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Zarreich |
Background | MS. Info | Contents | Character Images
Writing InventoryThe novel, Zarreich, and all writing on this page copyright 2007 by Michael D. Smith
In the spring of 1981, with new energies surging into my life, I wanted to create a vast “psychological novel” that would go far beyond the four novels I'd previously done. In fact, that spring saw my final tired work on my endlessly revised third novel, Akard Drearstone (which I finally revised to my satisfaction only in 2005), and the temporary abandonment of my fourth novel, The University of Mars, which at the time had reached a dead end.
This note is from 4/18/81:
I want to point my writing into the future--I want the prow of the ship pointed into the black night snow imagination of whatever it is that will come. I want to create my future, not take pictures of my past. I have been through so much Anti-Existence, but my cells are at last charging, at last committed to life.
Although I later revised the 363-page manuscript into a 154-page second draft, retitled The Galaxies Groan Within, a later rereading of both works astounded me with how rich Draft 1 was and how much of that richness I’d cut out and repressed in order to make Draft 2. I now consider the rough draft as the real novel. Despite its many flaws, something real happens within Zarreich.
Here is the Emily dream from the early novel notes, 4/19/81:
1) The village in the sunny valley (arranged as: plain, valley, hill, 2nd plain--the first valley is the quaint village--the 2nd plain is the magnificent city built out of nothing.)
2) Into this I come, a Jim Piston character with my .38. I live in the first valley with my grandmother. But a guy next door strikes me as evil and so I shoot him--several times--but though I know I am doing damage he keeps standing in the doorway laughing. In paranoia I keep loading my gun and firing at this guy. In the kitchen. Finally I say to myself: “C’mon, you’re acting just like Jim Piston now.”
(Jim Piston is the sociopathic bass player in Akard Drearstone.)
There must have been a lot more force to this dream than the above indicates, because the 55 pages of Chapter 1 certainly amplify it enormously: Jim’s amnesia and mental confusion, his forbidden romantic yearnings, his horror of Dorch and killing him, and his attempted suicide. Looking at the original notes I'm struck by how few notes there are for Chapter 1, whereas Chapter 2 onward have extremely detailed plans.
It’s difficult to say, even from looking at the notes, what the original conception of Zarreich was. Apparently the first chapter blasted out uncontrolled, and then I tried to rein it in with more detailed plot notes.
In preparation for Zarreich I typed out one hundred “Other World” dreams I'd had over the previous eleven years, that is, dreams that seem to point to the existence of a real alternate world accessed through dreaming. Putting the best of these into the novel added a lot of wild energy. As far as I can recall, the concept of the nightmare city of Zarreich had been around for years.
I completed Zarreich in March 1982. In December 1982 I wrote two essays exploring how to rewrite it. The 1982 essays have a good professional tone, but they also betray a desire to tidy up the huge psychic energies of this novel. I'd just completed the successful Draft 2 of The University of Mars--the first time, I felt, I had actually written a coherent, valid, publishable novel--and I wanted to create a professional revision of Zarreich. I did appreciate Zarreich’s censor-breaking, without which the revised University of Mars would not have been possible.
But instead of truly exploring the questions Zarreich raised, though, I stifled them.
The irony of Draft 2, The Galaxies Groan Within, is that all that effort to make a “positive” novel produced what has to be seen as a cynical manipulation. There's some some good writing in Galaxies, but overall, it’s obvious I leeched the life out of Draft 1, which is why I now consider Zarreich the real novel. My notes from rereading both versions in November 1994 show how shocked I was to realize that the second draft Galaxies, title changed, characters consolidated, well over half the novel cut, was astonishingly inferior to the scary, wild first draft. I had never worsened a novel in a second draft before. It was a sobering experience to see how that is in fact possible.
Editing the Typewritten Draft 1
The final scanned and edited “Draft 1” aims to be as close as possible to the typed Draft 1. My habit since Akard of blacking out unwanted text with thick black marker to make the draft more readable was used to make a “final first draft.” I consider those markings and all black handwritten corrections (usually self-evidently done in tandem with the black crossings out) to be the final first draft, and all red corrections, including slashes down the center of the page to eliminate whole sections, to be preparation for the second draft.
So I've ignored red corrections, even if from an editing standpoint they might have strengthened a given sentence. It’s typical of the disastrous second draft that I now find myself sneering at how inept and repressive the red corrections can be. Such as when Emily says “Morning!” and Mr. 1983 circles that and writes “Bullshit!” to declare that the Draft 1 writer was pandering to Emily’s unfathomable chirpiness. Why can't my character say whatever comes into her mind?
In rare cases I’ve intuited that a black crossed out section is true to the spirit of Draft 1 and I’ve rekeyed it into the text by painstakingly going over it (and/or behind it) with a flashlight to decipher the typed writing. It was very time-consuming, so I usually ignored the blacked out sections, assuming that most of them were improvements in the spirit of making Draft 1 better. But occasionally I saw something that made me wonder what was beneath it, possibly something that would strengthen the story. In Chapter 6 Jim is talking with the irritating Dazzy, who uses the forbidden “Matt” to describe their educational counselor. Jim automatically corrects Dazzy with a clipped “Matthew.” I guess I crossed this out because it looked too cute at the time, but then again, it shows Jim having wearily bought into Matthew’s neurosis about his name.
There is also a problem with chronology as the novel progresses, but I left all the contradictions stand.
Tone Changes in “Part Two”
The difference in tone between chapters 1-9 and chapters 10-13 is striking. There's a painfully obvious attempt even in the rough draft to tidy everything up in the last four chapters, the letters the semi-astral Jim writes to four of the main characters.
10-13 attempt to placate the reader and redeem Jim. It’s not entirely unconvincing, as some of the plot in it is good, but there is a lot of florid writing going on, and it’s hard to believe the messed up Jim of 1-9 could suddenly be so articulate.
Possibly Jim’s new perspective came about validly, due to his shooting, his ten-day coma, and his realization that he’s a Bishop about to be permanently exiled to the Other World, but still, a revision would have him bewilderingly discovering all these truths, not matter-of-factly recording them later on, in a state of grace. The only thing that saves the last chapters from total disaster is that he’s still a little apprehensive about ceasing to exist and moving off into rebirth. Some of the edginess of 1-9 continues in 10-13, but there is a lot of psychic superciliousness.
Chapter 12 revises chapter 1 in that now we find that Jim had only rented a room from Emily Donne, a stranger, as opposed to the original plot of his coming to live with his grandmother. So uncomfortable aspects of family and kin are removed.
The attempt to declare Chapters 1-9 a Part One (which we could call The Horror) and Chapters 10-13 a Part Two (which would have to be termed The Deliverance) seems to have been an afterthought some time after the completion of the novel. A typewritten page is placed in front of each of Chapters 1 and 10, announcing the parts, but the second sheet is typed out 10-14, then 14 is crossed off and 13 written in--and in the dreaded red ink of the second draft! So this declaring of parts probably occurred long enough after the completion that I forgot how many chapters there were.
So some desire to reverse the horrifying dream ride of the early Zarreich energy was present even at the time of Draft 1. But when you require yourself to produce a happy ending, no choice about it, the novel is doomed. In fact, you’ll miss a true happy ending if one is possible. If you can present reality well, you transcend having to have choose either a comic or tragic stance. The novel, the art work, does that for you, because it is real.
Revision
As for revision of Zarreich, I have no timetable in mind for it. I just wanted it in digital format, cleaned up, possibly ready for some future work. I’m not sure whether the novel should be lightly revised--basically just left raw, just for myself--or whether it should be rewritten well, strengthening those last four letter chapters into reality.
Written
1981-1981 (Draft 1); scanned and edited back to Draft 1 state, 2006
Chapters
13
MS.
496 pages (Times New Roman 12, double-spaced)
Words
142,000
Currently input in
Word 2000
Previously published
No parts yet published
1. Jim Stunde's Arrival in the Valley
2. The Investigation
3. Cathedral Mortgage Corporation
4. The University of Zarreich
5. Jim's Research Project
6. The Awful and Cruel Party
7. Sea Girl of Cuxlacjs
8. Jim and Oceanmouth
9. Jim Stunde's Suicide and Murder
10. The Bishops
11. Jim Stunde's Last Ten Days
12. Jim Stunde's Funeral
13. The Trucker at the Edge of Childhood
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