Birth of a Novel

by Dennis Green

I dreamed I was hiking up the Stevens Creek Trail in Santa Barbara, the one that goes up out of Stevens Creek Park, under the Stevens Creek Bridge and on up into the mountains. If you follow it all the way up, you come out on La Cumbre Peak at some 5,000 feet elevation.

When I woke, I remembered an experience I’d had there one day, a huge adventure involving a Chumash sacred site, mescaline and those big motorized off-road trikes. I lay there, half-in, half-out of sleepfulness, and musing about some of my other adventures in Santa Barbara over the course of the 20 years I lived there.

Several themes began to emerge, although from different times, different incarnations there, over the course of my first three marriages and during the times I taught at the University and later when I worked as an editor there. But I began to see a larger picture, a bigger story where all these pieces fit together in a short span of fictional time, and suddenly I realized it — I was writing a novel.

And I started writing it down in one of the notepads I keep by the bed, writing by the light of the big 19-inch nightlight Diane keeps on during the night, in case she has insomnia. As I was writing, I could see, out of the corner of my eye, The Third Man movie on Turner Classics on in the background.

I wrote the first few long sentences for the opening of the novel, and then I did something I’ve never done before, in any of the previous six novels I’ve written. I took out another notebook and began writing down a list of the “cast of characters,” giving each one a name, a brief description, how they relate to the main character, and a bit of what they each might bring to the story.

I’d never done that before. But I realized that this will be a very different kind of story than any I’ve ever written. It will require a lot of research, most of it online at Wikipedia, into the history and culture of the Mayas, and the mystery of their calendar, which ends in 2012, into the growing of the Agavë and the production of mescal, into the history and culture of the Chumash California tribe and the Mescalero Apache of New Mexico, into the story of the Crystal Skull as told me by the mystic Frank Dorland, maybe even find out who this “Stevens” was.

There will be a profoundly dramatic tale with silky skinned women, and all the action will culminate on that one day on the Stevens Creek Trail.

I also made a list of the places, scenes and settings that will figure in the novel. The time period, early 1971, makes such choices particular to the era, since the UCSB campus and nearby student community, Isla Vista, have both changed enormously since then. Certain campus buildings will figure in the story, certain locations in I.V., including the then newly-rebuilt Bank of America, replacing the one that had been burned down in 1970, the new edifice a mighty fortress and temple to the almighty dollar.

All these notes will help me focus my energies and thoughts as I proceed. And while I’ve never done such a preview map of a story before, I know intuitively that this time it’s essential. This will be the most ambitious, and if successful, the most powerful story I’ve ever told.

I barely have a working title yet, but it will be something like “Mescalero City Blues,” and the main character, Devan Williams, will be a professor of anthropology specializing in Maya culture. He will have quite a number of lady friends. Olé!

And I will be sharing the unfolding of this novel here at EdgeCity. I may even serialize the novel’s chapters here.

©2009 Dennis Green