How to Write a Novel

by Melanie Sumner

  A+++ :)))))) I don’t even have to throw the rubric out on this one, Charles.

  Charles Hutchins

  English 1102

  Should People Be Sentenced to Life in Prison?

  Hays State Prison in Trion, Georgia, is a close-security prison in the Georgia Department of Corrections system that houses 1,100 inmates classified as “some of the state’s most challenging offenders.” One of them is my father, Marvin Hutchins.

  OH MY GOD! That’s terrible. I had no idea you were going to say that.

  He had a girlfriend when he was married to your mom?

  He was so mean in that other essay you wrote. I really did want him to go to prison. I’m sorry he’s your dad. I’m sorry if that sounded wrong. I don’t know what to say, Charles!

  You should never, never hit a dog. Not even with a newspaper.

  Who is Marvin Hutchins and what did he do to deserve this? He is a 6′2″ black male weighing approximately 200 pounds. On August 13, 1995, Marvin Hutchins stabbed his girlfriend, Lorraine Demeeter, to death. He was under the influence of methamphetamines at this time, and alcohol. He was a violent man, and I don’t know why. My mother says he hurt all the time and couldn’t find relief until he hurt something else. It was a kind of relief for him, to watch others feel pain. I remember once when I was a kid I watched him beat our dog with a broom handle. I couldn’t scream or tell him to stop because then he would beat me. So I took off my sock and stuffed it in my mouth. You may ask why couldn’t I leave. I couldn’t leave Betsy, my dog. I couldn’t help her either. I was so afraid he would kill her, but she lived, with just a broken jaw. After my father beat her, he sat at the kitchen table with his head in his arms and cried and cried. My mother doesn’t want anything else to do with him, but she prays for him.

  That’s where that phrase comes from, giving up the ghost. Cool.

  Can God help Marvin Hutchins? Some people would say no. In the Holy Bible, Job tells us, “But the eyes of the wicked shall fail, and they shall not escape, and their hope shall be as the giving up of the ghost.” Job 11:20. According to Wikipedia, it costs the taxpayers thirty dollars a day to keep a person in a close-security prison.

  “completed” looks like a typo to me.

  Sorry to be picky, but you skipped a little bitty word before “kennel.”

  Do you think it’s worth the money? Do you think he should be executed? I guess that’s a topic for another paper. Hays State Prison will be my father’s home for the rest of his life. When he isn’t in lock-down, he works at various jobs they put him to. Once he was a library assistant, but he can’t read very well, so he lost that job. He has the opportunity to completed his GED, but he doesn’t. In his letters he says he goes to the prison church service, but he is in lock-down sometimes for acts of aggression. When they take him into the recreation yard, he has to be in kennel.

  I don’t know!

  Profound.

  Is there any hope for Marvin Hutchins?

  My father has been in prison for most of my life. I have visited him three times. He will never see me graduate from college, never meet my wife or children. He is alive, but also dead. The last time I saw him, he said, “Boy, you done grown on me. You’re a man now.”

  This is so beautiful. Your writing just gets better and better. At first I thought you weren’t any good, but now—fame is just around the corner for you, Charles.

  I said, “Yes, sir, I am.” Then we looked at each other through the little window, and it was like looking into a mirror because we look alike. That is the worst feeling I have ever had in my life. I can’t even describe it. That could be me, on the other side of the bulletproof glass, in a cage for life. At that time, I lost all hope.

  Then something happened to me. I remembered the verses James 5:19–20, where Jesus tells us, “Brethren, if any of you err from the truth and one convert him, let him know that he who converteth the sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins.”

  I agree. Prison would suck.

  I had my calling then. I cannot save Marvin Hutchins, but I can bring salvation to those who seek it. I will never be on the other side of that glass.

  After Joe died, Diane insisted that we only keep what would fit inside one trunk. One trunk was something we could handle. His saxophone went in first, and then a crooked pot holder I had made for him in preschool. His hiking boots fit, and odds and ends like his wedding ring, his watch, and the worn leather wallet with his expired Alaska driver’s license inside the cellophane cover. On top of everything, Diane had spread a gray wool sweater that still had his smell. Whenever I snuck into Diane’s closet to open the trunk, I allowed myself four sniffs—I didn’t want to use it up.

  When Diane had to identify Joe in the morgue, she recognized him by his clothes. “The corpse didn’t look like him,” she said. “He wasn’t in his face. It’s your soul that makes you look like you.” Of course, you lose your entire soul when you die, but do you lose some soul when you murder someone? I was thinking about Charles Hutchins looking at his dad through the prison window. He said they looked alike. When Charles Hutchins looked at Marvin Hutchins, did he see himself with a broken soul—half-dead? What it would be like to tell people, My dad got life? Wasn’t that a funny way to say it? His dad got life; my dad got death.

  Heavy, heavy, heavy. Now I had a pile of rocks on my heart. Way to get yourself depressed, Aris. No one can do homework in that state of morbidity, so I skipped my English assignment and turned to a delightful writing exercise in Write a Novel in Thirty Days!

  Exercise #7: Sex sells! Here’s a surefire way to create a sex scene. Make a list of one hundred food and kitchen items, using nouns and verbs. Write a short sex scene. Now rewrite it, substituting your libidinous words with your kitchen words.

  Ah, sex. It’s not without its complications. When I was twelve, which seems like ages ago, I appalled one of Diane’s friends by revealing certain things about my relationship with Billy, who was living in Kanuga at the time. I was having lunch with Diane and her friend at the Busy Bee Cafe, which is one of my favorite dining spots because the menu lists macaroni and cheese as a vegetable. Fortunately, Diane and I had found a babysitter for Max, and we were both wearing hats. Hers was floppy, with a string under the chin, and had probably been dropped in the river on too many kayaking trips, but it looked good on her. Diane has a cute face when she’s relaxed. My hat was more elegant, a broad-brimmed straw hat with a lacy weave, encircled with a purple grosgrain band.

  We were discussing men, of course. I happened to mention that Billy and I had considered counseling. We weren’t having serious problems, but relationships are hard, and sometimes men just don’t know how to communicate. Diane’s friend, whose name escapes me at the moment, let her mouth drop open. I could actually see the corn bread she had been chewing.

  “He’s moving to Boston,” I explained to her, “so we have to deal with the long-distance thing. We haven’t really figured it out yet.”

  “It’s too far to drive,” said Diane.

  “There’s always time travel,” I said. “According to Albert Einstein, if you could travel faster than the speed of light, you could theoretically travel backward in time, d = rt.” I pushed my hat farther back on my head because it tended to slip over my eyes. “Although breaking the speed of light with any mass is currently considered impossible. I weigh 102 pounds.”

  “Well, my goodness,” said the woman, and took a long gulp of her iced tea.

  “Dating other people isn’t an issue,” I assured her. “We’re monogamous.”

  The woman turned to Diane, her eyes wide. “She’s dating?”

  “It’s not like they spend weekends at Barnsley Gardens,” Diane said. “They sit next to each other at lunch.”

  I was a little miffed—it wasn’t like Diane went to Barnsley Gardens with her dates (when she had one).

  “How cute is that!” said the friend, but I could tell that she had her d
oubts.

  Both ladies could have relaxed. Aside from a couple of forays into the sacristy at St. Michael’s, my sexual experience is limited. In fact, after I had made my list of kitchen items, I had to steal a scene from Ian McEwan to finish Exercise #7.

  Standing in front of the bookshelf in the living room, I leafed through Diane’s copy of Atonement while Penn helped Max with his math homework.

  “No, man, you tell me,” said Penn. “What is seven times seven?”

  “I dunno. Have you seen my Pokémon deck? Somebody moved it.”

  “Okay, let’s talk about the Forty-Niners. Did you see the Forty-Niners play the other night?”

  When Penn finished filling in the blanks on the math worksheet, he looked up and asked me if I was doing my homework.

  “Just doing some research,” I said. Atonement looked like a good book; I was thankful to Diane for excluding it from the sale pile. I took it to my room, closed and locked my door, and wrote Exercise #7.

  They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but an obliterating pot of coffee, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of squash on squash and pomegranate juice on squash as their Gimme Lean soy dogs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling.

  Done. After I ran a spell-check, I shot the document off to Mrs. Waller for the descriptive writing assignment that had been due last week.

  Before we went to bed, Penn brought us outside to see what he had done on the playhouse. Since he had ignored my request for one small, simple tower, I hesitated to ask for the English garden with a maze and a fountain.

  “Approve?” he asked.

  All I saw was a shed with a square cut out for a window. I tried not to look disappointed. Penn snapped his measuring tape open, mumbling numbers to himself as he took more measurements.

  “Can you make it a bay window?” I asked. “With a velvet window seat?”

  “I’ll study up on it.”

  “Or a French window that opens out to the garden?”

  “How ’bout I put a pane of glass in it and we call it a day?” With a flick of his wrist, he opened the measuring tape again, impressing us with the precison of the swing. He measured some things in sixteenths and asked us to convert them to fourths, and then thirds.

  “I don’t do math,” I reminded him.

  “Right, I forgot,” he said. “How about a lesson in cosmogenesis? Since space is our way of measuring distance between objects, can there be an element, force, or dimension known as space?”

  “Big Bang theory,” I said.

  “You didn’t raise your hand.” He turned to Max, who had apparently given up on snapping to rap songs and was blowing air through puckered lips. “Whatever caused this epic explosion occurred in empty space, where expanse and distance are infinite. Are you with me?”

  Max blew a weak raspberry from his lips, and I began to whistle “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” in key.

  Penn nodded, as if we were both whistling agreement, and delivered his summary. “If this cosmology is true, then our universe exists without cause or explanation. In that case, where is God?”

  Max looked around. He looked up at the sky, at the playhouse, at us. Finally, he said, “In my heart.” Then he made a horrible farting sound with his mouth.

  “Shaping young minds is such a satisfying occupation,” said Penn.

  “Penn,” I said, smiling and stepping closer to him, which is what Diane says I do when I’m being manipulative. “If you made a bay window with a window seat, that’s one less chair you’d have to build.”

  “I didn’t hear about furniture making in this deal. Y’all can put your beanbags on the floor.”

  “Mom threw the beanbags away!” yelled Max.

  “We have nothing,” I said, and I wrung my hands. Penn leaned back against the wall to roll a cigarette.

  “Am I being manipulative?” I asked.

  “Now that you mention it,” he said, and licked the edge of his rolling paper. “Manipulative and petulant.”

  “It’s most unattractive of me, isn’t it?”

  “Butt-ugly,” said Max, but we ignored him.

  “No, it’s just your dark side,” said Penn. “Your shadow side.”

  I confess to a secret thrill at the thought of having a shadow side. As the smell of his cigarette mingled with the fresh scent of wood shavings, I imagined people saying, She seemed like such a nice girl.…

  “You have a message from Kate,” said Max, who seems to be attached to my phone by some electrical wave, while I never hear the tone. I pulled it out of my pocket.

  I briefed Billy on strawberry-blond arrival to his social media pod. Result: Swears she’s a cousin. My fact-checking on three sites proved inconclusive, so I friended her on one social media site for further investigation. Uncovered one “Like” of the meme Your husband is cheating on us.

  I forced myself to not look at her pic again, seeking a family resemblance.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Max.

  “Life, little one, just life.” I turned to Penn. “What do you think about the nature of evil?”

  “I try not to.” He exhaled over his shoulder. “What do you think about it?”

  “Well, I read this poem by William Blake.”

  “Wait a minute. Is that the one about a leopard?”

  “It’s called ‘The Tyger.’ I’ll read it to you.” I got my library book from my room and brought it outside. In the falling winter light of our backyard, over the sound of Max’s plaintive efforts to whistle, I read:

  Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

  In the forests of the night;

  What immortal hand or eye,

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  In what distant deeps or skies.

  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

  On what wings dare he aspire?

  What the hand, dare seize the fire?

  Max got quiet and moved closer to me. Deep purple streaks crossed the lavender sky, making it darker and darker. A few minutes later, the night was black without a single star except for the orange glow of Penn’s cigarette.

  I felt my shadow side growing larger. It had yet to manifest into Evil Aris, but the stirrings were present: Fingerlings of doubt had crept into my relationship with Billy Starr, that god of adolescence, and I was flat mad at Diane. If I failed to bring a new daddy on board by getting Penn and Diane together, I might lose hope in myself—and that is the making of a monster.

  12 Short for “emotional.”

  13 Astute readers will wonder why Penn is building a playhouse. What is his MOTIVATION? A) He’s bored. B) He feels sorry for these fatherless children. C) He wants to get into Diane’s pants. D) He’s a practical man who sees the need for more space in the house.

  I don’t know the answer yet, but it’s coming …

  14 Okay, I used a thesaurus.

  Gosh, I almost forgot I was writing. When I’m not visualizing the comments of Mrs. Waller, my English teacher (“You’re rambling, Aris. What’s the point here? Where’s your outline?”),15 I can relax. Writing a novel feels almost like talking. You’re not talking to yourself, exactly, but when I’m talking to myself, I’m not talking to myself anyway. I’m talking to someone who may or may not be real, someone who really likes me. If I’m hating on someone––for example, someone who went through all my personal stuff and threw valuable things away without permission––then I’m talking about that person to the person who really likes me. Most of the time, I never even move my mouth.

  Diane, to our horror, talks to herself at Kroger. She doesn’t try to hide it. “Three ninety-eight!” she exclaims. “For a jar of yellow mustard?” Too harried to get her reading glasses out of her purse, she grabs her nearest child. “Read that label and tell me if it has high-fructose corn syrup in it.” She talks fast at Kroger because she wants to hurry up and get out of there—the people in the aisle probably think she’s saying something else instead of “fructose
.” Which has happened. But she just goes on talking to herself. “I don’t need that. Wait a minute, do we have ketchup? Meat loaf … what goes in meat loaf? Let’s make it with oatmeal, for more fiber.”

  I have stood in the bread aisle and listened to her plan an entire menu, out loud, over by the pickles. She’s not embarrassed at all. She argues that people are always talking on hands-free cellphones, so they probably think she’s wearing a Bluetooth device on her ear, under her hair. When I don’t buy that excuse, she tells me that the pain I endure as her child is building my character. More or less, I agree with her, but Max suffers.

  Max talks to himself too. In the shower he conducts Pokémon warfare (with sound effects), and sometimes on the toilet he will thank God for his family and food and shelter and put in a request for a Mustang. On the Wednesday after Diane got rid of our stuff, he stormed into his room and slammed the door so hard that the crooked sign attached with masking tape slipped to the floor.

  In the safety of his locked room, he yelled, “I hate her!” Legos clattered against the wall. He paused, as if listening for repercussions, and then continued, “She’s mean.” Mimicking Diane’s voice, he said, “ ‘You’re the child, and I’m the parent, and you’re being disrespectful.’ ” Another pause. Then, in a calm voice, he confided to the person who really likes him, who may or may not be real, “She’s not really even my mother. She’s just the maid.” For a few minutes, he grumbled unintelligibly. Finally, he said in a loud, firm voice, “You’re fired.”

  This Wednesday was not as yellow as it should have been; it was more of a dark gold until Penn arrived.