Alternatives
How Ship of Fools might have started... and might still do
Welcome back to Glass Half Full! We’re done with the character profiles but we’re going to stay meta with a consideration of other ways I could have started the novel. Today I’ll present one of the “darlings” I cut from an early chapter and next week I’ll go into an entirely different approach to plotting the opening. I hope both will give you object lessons in what to do (and not to do) when structuring and editing a novel.
Also, a bit of housekeeping. Since we’re about halfway through Ship of Fools, I wanted to check in with readers to see how you’re experiencing the story. I’m going to do that through my first subscriber chat this Thursday. To participate, you’ll need to be on the Substack website or in the mobile app. (If you’re reading this in your email and you want to go to the website, just click on the title above. On your phone, you can click either the title or the “Read in app” button.) Hope to see some of you there!
Here are the three questions we’ll be pondering:
After reading today’s post, do you think the novel should have a faster “takeoff”? (I’ll present one way to do that next week.) Or were you happy with the way the story unfolds as written?
Since we’re at a literal cliff-hanger for Liz, do you have any ideas about where the story is going to go from here? Friday’s chapter will reveal a lot, so get your guesses in now.
The thorniest question: Should I change Lonnie Ester’s name? Obviously it’s a play on the name of one particular real-life rocket tycoon. One that I’ve repeatedly denied is a model for my own character (although that’s a bit complicated). Should I put the confusion to rest by changing his name? And will it do any good?
If you can’t be part of the subscriber chat on Thursday, please feel free to leave your answers in the comment section below.
And now, on with the essay.
My satirical novel, Ship of Fools, has an admittedly strange structure. The inciting incident doesn’t happen until Chapter 11. Those first ten chapters are scenes aboard a cruise ship interspersed with flashback chapters. The cruise ship chapters all take place within the space of a couple of hours, so the narrative still manages to answer the essential question: “What makes today different than any other day?” But it’s a lot of pages into the novel.
Oh, and there’s also a Prologue featuring characters who don’t reappear until Chapter 16. That doesn’t count an Interlude in an alternate universe that doesn’t get a chapter number. See, even describing this opening section is difficult! Are the characters in the cruise ship chapters both humorous and interesting enough, with enough minor conflicts between them, to keep the reader going? Is there enough interest and suspense in the flashback chapters to drive the narrative?
The readers who have read and enjoyed the novel so far haven’t complained about this strange structure. But there must be others who have looked at the first few chapters here on Substack and walked away. None of them left a comment like “when does the story get started?”
What I want to do in this and the next post is consider alternate ways I could have started the novel, and still might when I publish it next year. I’ll cover an obvious one next week that would move the inciting incident up to page one. But it’s a highly clichéd approach to starting a story and I’m betting a lot of readers are as tired of it as I am.
Today I’m going to consider a section of the novel that I cut out of an early draft. It was a “darling” I decided I had to kill. I think the reasons will become pretty obvious as you read it, but I’ll go through them at the end of this post. Those of you who’ve been following along with Ship of Fools will recognize some of it from the first half of Chapter 2, “The Collector.”
This deleted scene was supposed to be bonus material for my paid subscribers, but I decided I’d put it out to the public. Paid subscribers, I hope you aren’t too mad that I’m giving away the trash I cut from the novel.
THE CAR coasted down the slope of yet another range of craggy, arid hills into yet another desert plain, nothing but creosote bushes and ATV tracks and solar panels stretching to a horizon undulant with yet farther mountain ranges. Inside her glass and chrome enclosure, Liz gazed out at the bleak landscape with a mixture of tedium and dread. It was hard to accept the existence of such an expanse hostile to human life. But it should have been no surprise, the planet having become measurably more hostile to human life in recent years. The car’s thermometer read 110, about average for a summer day.
She should have flown into Las Vegas for this assignment, not LA. The little town of Tecopa was just an hour and a half from that one-time gambling mecca, out past the red rocks of Red Rock Canyon State Park and the legal brothels in Pahrump, then over the state line into California and the southern borders of Death Valley. And not that far from Area 51, as she’d noted when the source contacted her and gave his location for this meeting.
But she’d wanted to visit her mother in Los Angeles. If she was going to travel this far anyway, the extra drive seemed worth it. Stan, her editor, had approved the additional mileage, and it would be her first visit since her mother had moved from Michigan, seeking a respite from slushy winters and muggy, mosquito-infested summers.
Great time to retire to the coast, mom, when most people were heading the other way. But her mother could afford it, with her university KEOGH and the killing she’d made on her Ann Arbor house. Property in Rancho Palos Verdes was coming down, even if the price for water was stratospheric. Mom had found a house high up on a bluff, far enough back from the cliff face that she needn’t worry about it slipping over the edge during her lifetime. She could sit out by the empty pool and watch the rising blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean for hours.
After a weekend sipping gin and tonics under a shade umbrella on her mother’s deck, shopping in nearly empty malls, and eating what she suspected was third-rate Mexican food at La Casa de Amigos, she’d headed out early that morning, a Monday, her eagerness for the adventure quickly quashed by the ruin of LA, the abandoned housing tracts and shuttered, nameless factories of the eastern basin, the foothills with their ranks of empty warehouses and vacant parking lots surrounding boarded-up big-box stores, the only signs of former commerce a few tattered plastic bags clinging to the resurgent coastal sage scrub. Los Angeles, the metropolis built on stolen water, and then ended by it when the climate, not to mention surrounding states and autonomous zones, had grown stingy.
Out of the metropolitan ruin, up and over the Cajon Pass, the eight-lane freeway nearly empty save for a few convoys of trucks coming the other way down the grade, tailgating each other on autopilot at 100 mph. On either side the mountains rose up, no trees yet at this elevation, just more brown chaparral shrubs, and even less growing on the more vertical slopes — plate tectonics’ effective blockade against further urban encroachment.
And then gently down into the first of how many desert basins she’d traversed by now, the sprawl of Victorville as empty as its vastly larger neighbor to the south. The abandoned houses thinning out until only the natural desert remained, or as natural as it could be in this era of renewable power, heat waves shimmering off the panels, the giant white towers with their spinning — or sometimes stationary — pinwheels marching up over the mountain ridges.
After another hour, the monotony had taken its toll. She tried closing her eyes, but at the rate the car traveled around curves and over rises engineered for a much slower speed, she began to feel car sick. She opened her eyes to a landscape at last devoid of any human structure, a jumble of black and orange rock — volcanic, probably—thrusting up toward the sky on either side of the highway, a little jeep track winding up into the hills the only sign of human presence other than the freeway itself. Heat waves shimmered the far distance, making everything vibrate, dreamlike. From her glass-enclosed pod, it seemed a terra incognita, uncrossable, unmappable, unknowable.
But this was nonsense, her reptile brain reacting to the old primal fears out here where no trees offered retreat from an approaching predator, no grassy savanna promised game and forage, an occasional ring of green holding life-giving water. Yet she was perfectly safe here in her pod with its air conditioning, a smooth ribbon of concrete for its wheels to roll over, and plenty of charge left in the battery. She was just reacting to this strange, almost alien landscape.
She reminded herself she was the alien here. Others knew the place better, geologists and botanists and wildlife biologists. She’d even interviewed some of them. She knew there was more life out here than the place revealed in the day time, at 90 miles an hour, much less in summer; in its way, it was as full of life as many other places people found more palatable. She knew all this, but still the ancient impulses would have their sway.
And out on the flats the car was now descending toward, yes, there it was, the shimmering heat waves turning into the illusion of a vast, blue lake. Just another trick of the mind and the physics of light, yet she had to consciously push back the urge to redirect the car toward that water. How cool it would be! It looked crystal clear and pure from here. She pushed back on those thoughts, took a sip from one of the two water bottles she’d picked up at a convenience store before getting on the freeway, adjusted the window tinting a shade darker, and opened her notes on the source she was traveling to meet.
Ben Himmelstein. His wiki had him as an assistant director on B-movies in Hollywood in the 1950s, so he must be pushing 100 now. When his directing career had fizzled, he’d become an archivist of films and related memorabilia, working both independently and for organizations like the American Film Institute. According to contemporary articles in the Hollywood Reporter and Cineaste, he’d developed a reputation as the man with all the right contacts, who could get his hands on any piece of memorabilia imaginable. There was even a rumor, never confirmed but important if only because the cognoscenti found it believable, that he’d procured, for an undisclosed buyer, the panties Marilyn Monroe wore in that famous scene from The Seven Year Itch.
More important for the piece she was writing—the piece that Himmelstein had pitched to her—he had been close to Kubrick and had curated shows focusing on 2001, Dr. Strangelove, and The Shining. All the reviewers had been impressed with the level of detail, the range of film artifacts, and the stories behind them. Yes, there was no question that Himmelstein was well placed to provide the evidence that could back up his outlandish claims. Not that she knew exactly what those were. Something to do with the moon landing, obviously.
When she’d received his message a month before, she’d been tempted to send it to the trash bin, along with the countless other pitches from cranks, conspiracy theorists, and believers in wild hoaxes she received hourly. For the conspiracists, she was the big game—they knew if they convinced her, the most prominently placed and skeptical skeptic of them all, their time in the wilderness of the lunatic fringe would be at an end. That, and she had good relationships with many of the principle believers in the arcane, the outlandish, and the impossible. On her old blog and in the book that had earned her the gig at the Times, she never called them insane, stupid, or con artists, but told them simply, “Convince me.” If their claims stood up to logic and evidence, she would run with their story. But they never did.
Something about Himmelstein’s message made her hesitate before trashing it. Of course he was a big fan of her work, but she brushed aside that obvious flattery. They all did that, claiming to admire the way she debunked those other cranks, the ones who believed in the obviously insane Theory X. But this one had a calm, professional tone, in contrast to the usual breathless hype. And then there was his professional bio, easily confirmed with a quick search. True, the hoax he was promoting was one of the oldest in the book. But he said he had new evidence of Hollywood’s involvement in the Apollo program, and if anyone would know one way or the other, it was he.
She had no choice but to take it to Stan.
“This is great!” he said, his eyes lighting up. “The guy’s probably gone round the bend, but think of the human interest angle.”
“Human interest. Great. It’s what I live for.”
“Come on, Liz, we do need to sell the section sometimes. One article like this will earn you ten hard science reports. I know you won’t treat him too harshly, with your trademark gentle irony. And look where he lives! Just a short hop in a flying saucer from Area 51.”
“Gee, Stan, you really know how to sell me on this. That only makes him more likely to be a crank, and me less interested.”
“But look, you can fly into Las Vegas, play the slots, have a good meal—I hear Morimoto has half-price deals on Thursdays—maybe file a report on the water situation while you’re there. Then hop over and interview this guy, write up a piece with a lot of local color. There are even hot springs there. Sounds relaxing. Come to think of it, maybe I should go.”
“Hot springs in summer in one of the hottest places on Earth. Sounds great.”
Seeing no way out of it, she’d negotiated the days in LA, a move she continued to regret as the car turned off the freeway at Baker, the town’s tall thermometer pegged at 115, and onto a two-laner into increasingly desolate desert. The car climbed into another rocky mountain range, the black and brown and yellow volcanics seeming to support no life at all, at least none she could see through the glass at these speeds, not a blade of grass or a leaf of green, just bare rock and dead twigs, where anything grew at all. And then suddenly a blaze of green, cottonwoods growing at the head of a creek — or dry wash, maybe arroyo, she guessed they’d call it in these parts.
And then up to the top of the pass, the road twisting between peaks, the landscape lifeless once more. Suddenly she was seized with fear. Was this a journey to any human destination, or into the progressively less human, the anti-human, until she arrived at a place that would tolerate no human at all? What would she find on the other side of this pass—a settlement, as she’d been led to expect from sat photos, campers around the hot springs, a few desert rats living in their isolated shacks and mobile homes, all facing resolutely away from each other? Or a road stretching into nothingness, an endless expanse of desert, the tarmac giving way to gravel, then a sandy two-track, then no road at all? And what then? She looked down at the water bottles in the cup-holders, one empty, one half full, and realized she needed to pee.
How ironic, carrying water to deposit in the desert, only to die of thirst. What had she been thinking, setting out into this hostile wilderness with little water and no food?
No, it wasn’t just the wilderness and the heat. Something in the desert didn’t want her here, it was pushing back against her very existence. Not an embodied being, surely, certainly no cloaked and hooded figure here, its arms outstretched to ward her off. No, rather a skittering movement, a flash caught from the corner of the eye, a cactus arm upraised like a claw glimpsed at ninety miles an hour. Whatever that thing was, whether force or entity, it seemed about to be revealed around the next bend.
“Stop at the next pullout,” she told the car.
It was another mile before the car came to a safe stopping place. While she waited, she tried to collect herself and her scattered thoughts. She checked the map screen, which showed time to destination as twenty minutes and clear roads all the way. She zoomed in on them in sat view just to convince herself they were all paved. She checked the battery, and it had more than half a charge. Himmelstein had claimed to have a fast charger for her rental, and even if not, she could still make Las Vegas. She could get more water and supplies at a gas station in Tecopa or Pahrump. She was safe. She would survive.
The car pulled into a wide gravel area beside the road. She grabbed her sun hat—at least she’d thought to bring that—and a few tissues and got out of the car. The only bush she could find was little more than twigs with a few brown leaves clinging to them, but she still dropped her jeans and squatted behind it to relieve herself. That was better. Now that she was out of the car and not speeding through the place, the silliness of that vision — or whatever it was — seemed obvious. Everything, the sand, the small rocks of the graveled pullout, the sparsely arranged shrubs, they all seemed normal, quotidian even. The desert was just another place.
But damn, it was hot. She got back in the car, the sweat on the back of her neck chilling instantly in the conditioned air. She drank the last of her water.
The car pulled back onto the highway and in fifteen minutes reached the turnoff for Tecopa, the road signs—Death Valley National Park straight ahead, the little town to the right—strangely comforting, not so much signs to physical places as tokens that she hadn’t left humanity’s sway utterly behind. But she couldn’t imagine how anyone could live out here, much less why.
She’d expected a gas station in the town, or maybe a bar where she could freshen up and compose herself before continuing on to her meeting, but found only a long-shuttered post office at the town’s one intersection. To the left, she knew, were the hot springs and hotels and campgrounds, but whether any of them were open at this time of year, she hadn’t a clue. Himmelstein’s was to the right, about a mile away. She’d better head straight there, as thirsty and light-headed as she felt. Just too many hours in the car, she told herself.
A few turns and several minutes later, the car pulled into the wide gravel space in front of Himmelstein’s home. An ancient Isuzu Trooper, obviously converted to electric since it was plugged into the promised fast charger, rested in the shade of a ramada next to the house, a prefab affair. She was glad to see trees, even of a sort she didn’t know, with dark bark and tiny green leaves, towering over the place, casting the most shade she’d seen in hours. She resisted the urge to run straight into it as she got out of the car, pulling her briefcase after her.
Now, out of the shade and into the glaring sun came Himmelstein himself, moving with quick old-man baby steps, his ancient Birkenstocks scuffling across the gravel.
“Ms. Dare, how nice to…” Then a pause as he got a better look at her, her hand outstretched to shake his. “But you look done in. How about you come in and have some lemonade.”
She’d never been more glad to see a fellow human being in her life.
Even if you’re not familiar with Ship of Fools, I bet you can spot many reasons this should be cut. Here are mine:
There’s no conflict, except with the landscape. That might be fine in another kind of story, but this conflict doesn’t carry through the novel. It just trails off here and is left behind. The real conflict and central question of all these flashback chapters is the one she’s driving toward: could Ben Himmelstein’s implausible moon-landing hoax theory possibly be true? And, later in these flashback chapters, who is trying to stop her from pursuing this story? So I drastically cut the driving part and spliced it into what had been the first part of her meeting with Himmelstein.
It’s over-written. I was still in the thrall of my biggest influence for this novel, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. Like a lot of Pynchon’s work, it’s filled with those long, looping sentences and lush descriptions. I kept some of that as I found my own style for Ship of Fools, but decided this was mostly too much. Pynchon is a maximalist, and if I was going to go down that path for the rest of the novel, it would have ended up at something like 300,000 words. I knew I probably didn’t have that much material in me, plus I had no confidence that I could keep the reader engaged with material like this. (As it is, the novel is 145,000 words, with eight or nine POV characters, so it’s already pretty baggy.)
It doesn’t move Liz forward as a character, or reveal anything about her that isn’t in the current, shorter version.
I really just wanted to spend some time describing the desert, which I used to write about all the time. But lavish descriptions do not a story make.
It was more idea-driven than character-driven. I wanted to confront Liz, the ultimate rationalist, with a challenge to her rationality. First, just in the way the mind can play tricks when the eyes behold a mirage. And second, by giving her the kind of minor freak-out some people experience the first time they see the desert. Something about those vast stretches of hostile terrain is humbling, even crushing, to the human ego. But Liz will experience assaults on her rationality later in the novel, so why bring them up this early, in a way that won’t carry through the story?
I was already aware of the story’s slow takeoff, so cutting 1,300 words here helped speed things along.
There’s only one thing I regret about making this cut: The passage contains one image that foreshadows the ending of the novel. I’m not going to tell you what it is. Shoe-horning it into the current version won’t work because it would seem too out of place. I’d forgotten it was even in there until re-reading just now, and I’m not sure I was aware it would be a recurring image when I wrote this passage.
So there you have it, one writer’s decision-making process in deciding to kill one of his darlings. Next week, we’ll look at a completely different way I could have started Ship of Fools, opening with the proverbial bang.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this bonus scene, please give it a like, a share, a restack, or a comment. And if you really enjoyed it, I hope you’ll buy me a coffee or upgrade to a paid subscription.
What do you think? Was I right to cut this section? Let me know in the comments! Or in Thursday’s subscriber chat.
Come back on Friday for Chapter 37 of Ship of Fools, “On the Path,” in which we’ll find out what happened to Liz after her plunge into the abyss.
I feel like I already knew all this about Liz from the shorter starting and further chapters in the story, so cutting makes sense (or rather, leaving it doesn’t add anything). But now I’m curious what imagery for shapes the ending…