Novel Beginnings
"Strangers, they come to
town. Six men -- black, furtive, traveling by night. They cross the Cape Fear River by
rowboat from the west bank and gather in the shadows of stacked cotton bales on the wharf.
The August heat steams off the river in a clinging fog. The six are frightened.
There has been an uprising up north in Virginia -- ..."
--CAPE FEAR RISING by Philip Gerard
THE SPOTLIGHT
Philip Gerard
Page ONE
"Who were your literary inspirations when you were growing up? When did you decide
you were going to be a writer and why?"
Philip G.
"I went to a Catholic elementary school and had terrific, dedicated teachers, most of
them Franciscan nuns, all of whom encouraged me to read and later to write. It was simply
in the air. I remember winning books such as The 1001 Arabian Nights and King
Arthur's Knights of the Round Table in school spelling bees, of ordering David
Copperfield and Great Expectations from the Scholastic Book Club, of just
reading, reading, reading. We always got books for birthdays and Christmas -- Biographies
of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the How & Why books on everything from
reptiles to space flight, Hardy Boys novels, all sorts of great stories. If your read
enough stories, you naturally develop the urge to write some of your own. You learn to
depend on stories for friendship, confidence, entertainment, fun, and the truth about
things.
"I planned to be a musician all through college and played in
bands while studying Anthropology and English -- figured if music didn't work out I'd be
an archeologist. Then I studied with Tom Molyneux, a brilliant short story writer teaching
at the University of Delaware-- the first person I ever knew who could talk about writing
from the inside. Five minutes into his first class, I said to myself, "This
guy is a REAL writer." And he encouraged me and published my first stories in the
university literary magazine.
"Unfortunately, he committed suicide at the end of my
senior year, right after I'd helped him move into a new home. I thought, if that's the
writing life, I want no part of it. So I went to Vermont to become a ski bum and bartender
but instead wrote a novel, which thankfully has never been published. I set a goal-- to
write 300 pages of a single story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. As I
finished each chapter, I used to read it to my roommate, Frank, and he'd raise questions:
Why did so and so do that? What will so and so say when he finds out? It was a great
exercise in reader-response, because I'd find out immediately what was interesting,
confusing, clumsy, or suspenseful. A great writing lesson. I then freelanced some
nonfiction and went to work for a small newspaper back in Delaware. Ultimately I decided I
really wanted to write books, so I went to a place where book writers were-- the
University of Arizona's MFA program. It was the best two years of my life till that
point-- all these great writers running around and paying attention to my work! I felt so
privileged, so energized, so humbled, so enthralled. That's the kind of atmosphere I
wanted to create for our students here at UNCW."
Page ONE
"Your novel Cape Fear Rising was historical fiction which must have taken a
lot of research. Where did the idea for this novel begin and how did you go about writing
it? How long did this novel take you to write from research to final draft?"
Philip G.
"When I moved here to Wilmington, [NC] I began hearing tales of a riot that had
happened long ago. One person would say, "Oh, yeah-- that was in 1890 when the blacks
marched on the courthouse and they called out the national guard." Another person
would say, "No, that was in 1920 and the Klan burned the black community."
Finally somebody accurately located the event in 1898. I got curious. So I went to the
campus library and checked out everything that had to do with the "riot" -- a
few unpublished dissertations and theses, along with some of Alfred Moore Waddell's
speeches and local history books. I was astonished that an event of this magnitude-- a
calculated coup d'etat and a resulting racial massacre -- wasn't widely known. I thought
there'd be dozens of books, at least half a dozen recent novels, but there weren't.
"When I first heard about the event, it seemed a classic case of
racist violence: a small cadre of rich white men manipulated a lot of poor white men with
guns into attacking the black community. I have always recognized the injustice of racism,
but it has not been my particular passion as a writer. But as I investigated the chain of
events that led to November 10, 1898, when a thousand armed white men took to the streets
and murdered an untold number of blacks, I discovered that the flashpoint for the whole
ugly business was the Daily Record, which billed itself as the first
"Afro-American" daily newspaper in the country. The editor, Alex Manly, was
banished from the city under a death sentence and his newspaper office was burned to the
ground– because of an editorial he had written.
"Now I was circling closer to my passions. I've always been
passionate about freedom of expression– a writer usually is. In particular, I'm
passionate about writing-- the sublime mystery of how the right words in the right order
excite our emotions and rouse us to thought and action.
"In an important way, the events of 1898 were played out first
in written and then spoken words-- in narrative: newspaper stories, white supremacist
campaign speeches, political resolutions (including The White Declaration of Independence)
sermons from the pulpits of white and black churches.
"In the midst of the violence, the white vigilantes hauled the
mayor and theboard of alderman into city hall at gunpoint and made them resign. It is
widely believed to be the only coup d'etat in American history.
"At last I had penetrated to the core of the incident– and
to the core of my passion. Sure, it was a story about racism, and about freedom of
expression. But it was more than that: it was a story about the failure of democracy.
About that moment when the social contract breaks down, all bets are off, and a
progressive community with good schools, telephones, an opera house, and a well-educated
citizenry turns into Beirut.
"That's why the events fascinated me so, and my passion lay in
uncovering the why of such a civic failure: What were the motivations of the principal
players? What were the conditions that made the city ripe for violent revolution? Was it
inevitable, or could determined men and women of conscience have stopped it?
"The novel was not about a Southern city in 1898. It was about
every city in the world in 1998. And it was the kind of storythat, once I knew it, I felt
obligated to write. I couldn't turn away from it."
Page ONE
"In your novel class you have said that most good novels contain a signature and that
signature can most of the time be seen on the first or second page. For those that don't
know what I'm talking about would you describe what you mean by a novel's signature and
what was the signature for Cape Fear Rising"
Philip G.
"I've always maintained that if you can't boil down the arc of a novel into a
sentence, you don't know enough yet to write your novel. Moby Dick: Obsessive
captain hunts white whale. The Odyssey: Guy comes home from a war. It sounds
simple-minded, but everything in a novel always comes back to that basic driving idea. The
Great Gatsby: Poor Boy tries to win Rich Girl. It's not for a second what you're
interested at the deeper level, but it makes the deeper level possible. It pulls the
reader through the action on a literal and figurative level. In Cape Fear Rising,
the signature is simple: A stranger comes to town. It's contained in the very first line
of the Prologue: the first line: "STRANGERS, THEY COME TO TOWN." The
book designer even put it in all caps.
"Every element of plot, every thematic concern, arises from
that simple fact. The blacks are strangers in 1831, just as the black community in 1898
has become a stranger, unwelcome, a threat, The Other. Sam and Gray Ellen Jenks
are strangers. Ivanhoe Grant is a militant stranger. When the stranger comes to town, the
whole balance is upset, and order must be restored. In this case, the attempt to restore
"order" is a disastrous and brutal betrayal of democracy. The ending, of course,
solves the problem of strangers, at least for the white supremacists in town: they put all
the "strangers" on trains out of town-- banish them--or kill them. No more
strangers.
"Ironically, though, the people left behind have become
strangers to themselves. One of the men of the Wilmington Light Infantry, who rode with
Walker Taylor, wrote a letter to his sweetheart that he didn't recognize himself, that she
would not have recognized him, as he rode with the vigilantes and killed Negroes. So in
casting out the strangers, they themselves became the strangers to be feared."
Page ONE
"I read somewhere that you wrote the novel Deseert Kill between the hours of
midnight and four a.m. Is this is true and did you do this for story?"
Philip G.
"Writing the novel was practically a nightmare-- I usually have vivid dreams of any
novel I'm working on, and the case of Desert Kill the dreams were horrible,
bloody, frightening nightmares, possibly brought on by the fact that I wrote just before
going to bed, as well as a dark period I was going through. I wrote it during those hours
because my teaching schedule allowed me little choice. I have always believed that to be a
teaching writer I must first be a working writer, and you can't do that on summer holidays
and weekends or you'll write like a hobbyist. So I make my schedule accommodate my writing
somehow. The upside of working at night is that it's quiet, the telephone doesn't ring,
and nobody bothers you. The downside is you're burning the candle at both ends.
"For some reason, fiction works better at night,
maybe because it is only once removed from dreams anyhow."
Page ONE
"You have written Historical fiction (Cape Fear Rising, Hatteras Light);
psychological suspense (Desert Kill) And nonfiction (Brilliant Passage.
. . a schooning memoir & Creative Nonfiction-- Researching and Crafting
Stories of Real Life). Which of these areas of writing do you draw the most self
gratification and why?"
Philip G.
"Fiction is always harder than nonfiction because you have to invent so relentlessly.
Since gratification is proportional to the difficulty of the challenge, I guess fiction is
the most satisfying. The novel is for me the grand dame of literature, and I love being
able to work with the same characters and situation over the long haul. Each time you
begin a novel, you have to reinvent the form, while creating the illusion that it is
familiar. You have effects of scale in the novel simply because of the accretion of
scenes, of images, of motifs, so that there is a cumulative effect not possible in a short
piece. The novel is GREAT in the old-fashioned sense of having a panoramic sweep through
space and time and sensibility. E.M. Forster talked about War and Peace as a
terrifying and exhilarating symphony of a novel in which "great chords begin to
sound." That's the novel at its best.
"Having said all that, I will also say that writing a good
piece of nonfiction about the world is incredibly exhilarating. The challenge is to be
true to the world in a very actual way that can be verified by your reader while spinning
a good story. There's a tension between the two demands that lends an electricity to the
piece when it's working (and that just drives you crazy when it's not).
"Right now I find myself writing a nonfiction book and a
novel at the same time, and the process calls for some compartmentalization. The
nonfiction book is much more analytical, the novel much more intuitive. Yet I outlined
both with a cold eye toward a structure that would create the effects I'm after, and there
are moments in the nonfiction book when I create stories to illustrate a point; there are
times in the novel when I delve into technical writing about meteorology. So there's
always some connection between the two."
Page ONE
"In your office you have a sign that reads 'THINK'. What is the origin of this sign
and what does its message mean to you?"
Philip G.
"THINK was the old motto of IBM (may still be). The wooden sign used to hang in my
father's office-- he helped oversee the installation and trial of the old IBM Univac and
other early IBM computers for DuPont. (You could walk around inside that computer-- it
took up a whole room, rows and rows of vacuum tubes. It cost millions, then in a few years
it was obsolete, and the junk man gave them $200 for the scrap metal.) For me the sign is
a reminder not always to shoot from the hip, but to probe beyond my first impression,
first thought, obvious answer to a more profound level of understanding. Thinking is what
makes us human, but the world is full of people who never think."
Page ONE
"What general advice do you have for writers who just completed their first novel?
What do they do now?"
Philip G.
"Write the next one. Once you're sure the first novel is as absolutely good as you
can make it, send it out to an agent or editor and get started on the next one. Don't
wait-- selling a novel can be frustrating and demoralizing, though once you DO publish it,
miraculously all the heartache is replaced by euphoria. But in the meantime, you want to
be working at your craft, keeping your head and heart in the writing. Your most important
book is always the next one."
Writing Wisdoms
"No fiction can have real interest if the central character is not an agent
struggling for his or her own goals but a victim, subject to the will of others.
(Failure to recognize that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon,
is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners.)"
--John Gardner, The Art of Fiction
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