Back Story: Flight by Gregory Wolos
The composition process varies for me. Some stories roll right out, their intended destination as clear as the situation and the characters that will carry them there. Other stories have to be woven together—and these take more emotional energy and time. “Flight” is one of the latter. The motivation for the story came from the suicide of a former student, a talented young woman who lost her battle with severe depression.
I intended the story as a kind of memorial, but really it was a testament to my own grief. The problem for me was how to capture the feelings I had in fictional form. The notion I began with was of a father who is trying to escape his despair over the death of his daughter. Early on in the story’s evolution I decided to have the protagonist recovering from Lyme disease—something that had debilitating physical symptoms behind which he could hide his real misery. I also decided pretty early on to dispense with dramatic irony—I wouldn’t articulate the true source of the narrator’s pain with the reader until it forces its way into his consciousness at the story’s end.
So—I’d committed myself to asking the reader to follow the untrustworthy consciousness of a protagonist without revealing he’s untrustworthy. The idea was that the reader would be slapped into awareness of the truth at the same time the character is finally compelled to acknowledge it.
But the interior journey of the character needed an exterior—a setting—and there had to be someone in that external world to push him toward his (and the story’s) climax. So I put the character on a plane, and I gave him a chatty row-mate—someone from whom it would be impossible to hide. When I made him a professor, the Venn diagram motif of the story was born almost immediately, and it gave me a way of “speaking” about the ambiguities the protagonist created without stating them directly. Venn diagrams—similar parts of different things are revealed. One can either dwell on the “shared” or on the “different.” The protagonist creates overlaps with the woman in the window seat—she reminds him of his dead mother, who in turn reminds him of his daughter—his physical weakness helps create a kind of dream state where “overlaps” are made and unmade. And the woman has a siren-esque quality that is luring him toward the one truth he doesn’t want to see.
The biggest overlap of all is that the protagonist and the woman of the window seat both have daughters—but when he hears the woman’s description of her own daughter’s unfortunate circumstances, he can’t help projecting his own cover-up onto her; she’s hiding the “truth.” The more evident it becomes to him that she’s lying about an important detail of her daughter’s story, the less able he is to disguise his own lie. And he (and the reader) must finally confront with the truth from which he can’t escape. At story’s end he is bereft and far from healed.
The Venn diagram idea gave me the freedom to play with “overlaps” in the story, from the physical (the concentric circles, or “target” caused by the tick bite) to the linguistic (simple puns like “lying” for “Lyme” and confused names) to setting (pictures by or of grandmothers). And, of course, there are the larger thematic overlaps—the suffering that comes with parenthood, to suggest just one.
But the story took two years of off-again on-again revising to get the balance close to what I wanted—how much should I hint to the reader; how many overlaps were too many. And I didn’t want to forget that the story was rooted in an inability to shake my sadness over the tragic death of a young friend.
One of the things I find fascinating when I read one of my stories after some time has gone by is how details from my life wink at me from the narrative: the oval portrait of my grandmother as a toddler that hangs in my living room; the Lyme disease “target” my buddy pulled off his shirt to show me; my daughter’s anecdote about a childhood friend whose one night stand was parlayed into an online porn video by an unscrupulous date. I wonder from what experiential recesses the details of my next story will spring.
Gregory Wolos’s story “Flight” appears in the winter 2011 issue of Rose and Thorn Journal. This fall and winter his stories have been published in Forge Journal, elimae, Tertulia Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Journal, Pif Magazine, Blood Orange Review, Used Furniture Review, The Coachella Review, and Underground Voices. New stories are forthcoming in The Write Room, Emprise Review, and Apple Valley Review.
His story “Among the Marigolds” won the A.E. Coppard Prize for the Long Story (White Eagle Coffee Store Press). Recently, his short fiction has been recognized by Glimmertrain (Finalist—October, 2009 and January, 2010), for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award (Finalist for a book length collection, 2010), and as a finalist for the Rick Demarinis Short Fiction Award (Cutthroat Journal). The editor of Tertulia Magazine has nominated his story “Interstate Nocturne” for a Pushcart Prize.
Gregory lives and writes on the northern bank of the Mohawk River in upstate New York. Visit his website at gregorywolos.
it is not only intriguing, but personally rewarding to read r&t authors' back stories. as an author, i relate to much of what was said. gw's creative process also helps me with my own. truly as fascinating as 'flight' was on original reading.
thanx and write on!
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Thank you Gregory. Loved reading the process by which your story was born. Truly interesting!
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Brilliant!
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