Novel Not Novel

Last week an old friend asked me, “What’s going on over there? You’ve stopped writing.” Well, that’s both true and untrue. I’ll lay it out for you straight. I have no talent for fiction. Still, let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

This Winter saw a lot of boredom in Jejudo. November fourteenth was the last day one could reasonably go for a walk. I made it to Gwan Got and watched the waves against the rocks, hoping that each swell would be louder and wetter than the last. I tasted the spray on my lips. Gwan Got is the part of the shoreline closest to the mainland, North. It’s also dangerous for boats. There’s no beach there, just a plain of volcanic rocks. At high tide many of them are covered, but if you give it a shot you can walk to the edge and look out on the ocean. November fourteenth was no day for that. The wind was too strong.

By December fourth the ocean was an icy cage. Hamdeok is fourty minutes by bus from the coffee shops and bars of City Hall. The last ride back leaves at 9:30, which meant a lot of dead time in Ocean Love Pension. On December fifth I tried meditation. By December ninth I had bought a car.

Mobility is great, but it didn’t dull the cold. I started writing. Fiction felt unnatural. I am comfortable with travel narratives and essays, but in this I had no idea where to start. Mike Abbot once told me that Arthur Miller began by copying Shakespeare on a typewriter. I re-read The Sound and the Fury and resolved to copy Quentin’s section, word for word, by hand.

I played guitar for three hours every day, I learned to sing, I wrote a few poems, I thought and thought and thought, and I put poor Quentin Compson’s final hours to paper. My handwriting has improved.

Still no presentable fiction. A few sentences, a paragraph. Nope, too cliche. Nope, this dialogue is bad. The novel was to be about the mental hospital I worked in right after college. It was to expose patient mistreatment. Many of you know that I was called last year to be a witness in a civil trial against this former employer. The trial, as far as I know, has not come to pass. The charges involved the rape of an elderly woman. It is my strongly-held conviction that the hospital is at fault, paperwork factory that it is.

But I’m no Upton Sinclair for our generation. I can’t fictionalize those experiences convincingly, only relate them plainly. On May fifteenth 2010, nearly one year after my separation from Corporate America, I woke up and decided to be a photojournalist. Within a week I was shooting and writing for a local paper. Thunderous internal applause.

There’s much to be done. By my reckoning I can stay on this island, teaching three hours a day, for fourteen more months, after which I am no longer eligible for the TaLK program (anyone care to join until then?). That puts me right under halfway through this part of my life. Jesus, Al, took you long enough to get your shit together. I know. I know. I went to Seoul for a photography competition two weeks ago, last week read four-hundred pages worth of photography books, and yesterday shot for an article. Fourteen months remain in my own, personal, Jejudo Photojournalism College. So that’s the news. Oh, and it’s warm again. And I won a surfboard. The next few posts are already written. I’m still going to tell you about the hospital, just not as I had first intended.