"Aaroneous Monk"

"Aaroneous Monk", a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

The past few summers my family and I have made several trips to see a doctor who practices in a quaint little town near Cleveland. As part of these trips we frequent a putt putt golf course that is situated in the middle of nowhere about 5 miles from the doctor's office. It is a melancholy place surrounded by forest and with few patrons, or at least the day of the week and the time of day we visit there is rarely anyone there but us. The strangeness of its isolation sparked an idea for a story last summer which in its most basic form involves a monk living alone on an abandoned putt putt golf course. Over the course of this past year the story has grown in complexity and made some very strange twists and turns in my head eventually giving me an opening scene, a climactic scene, and a scattering of events in between.

There is one small problem. I am not a writer. Ever since Elias was born I have satisfied myself with telling stories by taking photographs. This has given me a great deal of pleasure but it is not the same thing as using words to tell a story. The closest I've gotten to writing are the poems I've penned in conjunction with particular photographs I've taken. This practice of pairing poems with photographs proved to be most poignant for me when I was deployed to Iraq. Whatever pain I was feeling at being separated from my wife and two year old son or the intense conflict I felt about being a reluctant participant in a war could be bound up in a photo-poem and released in a kind of creative catharsis.

But this idea has continued to grow in my head sending out shoots in odd directions to the point I feel compelled to at least take a crack at it. My first step toward this goal was to pull my old copy of Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" off the shelf and start to look at the basic mechanics of writing. Next I ordered Stephen King's "On Writing" as an e-book to see what a popular and prolific author might have to say in the way of crafting fiction. A few months ago I e-mailed author Jim Forest asking for advice. He basically said to "keep putting sentences together until it makes sense." Working from that I've been trying to blog more and even wrote a Short Story inspired by a weekend call at the hospital in which I mingled coffee with the apocalypse. It clocked in at ~7500 words which is probably the most I've written in a single project since my senior thesis 20 years ago.

Just last week I found "The Nighttime Novelist: Finish Your Novel in Your Spare Time" by Joseph Bates at Half Price Books. It has helped me start to think about what I need to do to pull this beast of an idea together in order to make a cohesive novel out of it. The analogy that came to mind today was that I want to build a house, but I've never built a house before and I don't have all the tools I need.  Worse yet, the materials needed to build it are scattered about in random piles.

It is easy to become overwhelmed with the thought it could take years to bring to fruition ("Pre-order now with expected publication in 2025!") and with no guarantee that it will ever really go anywhere. So, to make it feel more real I have created the book cover to my unwritten novel to psych myself out. It is a picture of Elias and me that gives a feel for what the overall theme of the book might be. The working title is the name of the protagonist, Aaroneous Monk, which will likely change before publication (think positive thoughts, think positive thoughts). The use of "A. Wesley Haney" was something I thought of years ago as a pen name when I wanted to write but wasn't. Wish me luck!