I last posted about The Book of the Wounded Healers (a Study in Perception), a work-in-near continual-progress, on 25 July 2022. There were two other more recent mentions and not about reworking the novel for publication.
As you can read in The Book of The Wounded Healers
(a study in perception): Frame and Chapter 1 – The First Communication, the novel had an arduous ride to that point.
Well, not one to let a good story go and also recognizing it wasn’t getting any better, I once again shelved the novel.
Until now.
I did some minor edits and invited folks to be first readers in my July 2024 Newsletter.
Some brave folks agreed.
That’s when the painful fun began.
The Wounded Healers first draft is from 1991. A lot was happening in my life back then, and all of it wonderful. All of it incredibly painful, too. The Wounded Healers came from the same period of writing as The Augmented Man, Recovery Triptych, The Inheritors, “Canis Major,” “Cicatrix,” and a host of what I now describe as my “trauma” stories, as all of them dealt with recovering from overwhelming life trauma.
The Wounded Healers was the last of the novels written during that period and yes, it contains lots of trauma related material.
Except I now realize I put the trauma on stage for no good story reason. It didn’t work as part of the story, instead it got in the way of the story.
And one astute first reader caught it. She said, “You dropped the throughline several times in the first 100 pages.”
Okay, she didn’t quite say it like that but that’s what she meant.
I knew that’s what she meant because when she said, “I keep losing track of what’s happening. Ben Matthews (the protagonist) keeps having all these memories and I don’t know how they relate to the main story. Ben and the three creatures, that’s the story. All this stuff Ben’s remembering gets in the way.”
What really bothered me is I knew the story was flawed and – because the novel (like so many at that time) is based on my life (I write autobiography, remember?) – I kept getting caught up in the memories written into the story. Many are nicely written (not going to deny it), and most of them are irrelevant to the core story of Ben and the Wounded Healers with whom he journeys Manhattan.
Okay, lesson (painfully) learned.
It didn’t help that I kept hearing Thomas Huxley’s “Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.”
I mean, how many times did I need to revisit the same ground? It didn’t help when I’d written the following exchange into the novel the previous day:
Jenreel repeats his question differently. “Where do you go with you do that, Ben?”
“When I do what?”
“When you stop seeing what’s in front of you. When you stop hearing what’s around you. It must be a wonderful place. Many of your people do it so often.” Beriah and Cetaf come up behind him. “Could you take us with you the next time you go?” Beriah and Cetaf nod vigorously. {Quick learners, they,to have mastered human mannerisms so quickly.}
Cetaf leans over and stares down at me. Have you ever seen a walking wall beg? It’s not pretty. “Or could you teach us, Ben? It must be such a wonderful place, could you teach us how to go there?”***“No,” I tell them. “It’s not a wonderful place.”
The three pull back. Visibly pull back. They turn to each other and huddle. The huddle breaks and Cetaf and Beriah nudge Jenreel forward. He drew the short straw, he pulled the low card, his camel can’t be healed. “You keep returning because…?”
{Yes, Dr. S. Why do I keep returning to a place from which I fought to escape? Am I some kind of emotional salmon who needs to return to pain in order to spawn?
Spawn what?
They teach me something I could not learn from you. I realize now I wasn’t ready, it wasn’t time, or perhaps you laid the groundwork on which they build: one’s history must inform, it must not guide. To do so robs you of the moment, denies you a better future, mires you in the past.
But one’s past is the basis for one’s future.
Until one realizes it doesn’t have to be.}
Okay, so slap me silly with a two-foot pen.
I’ve said many times, I learn slowly, and eventually I do learn.
Especially when your characters are telling you to give it a rest, right?
So starting next week, The Book of the Wounded Healers (a Study in Perception), hopefully healed.
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