Musings & Thoughts for Thursday, October 5, 2023, or: Family Anniversaries Loom; Progress on Novel Inches Forward

Midday/Early Afternoon, Thursday, October 5, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another Thursday edition of A Certain Point of View, Too. It’s the fifth day of October, which as you know is not one of my favorite months – for a number of reasons.

First, it’s the “birthday month” of both my parents. Dad was born on October 4, 1919, so yesterday would have been his 104th birthday, had he been gifted with centenarian longevity. Unfortunately, my father didn’t even get to celebrate his 46th birthday; he died on the morning of February 13, 1965[1] – as I’ve mentioned in several posts about Papi – when the Curtiss C-46 Commando he and his copilot were flying from Miami International Airport to El Salvador suffered a catastrophic engine failure and crashed in an auto junkyard near the airport.

My mother lived a far longer life; she managed to “celebrate” her 86th birthday on October 17, 2014, and died on July 19, 2015, just under three months shy of her 87^th one.  Her death, though, was slower and crueler than my father’s; a combination of health issues, including the onset of dementia that coincided with a slow and eventually unsuccessful recovery from a complicated operation to repair her damaged spinal column, slowly stole Mom’s last five years of life from her, along with her wit, memories, and fierce independent spirit.

So, yeah…this month is definitely not an easy one for me to deal with. Nevertheless, I will try to press on with my own life and make positive contributions to this world before I, too, must make that trip to what Shakespeare called “the undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveler returns…”

And speaking of positive contributions….

On Writing & Storytelling: Cracking the Code of Chapter 11’s Scene Four

Yesterday afternoon – and rather late in the afternoon, at that – I finally figured out how to write the fourth (and last) scene in the eleventh chapter of Reunion: Coda.

See, I’ve been working under the assumption that every scene in a chapter has to be at least a few pages in length, with a nice balance of action, dialogue, descriptive passages, and what have you. And, for the most part, this approach has worked well – or, at least until I got to this point in the narrative.

And then, after another day of grappling with the manuscript and trying to “crack the code” of Scene Four by any means necessary – including writing it first as a screenplay, then rewriting it as prose – I had an epiphany: the scene doesn’t have to be long at all. Instead of writing it as a multi-page scene, why not just do it in one or two pages? Stephen King does it in many of his novels and short stories. Michael Walsh did it in his 1998 As Time Goes By: A Novel of Casablanca. So do other novelists. Why can’t I?

Had I had this epiphany earlier in the day, and if I had figured out a creative approach to writing a short conclusion to this most vexing of chapters, I might have at least written between 50% and 75% of Scene Four yesterday and put the finishing touches on it today.

But no. I realized that going the “Keep It Short, Stupid” route was the solution to my literary Gordian Knot after 5 PM, by which time I was tired, frustrated, and ready to cease work for the day.

Because I’m determined to finish this project in time to release the book either in December of 2023 or January of 2024, I decided to stay at my desk and at least start the scene. It took me longer than I would have liked due to the lateness of the hour and the fatigue I felt, but I came up with what I hope is a clever and entertaining hook to “get things going” and move the story forward so I can wrap up this “Jim and Marty” flashback chapter and move on to the next chapter set in Reunion: Coda’s Present Day of Spring 2000. 

As Lao Tzu once wrote, “Every journey begins with a single step.”

---

[1] By a sad coincidence, Dad died on the 20^th anniversary of the still controversial Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden in the late stages of the Second World War.