10 Years After

Where I live, the events of 9/11 were not just images on a television or messages of heartfelt sadness. They were those things, of course, but they were also a motorcade of funerals, a stream of floral arrangements, a vital Thanksgiving meal months later. That day led to random moments of pain and sadness when otherwise meaningless things were noticed to be missing. And it also led to phone calls from people whose voices had almost been forgotten, calling..."just because, well, it's been a while, you know?" and we knew.

For me, 9/11 was highly personal for reasons I won't get into here. But it changed things in me about my writing, about what I wanted to accomplish and be remembered for: Writers write.

Those who know me personally or even merely from random lines in places like AgentQuery Connect or From the Write Angle or via Twitter probably get a sense that I like to joke around. Often, I joke because I take most of life so seriously — sometimes too seriously, perhaps. After 9/11 I took my manuscript very seriously. It had been mostly notes before that day. Maybe a few dozen pages of tripe were written. I don't think any of it survives except for its setting. My story took place in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is just across the river from New York City. The attacks were a point of demarcation unlike any other in my lifetime and I needed to decide when my story took place.

I decided that it was to be a year in the life of a family: From 9/10/00 to 9/10/01. I wrote nightly for months and most of that ended up on the cutting room floor, so to speak. It was my first serious attempt at a novel, and I made the mistakes that most writers make on such efforts. Too much back story, too many details that don't matter. I ended up putting it aside for months and working on other things. Short stories, mostly. A lot of freelance assignments. Some of which I'm proud of.

Eventually, I went back to my story, took it apart piece by piece, and started to build again. Perhaps too subtly, I wove 9/11 into the manuscript. It's there, but the story takes place before the events, so it must be done with care. I've had people tell me to change the date of the story or to make it more apparent. And I still think about it. The manuscript still has elements I'm uncertain about, and I've put it aside several times to work on other projects and let my mind work through those elements and help me decide if they're flaws or just need a bit more polishing.

By the time the polishing is done and it goes off to agents, I suspect I'll have come close to finishing another manuscript and several other short stories and a bunch more articles I'm proud of. But this story is one that will be with me forever, whether it gets published or not.

In a sense, it will be part of my personal 9/11 legacy. If nothing else, I have that.

My 9/10 Novel

Living in northern New Jersey, it's difficult, if not impossible, to not think about the events of 9/11, 2001. Indeed, it's probably bad for your mental health not to think about it from time to time if you lived through it here. I suspect I will always remember exactly where in my commute I heard about the first plane hitting one of the Twin Towers. I chastised myself for assuming we were under attack — especially after the guy on WDHA amended his comments saying that it had been a small plane, not a large plane as he initially had heard.

In between the time I parked my car and turned off the engine and I entered my office, the second plane had struck. It immediately struck me: We're at war.

This blog is focused on writing, however, so here's my point: By 9/10, 2001, I had begun my first novel and written about thirty pages. I was stuck not on what to write next but when did my story occur. Was the time significant? On 9/11, I realized that we had just experienced an important line of demarcation in history; there is a pre-9/11 world and a post-9/11 world. From there, I had to determine how this affected my novel

I decided to use it obliquely. My novel begins on 9/10, 2000 and ends on 9/10, 2001. Because such attacks were barely contemplated by the average person, nothing more than faint glimpses of fear and omen are displayed. The story takes place in Hoboken, New Jersey, a town I know well that lies directly across the river from New York City. Ground Zero is within view. Indeed, the clouds of smoke and debris floated above the river after the towers fell.

Whether my oblique references to the tragedy of 9/11 should remain part of my novel — and not an overt focus of it — has been a frequent point of discussion with my initial readers. Usually I bring it up, but some of my readers have anticipated the question. I still think it's more than just a moment of inspiration; I think it's important to the story, subtle though it remains.

So, each year, I think a lot about the people who experienced 9/11 first hand. I lost a friend that day and thank God that I didn't lose more people who were close to me. I lost some innocence as well, which is largely what my novel is about — not my loss of innocence, but the nation's; or maybe it's that our eyes were opened to the terrible possibilities. And I reflect on those fictional people who mean so much today who came to life on 9/11.

With my young innocents at home, I have had almost no time to work on the latest novel much less to send my "finished" one out to agents. I respect their time and my own too much to look for representation when I don't have the time to respond appropriately if I should actually get an offer. It's like going fishing without the strength to reel in the fish.

Remember 9/11, my friends, in your own way. It's important for all Americans, regardless of political party or ideology.

Saturday by Ian McEwan

Well written but slow moving, Ian McEwan’s Saturday takes almost two hundred pages to get to the action of the story. One of the blurbs on the cover was amusing in retrospect: “Read the final 100 pages at one sitting.” That’s because it takes so long to get to that you can’t help but continue reading.

That said, McEwan has drawn up three-dimensional characters and conflicts that linger long after you slip your bookmark between the pages of this 2005 novel. Henry Perowne, the lead character, is a neurosurgeon in London who awakes early on a Saturday morning feeling completely awake. He sees a plane on fire heading toward Heathrow, chats with his son Theo -- a burgeoning blues guitarist -- returns to bed where Henry and his wife, Rosalind, make love, then after a post-coital rest he heads to play squash. All this takes eighty-one pages, and we’ve still not arrived at a key moment; more than a quarter of the way in, the book has been all about character development.

The story takes place in February 2003, weeks before the beginning of the current Iraq war, and later that day hundreds of thousands -- perhaps two million -- will protest the inevitable war. But even that isn’t the story, exactly. At its heart, Saturday is about terror – witnessing it, anticipating it, experiencing it, and especially overcoming it. In some ways, the story has more in common with the American Airlines flight heading to the Dominican Republic, which went down from Kennedy Airport almost two months after 9/11 than the terrorist attacks that resulted in the deaths of thousands in New York, Washington, and the field where flight United 93 crashed.

For Henry Perowne and his family, the terror comes from a man named Baxter. To call him a thug is too facile, and McEwan makes the character sympathetic. Unattractive and suffering from what Perowne diagnoses from observation as Huntington’s Disease, Baxter is also intelligent and would forgo violence for a glimmer of hope to avert his fate: dementia, lack of physical control, death. Though he doesn’t use the poem, Dylan Thomas’s famous line “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” seems apropos.

Instead, it is another poem, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” that carries the day. When Baxter and his crony, Nigel, break into the Perowne household, young poet Daisy (who has returned to her parents’ home from Paris with a galley proof of her soon-to-be-published collection of poems and a baby on the way) is inspired by her grandfather, poet John Grammaticus, to recite Arnold’s famous work. The poem enthralls Baxter, to the point that he fixates on what he believes is the girl’s work. In a sense, their lives -- even Baxter’s -- are saved by poetry.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Whether specifically in Arnold’s poem or in Saturday, McEwan’s message seems to be this: You should face terror the same way you face life -- head on. Protest. Debate. Create art. Anticipate death and do whatever is within your power to hold it back.

Saturday is filled with the mundane amid the truly horrifying. When witnessed, terror can be inaudible. When all around you is the noise of conflict, your personal horrors can pass unwitnessed. Like squash players, people battle on against time and physical deterioration. And in the end, a new day emerges as you’re still thinking about yesterday.