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The intersection of form and content sparked the vision for “Ed
Dyess, Hero of Agoloma Point, April 22nd, 1942.” I wrote it midway
through the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College, when I was
trench-deep in setting all types of challenges for myself as a writer.
I wanted to stretch my abilities, write about people and situations
vastly different from my (then) comfort zone of often thinly-veiled
autobiographical fiction. I had first encountered the historical incident
a couple of years before, when I was hired to co-write a screenplay
about fighter pilots in World War II. In my research I came upon a
first person radio transcript dated April 22nd, 1942, given by another
fighter pilot who had escaped the Philippines to Darwin, Australia—the
voice of my story originally stems from this primary source. The screenplay
ultimately didn’t fly, but for a long time the bizarre, true story
of Ed Dyess and his band of pilots who ended up fighting a land mission
in the Philippines with old Lewis guns from the first World War and
oven mitts stuck in my imagination. If the screenplay wasn’t going
anywhere, why not salvage those great opening scenes, transfer them
to another form?
But as with many ideas for potential fiction, I didn’t attempt to
put the story on paper because I didn’t yet have a container for the
narrative. Not until I studied with Douglas Glover my second semester
and came across a short war story of his, “Swain Corliss, Hero of
Malcolm’s Mills, (now Oakland, Ontario), November 6th, 1814,” did
I have an Aha moment. I wrote the first draft as a self-imposed exercise
and turned it in to Glover, noting my intention to pay homage to his
tale with my own. The draft came back with all types of red marks
and suggestions, but I finally had a style and narrative structure,
enough to give it the dramatic thrust needed for a short story to
work.
That was the easy part. The big problem I faced as I attempted revision
(the story went through about five drafts) was that I had not yet
inhabited the point-of-view sufficiently so that the why of the narrative
was clear. As my third semester instructor Xu Xi posed to me, the
first question was what makes Ed Dyess a hero, beyond the military
sense—a hero that warrants this particular story be told of his life
in this particular moment by this narrator? Another problem was that
my initial descriptions of the action were strategic and not tactical
or specific enough—not surprising, considering my lack of military
expertise. But a writer’s job is to render the fiction believable,
so I had to nail the details. In the screenplay version these were
much easier to leave out, of course—a screenplay being comprised of
mostly dialogue and scant description, unlike literature.
To better capture the voice and tone, I studied Faulkner’s “A Rose
for Emily” and Ha Jin’s “A Woman from New York.” I also studied James
Salter’s excellent novel, “The Hunters,” a book that captures the
consciousness of fighter pilots in an entirely believable way. Even
after examining these texts I struggled with getting the voice right
up until I worked through the other issues in the story. Once I knew
Ed Dyess and the narrator better, the voice seemed to straighten itself
out.
A somewhat easier task was nailing the concrete details. I moved a
sentence from several paragraphs in, making it the opening line of
the story. From there I had a clearer vantage point to render the
events. This is a common pitfall when learning to write, for everything
builds from the opening line you lay down. So if the opening line
is faulty, like with a house, the rest of what you build will be on
shaky ground. In the early drafts I had a lot of awkward back-and-forth
that ended up being confusing; the story could just as easily be told
chronologically. Often when writing short fiction you want to keep
the backstory to a minimum, but in this case the historical details
were integral to the understanding of the story. So for the subsequent
drafts I focused on rearranged the telling to a more simple, straightforward
approach. Once I had accomplished that, and fleshed out the details
more, “Ed Dyess…” started to read less like a writing exercise and
more like a story.
Finally, to develop the “why” of the narrative more fully, I focused
on bringing out the character of Ed Dyess in a more precise and exacting
way. Once he (and the narrator’s perception of him) came into sharper
focus, the comment I wanted to make about heroism, war and absurdity
at this point in human history coalesced more fully.
Fiction, for me, is about living multiple realities through characters
whose lives are radically different from my own, and rendering those
inhabited realities believable for the reader to experience them,
too. How else would I be able to experience, in a complete sensory
and psychological way, a band of American pilots fighting the Japanese
in World War II? Walk in the shoes of a young man in a Pacific jungle
sixty-five years ago when I’m a woman in the twenty first century?
Writing fiction, for those who are called to do it, is among the most
important work on the planet, for it shows us what it is to be human.
By inhabiting another’s life different from your own, you learn to
empathize with that person. The process of doing so is my dharma—there’s
nothing more frustrating, exhilarating, or challenging that I care
to do. Sometimes it comes easy, sometimes not, but at the end of the
day, the work is fun and the rewards infinite.
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