Story Origins: The Wheel

Update: “The Wheel” is now published on this very Substack. Check it out!

Sometime in the last five or six years—or maybe ten or fifteen—I learned that I don’t have a mind’s eye in the same way that most other people do. I can’t remember exactly when I came to this disappointing realization, probably because I can’t see it in my mind’s eye. Fun.

Now, I can’t see what you do when you close your eyes and imagine something, of course, but as far as I understand it, it’s pretty different from what I see. Here, let’s try it. Close your eyes (or not, maybe you don’t need to, I have no clue) and imagine a green apple. It’s still got its stem, the UPC sticker is gone, and after a vigorous rub on your shirt, it now shines like the bald pate of your grandfather’s head. I’ll wait a second.

You saw the image, right? In vivid 3D color?

Hang on, let me close my eyes for a minute…

Ok, so I just imagined that same apple that I described to you. I know exactly what it looks like because I just told you in no uncertain terms what that is, but when I closed my eyes, I saw vague brightness with two reddish circles wavering around uncertainly. I then squinted hard and the brightness became blackness but at least parts of those red circles remained. I didn’t see an apple, green or otherwise. Sucks, right? If I’m wrong about what you all are experiencing behind your lovely eyes, please let me know in the comments but I’ve asked enough people now to feel like I’m on the right track here.

It was partially this limitation that stopped me in my tracks on my first writing project codenamed Svendrew. As I said in my first post on Substack, this led me to press pause on my first and grandest story idea and embark on something smaller. I was going to write what I knew and it was going to be a short story. I knew the title before I started—The Wheel—and, to quote my own self (how rich is that?): “I knew what it was like to be a dad. I knew how a shocking tragedy can affect a life. I knew the dark thoughts that went through my head on a Ferris Wheel. I knew Traverse City, The National Cherry Festival, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Oh and when I was a kid, an encounter with “Bigfoot” left me so shaken that I was terrified of the cryptid for years.”

The dad part came from my two sons, of course; the shocking tragedy part, from my wife who lost her mother to a freak accident in high school. For the majority of my adult life, I’ve had a front-row view of the PTSD that walks alongside a person after such an incident. I saw how it triggered emotions at baffling times, influenced decisions, and loomed large over an otherwise beautiful life. Also, as I mentioned in this tribute to my late grandparents, I had my own brush with tragedy over a several-year span. In this relatively short time, I lost two grandfathers, a father-in-law (an event that was also traumatic and life-altering), four pets, and very nearly my own dad. So after living a life that was mostly death-free, I was now very well acquainted with it; so well in fact that I was certain that one of my sons would be next.

So those were the biggies. Knowledge of Traverse City, the Cherry Fest, and the UP are all fairly easy to understand but I probably should enlighten you about the “Bigfoot” encounter because it’s pretty fucking funny in retrospect.

Sometime in mid-elementary school, my friend Daniel had a birthday party out in Lake Ann, Michigan. The story was that Lake Ann had their very own “Bigfoot.” Now that I think about it, I have no clue if this was true or if it was all made up for the party. It felt true then, though. I remember a bunch of us boys crowded in the lower den of his house, watching a small tube TV and various videos of Bigfoot.

I did not like it.

Then they took us outside and showed us the huge dent in their garage door. It was from Bigfoot, they said. He kicked it. (Dan also told me that his big brothers peed onto the power lines fifteen feet above our heads and I believed that, so you now know how stupidly impressionable I was.)

Then they took us on a walk to look for Bigfoot. I remember coming to a clearing that had some corn stalks growing in it. Remember, my mind’s eye sucks so I’m fuzzy on the details. What I’m sure of, though, is that there was a footprint from Bigfoot, just one of them, in the dried mud in the middle of the path.

Again, I did not like it.

I don’t remember much else about this walk and that in itself may be due to a trauma response of some kind. It may have been short, it may have been long, but what is crystal clear in my non-existent mind’s eye is that when we embarked on the last leg of the journey through the woods to Daniel’s house, Bigfoot appeared. He did more than appear, too, he began to lope and run at us.

I lost my shit. There were tears and sobbing I’m sure, but I only remember terror. Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one. There was one other boy, Adam, I believe, who had the same reaction I did (thanks bro). All the other boys ran at this monster, laughing. They jumped on him (I think) and celebrated him like it was the arrival of Santa Claus at the end of the Christmas parade. I didn’t understand it. Quite simply, I was a dumbass.

Moments later, the mask came off, and one of Daniel’s older brothers (who apparently had a garden hose spray nozzle set to “Jet” for a penis) was revealed. That didn’t mollify me though, I was a wreck. I have a brief memory of being in a side room of the house not long after. The room was entirely too small, long, and narrow and the evidence of the hoax was laid out before Adam and I as if it was a museum. (I’m sure this memory of the dimensions of the room itself is all completely wrong, by the way.) Here we were shown the mask and the foot that was used to make the print in the mud. I think there was more evidence on display but I can’t remember it. Either way, the damage was done. Bigfoot, Sasquatch, haunted me for years.

So along comes Jack Colby—a cheesy protagonist I’d had in my mind since an ill-fated and naive first attempt at writing fiction years prior—and he steps right into this mess of experiences from my non-fiction life. I would have warned him to watch his step if I could have, the poor guy. The result is a story that I think is lovely; my first and, so far, my favorite. It’s dark and very very heavy, but it comes around in the second half, I think. I cry every time I read the end and that’s something. One thing I’ve learned about writing is that it usually makes me feel emotions much stronger than reading does (The ending of my latest story, Water Tower, had me scared in my own home last night) and maybe that’s why I do it.

The Wheel was supposed to be a short story but as I followed it, it sprawled out to 25,000 words. So much for that idea. Then, when I returned to read it two months later after writing a real short story, I found that the first half wasn’t great; way too much telling and not enough showing. Somewhere around the middle, though, I had decided I was a real writer and built habits into my life to prove it, which led to much-improved prose. I set to rewriting the first half and revising the second and ended up with a 40,000-word novella on my hands. Great, good luck selling that, windbag.

The biggest change was in the ending. When I re-read my work, I realized I had smashed together two really depressing ideas and there needed to be hope somewhere. I said that I still cry at the ending but I cried the hardest when I first rewrote it. I hope that means this story has legs and I hope you get to read it someday.

The problem is that novellas are hard to sell, from what I hear. I recently tried to write a companion for it, hoping to sell the two together, and it ended up 20,000 words longer than The Wheel. It’s called Gull Island and I think it could still serve that same purpose but I also know that it’s the messiest first draft I’ve ever written and could very well spill over into novel territory in the rewrite since it’s nearly there already.

For now, my focus is on Rue, which is the short story I mentioned a bit ago—and it stayed that way for a time—but eventually, it begged for more and more it got. It’s my first novel and revisions on it start next week so wish me luck. In fact, I was supposed to be spending this time trying to decide what town in Missouri that story is located in but I did this instead.

Oh well.

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