Plotting the Journey

My dog Fergus has been home from daycare alll week because he has an eye problem that seems to have started with itchy, irritated eyes. He seems to have rubbed at one eye so much that he gave himself an ulcer in his cornea. Fortunately, eye drops can resolve the matter in 7-10 days. That assumes that he wears an E-collar and allows me to put the prescribed drops in both eyes twice a day. Let me simply say Fergus and I have not agreed about the necessity of doing either. Even with help from a friend, my yard guy, or my neighbor, getting drops in a determined dog's eyes is not easy. Having him wear an E-collar that he can't see around doesn't work out well when he bumped into things and can't go up and down steps. So, this week hasn't been as productive as I'd hope. 

The good news is that he seems fine otherwise and is happy to hang out with me and the cat. He's up for a car ride any time I head out the door. We've gotten in a few walks. But I haven't gotten a lot done. So, I'm hoping that when we go in for his follow-up tomorrow, his vet will say he can go back to daycare next week. 

I've been working when and where I can. High on my list is the synopsis that I promised my agent.  Writing a synopsis before I've finished a book always feels like trying to see into the future by gazing into a crystal ball. 

I'm a plotter. I spend lots of time sweating the details before I begin writing. I edit as I go along, and often the details change. That's because I continue to do research and often this gives me a better idea or, occasionally, I discover I've gotten something wrong. 

Sometimes the plot changes because a character says or does something unexpected. Arguably, this is my subconscious at work, but it feels as if the character has taken the story in a direction that I couldn't have predicted or planned for in my outline. When that happens, I go with it -- particularly if this happens with a secondary or minor character. Once it happened with my designated killer -- who suddenly offered his explanation for what had seemed to be guilty behavior. He had a secret, yes, but not the one I thought. If I had written a synopsis before I finished the first draft, I wouldn't have known that. I would have missed a subplot that took the book in a different and better direction.

I think I know how the book is going to end. But I still don't know which -- if any -- of the main characters will survive. This is a stand-alone novel, so theoretically all of the characters are in jeopardy. 

The other part of the synopsis issue has to do with "the hero's journey". I enjoyed playing with the three-act structure as I thought through the plot. But when I began writing, I realized I didn't really believe my protagonist would risk the goal that he has worked and sacrified to obtain because he was curious about the antagonist's inconsistent behavior. 

According "the hero's journey," in Act I, he is supposed to respond to a catalyst, may deny the call to action, but then takes the action that propels him forward. 

My protagonist is a Pullman sleeping car porter, who wants to go to law school. A couple of days ago, I was having another look at academic articles about the African American men who -- after the Civil War and through much of the 20th century -- were hired by the Pullman Company to work as the servants who cared for the passengers traveling by rail in the luxurious sleeping cars. But as historians who have done research in the archives and who interviewed the men who worked as sleeping car porters have documented the working conditions for the porters were stressful, both physically and mentally. They traveled hundred of miles per month, were on duty much of the time they were on board, and they had little opportunity for sleep during the night. Often they made back to back runs, coming in on one train and going out on another.

One scholar offers a fascinating analysis of the impact of sleep-deprivation on Pullman porters. Even though there was no scientific research on sleep deprivation in the early 20th century, the men themselves recognized the impact of chronic lack of sleep. Generally, they were able to get less than 3-4 hours sleep each night, and that on a cot in the men's washroom or a noisy upper berth made available for their use. Even this downtime was not available when they needed to be at the passengers' beck and call. The demand for time to sleep became an important element of the negotiations in the late 1930s between the porters' new union and the Pullman company. 

Reading about this issue of sleep-deprivatioin gave me the explanation I needed for why my protagonist does what he does in Act I. If he had thought it through, he probably wouldn't have. But -- tired and irritable -- he reactions without thinking. He tries to recover from his misstep, but his mask has slipped and his antagonist is taunting him. 

So, now I know where I'm going with this. I have a sleep-deprived hero who gets himself into trouble because he is too exhausted to "perform" his role wth a smile on his face. His lack of sleep will affect his actions throughout the book. 

I feel better about the synopsis now that I have more context. But I know other aspects of the plot are likely to change. 

The Passage of Time

I'm late today because I "slept late" and only woke when Harry, my cat, began to meow outside my closed bedroom door. His stomach and the daylight had obviously told him that it was time for me to get up, brush, and feed him. The curious thing is that with daylight saving time, Harry, who is usually up and meowing between 8 and 9 in summer (because I am up late and he eats a bedtime snack) is now napping until between 10 and 11. Sometimes, when he is in my bedroom, he wakes up, notices that I am awake but not getting up, and cleans himself and goes back to sleep.

I'm writing about my cat and time because I wonder how it is to experience 24 hours if you are a cat (or a dog). What is it like to spend so much time napping? When we, who love our animals look at them and regret the speed with which the time with them seems to pass, do they have the same sense of time passing. Does my cat, Harry, who is now officially a senior at 13 years of age feel as if he has aged when he dashes through the house with even more glee than he did four years ago because he is much more "at home" than when I adopted him? Does he know about time passing when he plays like a kitten, chasing his own tail around and around? Maybe it's because of his breed, a Maine Coon mix, and how they age (or don't).

I'm thinking about all this because I had a birthday this month, and I've been pondering the passage of time. But I've also been thinking about cultural history and fiction. I woke up and headed to the computer this morning to do research because I've been thinking about the everyday lives of my characters in 1939. In my thriller, they are on the move -- traveling frequently by train because my protagonist is a Pullman sleeping car porter. Another character  is traveling back and forth between Georgia, where he lives on a plantation that his grandfather purchased before the Civil War. This character is involved in the state's preparation for the opening of the 1939 World's Fair in New York That fair is themed "the world of tomorrow." Another character migrates from a small city in Virginia to Harlem in New York City. And a fourth character moves from a summer home in northern Virginia to Nantucket. How do these characters experience time and place? Do they walk faster in New York City as I do when I go there from Albany? Or, did people in New York City walk slower in 1939?

With none of our modern technology-- mobile phones, Internet, television (debuting in 1939 at the World's Fair), are my characters really unplugged? Was radio an inherently slower experience? Or. were 1930s movies with chase scenes the equivalent experience of our chase scenes?

What about cooking with 1939 appliances? By virtue of technology, "slow cooking?"

I woke up and did a deep dive into a database called "America: History and Life" to see if anyone had written an article about this. What came up first was a wonderful book review in the February 1, 2013 issue of History & Theory by a scholar named Brian Fay. He calls his review "Hammer Time," a title that made me smile because it seemed a tongue-in-cheek reference to the performer who now does commercials. But the review is of a 2011 book by Espen Hammer in which Hammer examined what various philosophers had to say that might be relevant to our modern sense of time. Hammer, who Fay describes as a man of reason, takes as a given that we now perceive the passage of time as "a series of present moments each indefinitely leading to the next in an ordered way," We measure time by the clock. This allows us to have technological breakthroughs, but at the same time we have problems of "transience and memory."

In his review of Hammer's book, Fay was thoughtful and poetic in describing how he himself experiences time. He noted that as he watched his daughter running down the hall after her bath, he experienced time not only as moving forward toward the next moments of putting her to bed, but backward in time to when she was younger. Fay argues that any moment can be filled with "the what is, that what might-have-been, the what-will-be, the what has been, and the what was." These experiences reflect our perceptions, memories, expectations, hopes, fears, and regrets. Because of this, Fay argues, modern time seems to him to be "fundamentally multidimensional." And he wonders if there is any period (at least in modern history) when time hasn't been experienced in this way. How is the way T.S. Eliot perceives time in "Burnt Norton" and "Dry Salvages" differ from Shakespeare's Macbeth when he refers to "the petty pace from day to day" that lead to "dusty death " (Act 5, Scene 5, 19-28).

I know this may be a writer's dive "down the rabbit hole" of research. But I'm fascinated by this subject and I'm going to spend a bit of "my precious time" reading about it. I suspect that if I can grasp the sensory experience of the passage of time in 1939 (another period of uncertainty and anxiety but without the modern technology) than my book will be all the better for my deep dive.

Harry is awake again and after meowing and poking me with his paws to get my attention, he has stretched out beside my chair to remind me that it is time for his lunch. His stomach has told him that it is time, no need for a clock.

I look at the clock and realize half my day is already gone. Would I have experienced that in 1939? And if 40 is the new 30 now, what was it like then?

Harry's meowing. Got to go.