Julia Skayakovak

Over the years I have written many characters with whom I have fallen in love. On the whole my writing tends to revolve around one woman and one man, with supporting characters. My women tend to be strong, capable, obstinate characters who resort to Machiavellian tools to achieve their agendas. My men tend to be somewhat capable survivors who are often in over their heads, but game. The conflicts that arise between these two personalities is one I have seen very little of, particularly where the woman is not sentimental and where the man is not ideological. My characters, as I’ve said, reflect facets of my personality, but they are never ‘me.’ They do not react as I would react, they do not approach problems as I would approach them, and they do not see the world as I see it. Nevertheless, I still love them.

For two decades I was possessed with this particular character whom I wrote into three separate books. The first book was never finished. The second I did finish, but it was awful and it has been lost now. The third book was the one I’ve mentioned already, Act of God.

The character at its inception possessed a number of questionable, young motivations which no respecting person my present age would have: beauty, murderous sadism, phenomenal amounts of ability ... the trope that would now be called a ‘Mary Sue.’ My inspiration had not been comics, but rather a desire to somehow make the notorious Carlos the Jackal into a woman character. It seems almost silly to write the words ‘international assassin’ in today’s world – terrorist would be more up-to-date – but that was the conception I originally had, lo about 1980.

Early on I settled on the name ‘Julia’ for its lyrical qualities and its associations with the conqueror Julius Caesar. Her last name was a composite of ‘skaya,’ the Czech word for ‘town,’ emphasizing her urban and thus modern characteristics; and ‘kovak,’ which has an imprecise meaning regarding stealth and capability. I could not know that Alan Moore was making the similar association (I assume) when he named his Rorschach character Walter Kovacs. I did not think that meant I needed to change the name of my character.
Being the terrible writer that I was in the 80’s, I wasn’t able to do her character justice in words. I could picture her in my head and how she ought to behave, but I couldn’t do better than to present the shallow outer shape. I did get an interesting break, however, that gave me a wider perception of what the character offered.

In mid ’86 I was at a job interview for an analyst’s position. I was fresh from working for the government as a statistical clerk and I hadn’t entered university yet. Before the job interview began I found myself in a conversation with another applicant. He went first. Then, after my interview, which didn’t go so well, I ran into him in the coffee shop downstairs and we continued our conversation. He told me his name was ‘Bob.’ I identified myself as a writer, and in answer to his query I told him about the book I was struggling with, which included Julia. I confessed that I wished I’d had more information about what went on behind closed doors with international intrigue, whereupon he explained that he could help with that.

We took a short walk to another building where he kept a small office for his own use. I realized quickly that he was obviously more likely to get the analyst’s job than I was. Once we were in his office, he locked us inside and began to explain that he had worked for C.S.I.S. for a number of years. That’s the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. After a little digging into his files, he produced a box which was full – coincidentally – of documents related to the movements of Carlos the Jackal from the mid 1970s and into the 80s. It was material that had been printed on a teletype machine ... old dot-matrix printing and so on. The pages made oblique descriptions of Carlos in Bulgaria, Carlos in Brazil, Carlos in Spain and so on. Now and then there were descriptions I did not understand that ‘Bob’ explained for me. Bombs had a tendency to go off in places Carlos had been seen in just a few hours prior.

I was engrossed, obviously. I was a bit worried, too. But after several hours of talking and reading, Bob closed the box, swore me to secrecy and let me out of the office. I never saw him again. I did not go looking to see him again.

I have always throught of that as a very odd moment in my life. Now and then I’ve had to convince myself that it really happened. Were the documents real, or were they some faked thing that Bob happened to have with him the day we met. Was C.S.I.S. watching me? Are they still watching me? I guess you have to decide how paranoid you’re going to be. I tend to believe that somehow the whole thing was a coincidental run-in between my writing and Bob’s unique conspiracy-fueled paranoia. I tend not to believe the documents were real. My subsequent investigations these last many years have convinced me that a lot of what I read that day was complete bullshit.

It was, all the same, terrific fuel for my creativity. If I had ever considered giving up on Julia prior to that meeting, afterwards I had to write something, eventually, that would suit the character. And as I’ve said, I eventually did.

Julia is not someone I would ever want to know personally. She did remain a terrorist and an assassin, but I washed the sadism out of her in favor for indifference, and replaced my original conceptions of her ideology with a sense of intense retribution. Not revenge in the ordinary sense, for wrongs done her, but the cold certainty that certain people’s lives should be brought to a literal end.

I suppose she deserves resurrection, and that will mean having to rewrite and restore the original book. It’s only been in the last two weeks I’ve realized I have to do that.

Getting Started

Very well, let’s get down to the work itself.  I am afraid for the gentle reader at this point because I am going to talk at great length about my own work on this blog.  The agenda here is to discuss writing.  I can accomplish some of my goals by discussing the writing of other people, but where it comes to why a particular thing has been written a particular way, I am at my best when deciphering my own writing.  I can guess at the intent behind the work of Charles Dickens.  But I can only be absolutely certain about the work of Alexis Smolensk.

I am also afraid that I won’t be able to promise a short post today.  When possible, I will try to be succinct, and since I will be posting every day, now and then I shall have to be.  But today I shall write until everything I wish to say has been said, however long that takes.

I would like, now, to introduce a book of mine.  No, I will not be posting large passages of the book, since it is not the finished work, but the fluidity of the work in progress that is the agenda here.  Nevertheless, it will work to give some background about the book, and to make note that the book will figure in many posts in the future.

The title of the book is ‘Act of God.’  I completed the first draft in 1998, the second and third drafts in 1999, and the last draft in October 2000.  There is much history about the book, its creation and the education it eventually gave me, and I will in time cover all of that.  For the present, allow me to focus on the book, and the book alone.

It is a thriller in the pattern of North By Northwest, in that an unsuspecting novice is thrown into a situation of international intrigue and forced to cope.  He has some horse sense and some courage.  He is in love with a woman who does not know, and it is through this woman and events surrounding her that he is dragged into the mess.

I have no intention of hiding the point of the novel, since the point here is to discuss the point.  In one sentence, the plot of the novel is that a woman terrorist intends to kill hundreds of millions of people in the United States by the release of a plague-creating virus.  I’ll jump right to the end of the novel and tell you that she succeeds.

I had a number of purposes for writing it.  I wanted to present a play that described the relative lack of concern all people feel for the tens of thousands of deaths that occur every day.  I wanted to place a story in the restaurant industry, where I had worked for a number of years.  And finally, I wanted to provide a vehicle for a character that had been haunting numerous story ideas for more than a decade.  That character was Julia Skayakovak, who was the terrorist in this novel.

Aside from my failure to sell the novel, there are some problems with it now that have precluded my redressing it and attempting to sell it again.  I pause here to make a comment about failure – writing is, in large part, the failure of projects to get off the ground, and the failure of finished projects to receive attention.  Every writer who has been at it for years is familiar with the growing stack or file folder rich with projects that one day he or she hopes to get back to ... if ever they solve the problem in chapter two, etcetera.  I have a considerable pile of these manuscripts.  Some are truly worthless, representing periods when I wrote purely for myself.  Others, imaginably, could be reworked.  Act of God is one such manuscript.  Maybe.

We are nearly at the point where we can get down to the nitty gritty.  It seems only natural that if we intend to discuss a work, that we discuss the beginning of the work ... i.e., the opening paragraph.  That lede to the novel which frustrates so many writers, and which is given an importance perhaps out of proportion with a work of 70 thousand or more words (Act of God, as it stands now, is 80,307).

I am now opening this file for the first time in about five years.  I shall write out the whole first paragraph, then return to deconstruct it sentence by sentence.

There’s a steel pin driven through the bone above my left knee, with a half-an-inch length sticking out.  The skin has grafted around the pin, now…both pins, actually, since there’s a second one pushed through my shinbone below the knee.  Between them hangs a solid-metal frame, which means I don’t bend my leg…and for the most part, I’ve learned not to miss-step.  That comes with practice.  I recommend that anyone unfamiliar with discomfort have it done.  It’s really the way to go.

The speaker here is Seth, who tells the novel from the first person.  As can be read from the above, Seth is a cripple.  One difficulty at present in rewriting this novel comes from the changes in medical practice.  Seth would not now have had the procedure that results in his circumstance.  Even when this was written, under normal conditions Seth would not be living his life with the pins and frame holding his knee.  However, in the novel, it is revealed that Seth escaped from a hospital upon learning that he is wanted for the rape and murder of a young girl.  This is all explained in chapter four, when Seth talks about his past, and I could get into all of that – but for the present, let’s keep with the discussion of the novel’s opening.

Let’s take the first sentence:

There’s a steel pin driven through the bone above my left knee, with a half-an-inch length sticking out.

Those words are carefully chosen to tell the reader about the speaker.  ‘Steel’ conveys hardness, brutality, cruelty, as does the word ‘pin’ within the context of the speaker’s leg having been violated.  The image is intentionally unpleasant in order to grab the reader’s attention, while at the same time thrusting the reader away with the graphic clarity of the image.  The bone, a part of the body not normally thought of as being pierced, gets all the focus.  The remaining image of ‘sticking out’ is that of exposure, even vulnerability, like an arm hanging out of a car window.

The skin has grafted around the pin, now…

I meant this second bit to convey that a lot of time has passed, and that healing has occurred.  It is important to introduce the element of the speaker’s personality as someone who has lived with this for a long time, and has adjusted.  The word ‘graft’ refers to growth, development.  It is a positive word.  And while ‘heal’ may have worked here, the sentiment that a changing and a moving on is stronger with the use of the word graft.  Heal denotes only that something lost has been regained.  I may be pedantic here, but words have very specific meanings, and even if readers do not consciously register the meanings of words they read, they reflect in their minds the myriad incidents of a particular word being used in a particular context, and as a writer you are able to make that reflection set the tone of your story.

…both pins, actually, since there’s a second one pushed through my shinbone below the knee.

Reading this now, I truly hate it.  I’ve always been uncomfortable with it, but after asking a lot of people back in the day if they had any problem with it, and not finding anyone who did, I had convinced myself somehow to leave it.  I wouldn’t now.  What’s wrong with it is the clumsy, afterthought aspect of it, dragging the reader right out of the narration and reminding them that this is a novel.  I find this unimaginably stupid after writing two good starts.  Rather than joining this to the foregoing with an ellipsis, it should have been made into its own sentence, something like, “A second pin, like the first, has been driven (not pushed) through my shinbone.”  Obviously the shinbone is below the knee.  Why would I write that?

Because, sadly, we convince ourselves that it is all right, that it isn’t that important, and that it can stand.  With distance, we will know better.  Or we will have an editor who will wisely fix it for us.  Except that the editor won’t change the word ‘pushed’ to the word ‘driven.’

Between them hangs a solid-metal frame, which means I don’t bend my leg…

Again, an ellipsis that shouldn’t be here.  I unfortunately write in them constantly, a habit I have of thinking in the first draft that they ‘feel’ right and that they belong.  As I get older and smarter, I tend to strip them out of later drafts.  Someday, I suppose, I’ll be smart enough to get rid of them altogether.

Now, the only thing this sentence really means to describe is the word ‘solid.’  That’s the critical word that needs to be in the reader’s mind.  However awful this arrangement of pins and bones is for Seth, the arrangement is solid as a rock.  This is critical because, when later in the story Seth is thrown around by various events like pursuits and explosions (yes, both!), it must be in the reader’s mind that the frame isn’t going to bust, snap, bend, break or any one of a dozen other possibilities.  The aforementioned ‘graft’ is good for that too, since trees and bones graft together, not flesh and muscle.  All the various descriptions in the paragraph do their best to compliment this idea of solidity, to reassure the reader that however brutal this is, it can take the punishment and keep on going.  The inflexibility of Seth’s leg is only one more addition to that premise.

…and for the most part, I’ve learned not to miss-step. 

Again, this sentence is shit.  There’s no sense in pulling punches.  It’s a weak structure, it doesn’t need the casual colloquialism “for the most part” – since the fact here applies universally, not just some of the time – and the words miss-step could do very well to be replaced with something like ‘trip.’  I read things like this now and I want to bang my head on the desk.

Anyway, it means to suggest that Seth is careful, and it fails utterly because it is so badly written.

That comes with practice.

This little bit of trash is no better.  Both it and the previous clause should be worked together into one firm and structured sentence that conveys, again, that Seth is a careful, careful man.  He has to be.  He has – pins – sticking out.  Except for the fact that none of this paragraph can ever be written like this now (because of the medical advances), I would rewrite this sentence to make my point clearer.  As it is, the whole paragraph has to go, along with the frame itself, and be replaced by some other arrangement that still makes Seth’s knee – on its own – an inadequate machine.

The importance of Seth’s knee is absolutely paramount to the novel.  An alternate title to this novel could be, “Seth’s Knee.”  It is because of Seth’s knee, and his inability to make it work the clutch of an old water truck, that the plague is released into the Milk River of southern Alberta and thence into the Missouri, the Mississippi and all the water courses connected with that system.  It is therefore very appropriate that the first paragraph of this novel is about Seth’s knee, even when the reader has no idea just how important this is going to be.

Interestingly, I always have an eye for a reader picking up a novel more than once.  I reread works all the time.  There are definitely parts in this novel that the reader will miss the importance of the first time through: small jokes that won’t be funny until you’ve read everything.  In a way, the first paragraph is like that – because when you’ve read the critical paragraph at the end where Seth is trying to press the clutch down with his knee – by that point having had the frame removed – the reader is meant to wince doubly upon reading the first paragraph again.

Alas, it’s all lost, since the first paragraph is now useless due to technological innovation.  Damn you, brilliant doctors!

I recommend that anyone unfamiliar with discomfort have it done.  It’s really the way to go.

Here, then, is the transitional passage that takes you out of Seth’s leg and into Seth himself … which he will go on to describe soon enough.  Seth is a bitter, sarcastic fellow, who diminishes things like horrible pain to the level of ‘discomfort’ in order to emphasize his bitterness.  Yes, unquestionably, I am Seth.  Except that, in truth, I’m not.  Seth is a particular facet of my character, which I release more in writing than in actuality.  It pays as a writer to ascertain various parts of your personality and hone those parts into individual, unique characters.  You will never know anyone as well as yourself, and no character will have as much depth as the one that speaks directly from your heart.  Writing in the first person emphasizes this, as carrying a personality through an entire novel is a chore.  Third person writing allows for more flexibility, but the voices of the characters will never be as personal.

My decision to write this novel from the first person stemmed from the theme.  Seth is the voice of reason amid the cruelty he witnesses, and it is his tone that translates for the reader a sense of disgust, shock, fear or disbelief as Seth is carried through the elements of the book to the conclusion.  A third-person telling would not have given the reader the same point of view – which is, in fact, the reader’s perspective, because the reader as well is unlikely to have met or interacted with the people Seth meets.

Here, then, I stop.  I hope that the reader of this post understands that my desire here is to provide a depiction of the writer’s trade.  I further hope that other writers, reading this, can understand how to look at a sentence and consider the elements of that sentence, and how every sentence can influence the complete work.  I argue that no sentence should be delivered without that in mind – but simultaneously, I point out that I have visibly failed to do so even in the first paragraph.  Obviously, throughout the book I will have failed to do so again and again.

But we work, and rewrite, and dig out the weeds in the novel and leave what’s healthy and desired.  That is the process.