While writing my first novel, The Edge of the World, (Mirare Press, 2007) I was like an explorer in the Amazon rain forest, slipping under low-hanging tree branches, and parting curtains of palms and vines, until I got to the center of my story. It was a wonderful creative journey, but it took years to write because I had no plan. I had a first person narrator and she and I were searching for the story in front of us. We’d get lost in the forest, we’d follow false leads, walk around in circles, or go off on tangents. It was a work of the subconscious, a work of retrieving memory, of fusing new knowledge to old experience, of inventing characters and creating composite characters to advance the story. It was a beautiful adventure in art and exasperating. I didn’t know what the novel was about until I finished multiple drafts. While I’m happy with the finished book, I believe I could have been a more effective novelist if I’d done some advance work before going into the fictional woods.
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By the time I sat down to write
Liberty Landing, I had a frame for the story and my main characters cut on the
canvas. When I look at the outline now—the frame that preceded the seven year enterprise
of writing the novel—I am amazed by how little I strayed from it, and astonished by how the novel unfolded, and how
the characters surprised me at every turn. In the outline, I did not know
anything about Gabriel Khoury, my protagonist, other than that he was a
Palestinian Christian. In the outline, all I knew of Angeline LaLande was that
she was a journalist, and that she was Louisiana Creole.
While there are writers who
insist that any pre-writing sullies the writing of fiction, I am inclined to
disagree. When an artist begins a painting, she is compelled to paint within
the borders and edges of a canvas. The novelist’s canvas has no edges, one can
keep writing pages in a Word document up to 32 MB. An outline, a thumbnail, a
map, a diagram—a visual expression of the story doesn’t spoil the writing of
fiction. Rather it is controlled creativity, propelling the story forward
within a structure. It gives shape and form to the emerging story. A novel can
be told in countless ways. An outline allows the writer not to waste her
writing time going down countless trails. It liberates the novelist to write a
story into being without getting lost.
Gail Vida Hamburg is an award-winning American journalist, author, and museum storyist. She is the author of The Edge of the World (Mirare Press, 2007), a novel about the impact of American foreign policy on individual lives. A nominee for the 2008 James Fenimore Cooper Prize, it is a frequent text in undergraduate post- colonial studies, war studies, and creative writing programs. Born in Malaysia, she spent her teens and twenties in England before migrating to the United States. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Literature and Creative Writing from Bennington Writers Seminars at Bennington College, Vermont. Liberty Landing, the first volume in her trilogy about the American Experience, is her love letter to the great American Experiment.
She lives in Chicago—the setting for Liberty Landing, a finalist for the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
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