Small Dreams and Minor Miracles: How ODD!

Writing Fiction, Reading Fiction

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become something of a dreamer. Some people, I know, become more cynical, jaded even, as they age. Negative Nellies. That’s often with good reason, given the state of their lives, if not the state of the world. Strangely, not me. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Prospero says in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I believe it.

I trace my newfound habit of dreaming to 2016, when I started writing short stories at the age of 55. Writing fiction is a kind of dreaming; to read fiction is to enter a dream. Ten years later, all that dreaming has led to the fulfillment of what is in the big scheme of things a small dream: in less than a week (May 23), my first novel, Milksop, will be in the hands of readers, perhaps even your hands. I hope it will be activating a pleasant dream in you—a minor miracle, when I think about it.

Photo by iridial on Unsplash

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On

There are big dreams, dreams of biblical proportions—like Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream.” Then there are the little dreams created by novels like Milksop.

But what exactly are fictional dreams made of, and what kind of dream is Milksop? In an earlier post, I mentioned a bit of writing wisdom from John Gardner that has guided me for the past decade during my apprenticeship to the craft of fiction:

“A true work of fiction does all of the following things, and does them elegantly, efficiently: it creates a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind; it is implicitly philosophical; it fulfills or at least deals with all of the expectations it sets up; and it strikes us, in the end, not simply as a thing done but as a shining performance.”

The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

A tall order! My dream in writing Milksop has been to create such a true work of fiction. I’ve aimed to do it by dreaming it into existence. Maybe it will help to parse Gardner’s explanation.

A vivid, continuous dream: A novel is largely a series of unfolding scenes constructed by words that activate or recreate those scenes in the reader’s mind. The writer’s task is to engage the reader’s imagination by making each scene lively—through sensory details, the narrator’s voice, action, dialogue, and so on. And the magic of that scene should not be interrupted or disrupted in any way, or the imaginative bubble will burst.

“I’m dumped in a farm laneway, a dark tunnel beneath a canopy of trees. That, children, is where my story begins. Standing with a small suitcase held by both hands in front of me, I face four strangers and a large dog with black-rimmed eyes while the sound of a car leaving fades to silence.”

In these opening sentences of Milksop, Evan Mulder invites you, along with his children, into a dream landscape, a dairy farm in 1979. For 386 pages, the dream unfolds uninterrupted except by “The End.”

An implicitly philosophical dream: That sounds heavy, doesn’t it? Readers don’t generally go to fiction for a dose of medicinal philosophy. The key word here is “implicit.” What happens to the characters and what the characters do and say all portray, suggest, and question what life is, how it works, what’s true and false about it. The story seeks to make sense of life for readers, even in some small way.

Milksop isn’t a parable or a morality tale, but it is a story about growing up—what that looks like for one teenager. It explores his conflicts, struggles, and beliefs as he seeks to find a pathway for his life. But it’s also a story about growing old because it begins in the present or near past with Evan having just retired, looking back.

A dream that sets up and fulfills expectations: The opening of a story—its very first words, its opening sentences, paragraphs, and chapters—these present the reader with a series of questions, conflicts, problems, or dilemmas at the centre of the dream. By “The End,” the story through all its twists and turns needs to somehow deal with those opening issues, whether tragically, comically, or otherwise.

The opening chapter of Milksop initiates a series of questions: Why was Evan dropped in that farm laneway? Who are those people? Why is he telling his children this story? What happened at his retirement celebration to trigger this telling? Why did he flunk high school when he was 17? And what will happen to him on that farm? The opening raises even more questions, but it’s best if you read the chapter yourself!

A dream elegant and efficient, a shining performance: Gardner frames his description of a true work of fiction by characterizing a successful story as a beautiful performance with nothing wasted—a tale artfully executed, a compelling story well told.

That’s been my aim in writing Milksop—through multiple drafts and work with multiple editors—to create a story that readers experience richly and that will weather well. Have I succeeded? That judgement is out of my hands now. It’s in yours and readers’ everywhere.

It’s a Miracle!

Perhaps it’s a minor miracle that Milksop will be read anywhere by anyone. It’s certainly a miracle that people read at all! (See, for example, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Our brains weren’t born to read.)

It’s a noisy world filled with words, isn’t it? A world of shortened attention spans for reading those words. A world of tweets by twits, rage-bait posts, and content designed to keep us doomscrolling. It’s a minor miracle that the novel exists in this environment. It’s a minor miracle that people read novels. But perhaps the noisy digital environment is exactly why people turn to them.

Some of you may read Milksop and conclude it’s a minor miracle it got published. To judge for yourself, please consider ordering it ahead of its release on May 23. Check your options at my website.

As always, if the spirit moves you, please share your thoughts and this post. If you are an avid novel reader, I’d love to hear why!