When Ty pushed Vergil in his wheelchair out to the cement pad that Ty called their patio on the empty lot that overlooked the river, Vergil said, We’re like the blind man and the cripple. From the corner of…
I have a problem. I don’t think in plot. I think in images, sounds, and smells and the muck that they stir up. I also think in “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to, say, have Tiresias come back as a cranky old bastard named Ty living with a mortal partner named Vergil in a shitty mobile home park 150 years in the future, when climate change has made much of the United States uninhabitable and Ogdensburg, New York, has become the new Juarez, and the Saint Lawrence has become the new Rio Grande? And wouldn’t it be cooler to have Ty and Vergil function as the chorus, and for the three Fates be three lecherous red-hat ladies who live in a home in the park and spend their days playing games of chance, while a story taken from a familiar myth sets off a chain of events that involves the loss of a child, manufactured housing finance, human trafficking, three kinds of love, and redemption?” Those are promising materials, but making them into a coherent structure is work.
Writing happens on two levels, i.e., the level of the paragraph, and the level of the story. Paragraphs come easy to me. Writing a book-length story is iterative and lugubrious.
I have a few craft habits. First scenes of a novel contain a mini-story, seen from above. I don’t use quotation marks. Dialogue is non-Euclidean and jagged. I cut between scenes leaving ellipses. I shift between the depiction of exterior events and inner states quickly. I justify these by saying that they help reproduce consciousness on the page, but the real reason I use them is because they feel natural to me, and they sometimes work.
The section printed here introduces the characters in the first chunk of the novel. This is not unlike the beginning of a country song, with less economy. For example, in the song “The Road Goes on Forever,” Robert Earl Keen introduces two characters in four lines: Cherry, a waitress who “has been around,” and Sonny, a guy who failed the Navy entrance exam. These characters go on to populate a story that is as rich as the plot of any novel. My 5,000 words attempt to do what Keen does in thirty-nine words. The action—the place where a secret is discovered, two kids discover sex, one of those kids runs away, and two sets of parents are devastated—begins shortly after that.
JOHN KAUFMANN is a mobile home park owner who lives near New York City. His writing has appeared in The Washington Square Review, Off Assignment, Epiphany, Tax Notes, The Journal of Taxation of Financial Products, and The Journal of Taxation of Investments. His first novel, Leisure Living, is due to be published by Under the BQE Press in late 2027.
