The evolution of "Touch Your Defenses"
The inside story of one writer's early development
My seventh grade health class was in an annex building out back of Northwest Middle School off Murray Road in Forsyth County. I don’t remember a lot about the class, but one thing stands out. We were big into drums that year and I would pound on the desk with my pencils and stomp my feet and the teacher, bless her heart, had a hard time getting me to sit still.
I remember she told me to use my pencil to take notes and by the end of the semester I became an avid note taker. She stopped by my desk one day and looked over my notes and said “you’ve become a great note taker. That will really help you when you get to college.”
The fact that she assumed, or knew, I would go to college is what stands out to me. Her faith in me, even at that time of life, meant a great deal in my development as a writer. I studied history in college and became a newspaper reporter. Notes, lists and jottings have been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. When my newspaper career fell apart the first time, I was devastated. That story is the subject of the novella at the end of my short story collection, “Touch Your Defenses”, and it is an outpouring of my soul and emotions that I had to write through in order to be done with it. That experience in 2005 is what later gave me the time and space to begin exploring fiction writing. To be sure, I had to work through political blogging and fighting like hell to get back in the newspaper game, but along the way I had the opportunity to really read fiction for the first time in my life and to begin thinking about how to write it myself.
That brings me back to lists.
I began making lists of slice of life moments from my memory and experience, things that stood out in my mind 15 or 20 years after the fact. Moments that moved me still, somewhere in my heart or in my longings or regrets. Childhood experiences, teenage angst, the sting of lost love and rejection, the excitement of bliss, and the lure of hope. These are the things that make up life. These are the stories that move us no matter how far removed from the present moment.
Only one of the 12 stories in “Touch Your Defenses” did I write in my 20s. That story, “Mariah”, was written in about 1997 and came out of a codependent relationship I’d been in with an alcoholic lover who broke my heart and trashed my good nature in a way that motivated me to leave that lifestyle, and my hometown of WInston-Salem, in the past.
“Drift” was, I think, the first story I tried to write as I began this journey. It’s somewhat of a love story, a meditation on relationships, both meaningful and hollow, and is probably the saddest of the bunch. “Live For That Look” was next and is an attempt to explain how music moves me and how songs can bring connectivity to people in otherwise isolated despair.
By 2012, I had begun to attempt writing novels and several of the stories are excerpts from unfinished manuscripts I abandoned as my skill set grew and those ideas paled in comparison to my new vision. “One Night on Coward Knob” is the opening to one such effort, with “Bluff” also coming out of that phase. While working daily on that project, I would free write each day to begin my work, and four of the stories came to life in that manner. “Work It Out”, “The Other Side of the Window”, “Ugly as Sin”, and “Death Wish on Acid” were born in this productive phase as notebook sessions that I would type up when finished.
I continue to grow as a plotter of novels, but, as of yet, continue to struggle with focus and determination to finish a book-length story. That’s the center of my effort now and I hope in the coming decade to push through these personal shortcomings and produce the work I know is inside of me.
I wrote eight stories in the last year and “With Intent to Sell and Smoke” and “It Comes Back to You” represent the most recent development of my short story skill level.
Each of the short stories in this collection started as a list entry in a notebook or file of ideas that I keep, with the titles coming from extensive lists of iambic pentameter phrases I keep on my cell phone, which I normally take from song lyrics, sayings and Bible verses.
When putting the list of 12 stories together this spring, I at first thought to present them in the order written, but, on a whim, decided to list them in order of real life inspiration. When I looked at that list objectively, the stories seemed to tell a larger narrative of the evolution of a life over a certain 20-year period in a specific region of North Carolina. That felt, to me, like a moving story, while also fitting within a larger narrative arc.
I used composites of people and events to give the stories more of a removed, fictional feel, a trick I picked up while studying craft and trying to avoid the pitfall of “well that’s how it really happened”, which often hampers writers as they try to emerge from the personal to the fantastic.
I have begun to move toward more objective, third-person ideas outside of my own personal experience. The recent short stories on my website show this evolution, I think, and I have enjoyed becoming more of a puppet master than just bleeding my soul onto the page. The two novels I am working on presently are political, social commentary and I hope to begin sharing them next year.
“Touch Your Defenses” has been a great experience as a writer and a visionary creator. I have poured over these stories countless times to perfect the lines as much as possible. My hope is that the stories resonate with readers and perhaps find an audience. More than anything, I am proud of the evolution of these ideas from listed entries in journals, to first draft manuscripts, to published works, and finally to a collection of fiction that tells a story larger than its parts.