On Writng and Life: There is a Time for Everything.
The preacher was right when he said in Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything. Take the very first novel I completed. First, a violent storm in my personal life and then a storm by the name of Hurricane Ivan left me, my family, and our city devastated. But all was not lost. The citizens of Pensacola and the surrounding area began to rebuild, and I began to put my life back together. Both processes were long, painful and are still works in progress.
As the city rebuilt, I found a new occupation, worked on strengthening some personal relationships, and for some crazy reason had the inspiration for a story. That “someday I’m going to write a novel” had finally come.
It was a story about a man who had sworn to never return home, finding himself in the eye of storms both physical and spiritual.
Rather than base the story in Pensacola I decided to use another city I knew well. The prose is not polished and I have learned much about writing since but here is the opening of The Token penned in December 2004.
The yellowed photograph fluttered in the night wind. Appearing as old as the city itself, it seemed impossible it could withstand one more blast sent its way by the approaching storm.
Could a late night meeting on a ferryboat, a faded picture torn from the front of a cheap paperback book, and three chirps of a cell phone change two men’s lives forever? The man clutching the picture knew they could as surely as the relentless winds would change the life of a city for years to come.
Eighty-two thousand words and six months later I was finished. For a first effort I still think it’s a pretty good story. Hurricane Ivan ripped through Florida and Alabama in September of 2004. I ripped through that novel and was finished in June of 2005. Then, just as I was ready to begin to shop the story, something happened that would have been funny were it not so tragic. Have you guessed yet what city I set my novel in? Remember the subject of this piece is timing.
I had framed the entire story around the effects of a powerful hurricane on the city and its people. Here I was ready to send off my manuscript about a mythical super hurricane hitting … New Orleans. To quote that noted philosopher Charlie Brown, “Good Grief!”
The timing was all wrong. Who needed or wanted to read a story while the real thing was playing out before our eyes? Who would believe I had the idea a year earlier? Who would believe my descriptions of what happened to the Lower 9th Ward was a product of my imagination and writing skills?
It was just bad timing. Or was it? Looking back, neither that novel nor I was anywhere near ready. God was about to write a new chapter in my life. A chapter of pathos filled with pain, and uncertainty. A chapter introducing yet another dramatic turn in my story that, though marked by illness and struggle, also carries with it a certain peace about who and what I am.
I still take a peek at The Token from time to time. Its characters are still with me and I know one day it will find its way out there for others to read. It’s all about timing. But it is more than that, life is about God’s timing.
And that is one Story Teller in Whom I have perfect confidence.
