Commentary on Day One
For those reading the commentary, know that there will be all kinds of spoilers for what’s to come. So if you’d prefer to read this novel as it comes out as if it were a novel, perhaps it’s best to avoid this sort of thing.
For the rest of you, well, you’ll get to learn about how I write and especially about the construction of this specific story.
The art I’m using for this section is Henri Lehmann’s Calypso from 1869. I think it’s fitting for the story I’m intending to tell here, which is one of longing and love and heartbreak. Seeing Calypso staring off endlessly to the sea is a powerful image that’s been deep inside me for much of my life.
One of my first published stories actually uses this exact motif of love lost to sea. When writing that in 2007, I wasn’t thinking of Calypso but maybe I should have been.
The poem that begins this novel is Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Calypso Watching the Ocean from 1836.
Now, you reading this or the Introduction, know that this is a story about Calypso and Odysseus, though the final product will not be plain about this, and this is why I’m not using the characters’ names in this first chapter. I won’t be using their names for the entirety of the novel, most likely. That’s subject to change, but right now they will likely remain She and He.
Now, before we get too much into this first chapter, I suppose I should spent a moment explaining why I’m writing this and not anything else.
Well, to be honest, most of it has to do with Jorge Rivera-Herrans’ musical adaptation of The Odyssey. I’m not much for musicals but my wife is and she discovered this about two years ago. Since then, it’s become a real mainstay in our house as our sons go bonkers for these songs.
This also led me to reread The Odyssey for the first time in twenty five years. It also caused me to begin writing a novelization of Achilles’ life for my son, which kind of twisted away from something I’d want him to read, and so I abandoned it. But I’ve also decided that I really want to write about Odysseus and, eventually, I will. A proper novel that does, I think, something interesting with the character and myth, but we’ll save that for another day.
It was really Rivera Herrans’ song Love in Paradise that got me thinking a few months ago about just writing about this specific moment in time. The seven years Odysseus and Calypso spent together.
Of course, such a project draws a bit from Madeline Miller’s Circe, which is a great novel and explosion of a brief episode from the world’s most famous epic.
My ambitions are not so large as Miller’s. For one thing, I imagine this novel may wrap up in about 100 pages, which keeps it more of a mood piece. This is my favorite length to work at, honestly, because I think it’s the best length to tell an emotion-forward story. As in, a story that lives and dies by the emotional resonance of its scenes, where emotion carries the weight of the narrative.
Of course, I’m often wrong about how long something takes so this may end up being quite a bit longer.
And part of the trick of a novel like this is that I need to establish the complexity of the emotions at play here. There’s love, but also coercion and violence. The power imbalance between an immortal and a man, a queen and a captive. And so I want the love to feel real and earned but I also want to develop that sinister edge to it.
It’s going to be a difficult tightrope to walk, to make you want this love but also be horrified by it. A love eternal but also a twisted and terrible kind of love that relies on coercion and rapacious desire all stemming from a depth of loneliness and need that I find quite haunting.
And so how do you tell a beautiful story about love that’s also essentially a horror story?
Perhaps I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.
But this is why we begin with Calypso. The novel will bounce between Odysseus and Calypso, but I believe that this will be Calypso’s novel and story rather than Odysseus’.
He already has his story, after all, and we’ve all heard it.
While the language isn’t quite yet where it needs to be, probably, eventually she’ll have a very lyrical and musical narration. Or perhaps I’ll keep that purely to her dialogue and will leave the narration consistent across perspectives, demonstrating contrast through dialogue and body language.
This will be something I’ll be working out in real time, chapter to chapter, so you’ll learn a bit as I go, which is also where I’ll be learning this.
But I wanted to establish Calypso’s isolation here. For, in many ways, she’s an abandoned child who created a world for herself alone to keep the hurts at bay, and so this also primes her to throw her heart into another so quickly, so easily, so madly.
Next chapter will be from Odysseus’ perspective, which is the one I’ve thought more about. This first meeting, I mean. Which actually made this first chapter somewhat a chore to write.
Isolating characters is always a bad idea but I knew I had to begin this novel that way. It’s possible that when I come back to edit this chapter in months or years, I’ll cut this first chapter down to a page or two or three and just get the two of them together. It might be the right way, but I chose, now, here, to give a bit more space.
I think that space will serve me well, since negative space will be a big part of the structure here. I’m going to be covering seven years in 100 to 300 pages, depending on how much length I get out of this story, which is wholly dependent on how much the characters reveal themselves as I write this.
Because I have no real sense of the scope here. I knew what this chapter needed to do. I know what the next one needs to do. I know how this ends and where it ends and the emotions I hope you feel sledgehammering your chest to pulp in that moment, but I’ve no idea how to get from these first two chapters to that final word, which may be 20,000 or 50,000 words from now.
But this is how I write, generally. I go in without much forethought and let the words carry me along.
So I hope you enjoy this journey with me.