980s for a creative writing class at what was then Miami-Dade Community College’s South Campus. I don’t remember now what our professor, David Schroeder, had in mind, but I do remember coming up with the character of Jim Garraty and setting the scene at my old high school, South Miami Senior High. The basic template for Jim was created there – he was 18 years old, a smart 12th grader about to graduate, and romantic at heart.  Those traits remained true in the various iterations of the story. 

It All Began with…an Erotic Dream Sequence!

I no longer have the original version of the dream sequence. It begins, as it does in the novella, when a tired and sleep-deprived Jim falls asleep in South Miami High School’s library on the last day of school. However, Jim does not dream about dancing with Marty, the girl he has loved from afar since 10^th grade, but rather about hooking up with one of the most attractive teachers on campus.

ALEX DIAZ-GRANADOS, ON THE ORIGINS OF “REUNION”

The original plot of the scene…. well, that was radically different from the version of Reunion that is currently available on Amazon. As I said, I don’t remember if Prof. Schroeder asked the class to write a dream sequence or a fantasy; it’s been over 30 years since I took that CRW course – but I do remember thinking that if he wanted a fantasy, I would give him one that would be, well, attention-getting.

I no longer have the original version of the dream sequence. It begins, as it does in the novella, when a tired and sleep-deprived Jim falls asleep in South Miami High School’s library on the last day of school. However, Jim does not dream about dancing with Marty, the girl he has loved from afar since 10^th grade, but rather about hooking up with one of the most attractive teachers on campus.

It was, for me, an uncharacteristically erotic plot point, but the assignment was to write a dream or fantasy sequence. I was young, and sex was something I fantasized about cos…I hadn’t experienced it yet. So…it was an explicit sex scene, especially in comparison to the version I ended up publishing in 2018.

At around the same time that I was taking CRW 2001, I was also working on a multi-part series of columns about my experiences in high school for the campus student newspaper’s About Time section. As I recall, it was a three-part “saga,” as my journalism professor, Peter C. Townsend – called it. Of course, the columns were 400-500 words long and barely scratched the surface of my three-year stint at South Miami High – my alma mater.

Obviously, all that thinking about the past had a strong influence on the choices I made for the fantasy sequence: South Miami High on my last day as a student there. And, as embarrassed as I feel about this now, my preoccupation with sex and dating (or rather, my lack of success in that arena) manifested itself in that fantasy.

I’m not going to get into specifics about that. Suffice it to say that although the setting and the protagonist survived throughout the lengthy process involved in the creation of Reunion, the 1980s-era dream sequence would have been rated NC-17 if it were a movie.

Also, in purely technical terms, the story was told somewhat differently. If I recall correctly, the CRW 2001 dream sequence was written in the third person – omniscient narrative voice, whereas the later versions of Reunion are told from Jim’s point of view (first person – limited perspective voice).

I don’t have my original draft of the dream sequence (I lost my copy – with its “B+” grade and notes from Prof. Schroeder on the margins) at some point after I decided to use it as the core for Reunion years later. But much of the non-erotic stuff survives in the definitive version of the story.

The Creative Impulse, Part I

The present version of Reunion, which happily is more of a PG-13 tale, was “born” at a very strange time in my life. In 1998, I was working with Gaude Timor, a Miami resident who owned a printing shop called Gaude Printing. Gaude was in her late 50s or early 60s at the time and, when I was introduced to her by a mutual friend, she wanted to become a published author of children’s stories. Like many Cuban Americans of her generation, she was bilingual and could write in English, but she had not taken any creative writing courses in the U.S. She had already “self-published” – using her own printing business – a few stories in slim hardcover books, but she wasn’t having any luck finding a publisher who would help her with mass distribution and marketing on a nationwide basis.

Our mutual friend knew that Gaude needed serious help with her writing if she was to even have a fighting chance to get a publishing deal. And he also knew that I needed a steady gig to make money from writing. Gaude had a lot of manuscripts for children’s stories that needed editing and revising. And because my mom didn’t raise me to be lazy or a fool, I accepted the gig in the fall of 1994.

I am not going to delve too much into the seven-year working “partnership” with Ms. Timor here. It did not end well, for one thing, and it’s not relevant to this story, except for one essential “plot point”: I needed a respite from writing children’s stories that I, as a reader and editor, knew would not be able to compete with either contemporary, living authors such as J.K. Rowling, much less long-dead ones like J.R.R. Tolkien or the Brothers Grimm.  I wanted to write an original work of my own with a more realistic setting and for a different audience.

At first, I had no idea what kind of story I wanted to write. I knew I had to choose something that would not require a lot of research or time-consuming prep work; this ruled out anything in the science fiction or military fiction genres.

I also don’t do horror stories well; I have read a lot of Stephen King novels and stories, but it’s not a genre that I think I could write comfortably in. I’d probably come across as a second-rate Steve King imitator. And because a lot of Gaude’s stories were sappy “happily ever after” romances with lots of magic and supernatural beings, I did not want to write a “chick-lit” story, either.

In desperation, I went through my college notebooks and folders to see if there was anything from either my college course on satire or CRW-2001 that I could use as a foundation for a short story. Luckily, I did…the strange “dream sequence” that had earned a B+ from Prof. Schroeder almost 12 years earlier.

I’m not going to bore you with a detailed account of how a three- to four-page-long scene morphed into a 40-page (in print) story. I will say, though, that several things happened shortly before I started writing the first draft of Reunion.

The initial spark for Reunion was a sad occurrence. A few weeks before I sat down at my desk to write a story about high school (which is how I thought of it then) I had read the obituary of a young woman that I’d known at South Miami High when we were both singers in the school’s mixed chorus. She had been killed in a car crash somewhere in North Carolina at the young age of 31. Although I didn’t know her well and had never had as much as a passing crush on her, it still hit me hard. She was a sweet and popular student, and we’d been in the same ensemble – she sang with the alto section, and I sang in the bass section – during the 1982-83 academic year.

The Creative Impulse, Part II

Another source of inspiration was the fact that 1998 marked the 15th anniversary of the Class of 1983 graduation. I had not gone to the 10-year reunion in ’93 because it was a pricey affair, and also due to embarrassment; I had not earned my AA degree in journalism and mass communications from Miami-Dade, and though I was working at the time, it was mostly every-once-in-a-while freelance consulting and business writing gigs, and not a steady, well-paying career job.

I really wanted to go to the 15-year class reunion, but when I saw that the price for attending the three-day get-together was close to $300, I thought, “Would have liked to go, but can’t afford it.”

A major creative influence – in terms of structure, characters, and themes – was Billy Joel’s Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. I liked the way that the song is essentially “The Ballad of Brenda and Eddie” – which Joel wrote first – with a melodically different “frame story” added on later so that the song would have a proper beginning and end. 

Now, the stories in Reunion and Scenes from an Italian Restaurant are different, but I deliberately followed the structure and narrative technique of Joel’s song when I finally sat down to write my story. 

There’s more to this, of course, but that’s the basic story of how Reunion came to be.