The Chase

by Bradd Hopkins

Bradd Hopkins' entire life has been spent acquiring the experiences to enable him to write. By trade a fire captain of twenty-five years experience, he has worked as an environmental emergency training consultant for several major oil and petrochemical companies. In 1989 and 1990, he worked as a supervising Safety Engineer on the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound and in Kodiak, Alaska, where he supervised safety operations for bioremediation of spilled crude oil. His military service in the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, Special Weapons gave him the perspective to write Navassa with a realism and technical accuracy that make the fiction read like fact. Bradd Hopkins lives with his wife, Rebecca, and their two cats, Elizabeth and Lilly in the Central Coast of California. He claims he does his best writing in the early morning hours before the house wakes up. Navassa is Bradd Hopkins' first full-length novel. The Fourth Corner of the Ninth Room is his second.

 

A few years ago the Moody Blues released a recorded album, In Search of the Lost Chord. It didn't sell particularly well, even among fans, but its title captured an element-a very important element-of the creative process.

One of the greatest joys we, as writers, can experience is the evocation in a reader of a specific emotive response, and to do this, we wind up searching for the allegorical lost cord. Whether it is the ring and resonance of exactly the right verb on the anvil of creation, or the capture of a precise mood or feeling by metaphor, we exult in not only its capture, but in the hunt, and in the presentation of the trophy.

As writers, it seems that the questions we are most often asked, and that we most often ask ourselves, turn on the experience of writing. What's it like to write? Why do I write? What can I do to make my writing better? That's well and good, but shouldn't we also examine the experience of the reader for whom, metaphorically, we bang our heads repeatedly against a porcelain sink? We should ask ourselves "What is it like to read what I write?"

The common thread that follows through any spellbinding work of fiction is that it engulfs the reader. It co-opts not only his attention, but more importantly, his participation. He is compelled to turn the page because, at some level, it is about him. It is never about the story. It is never about the author.

Make no mistake; the reader wants to be engulfed, he wants to participate. It's why he reads fiction; he wants to live the lie, if only for a while. He wants to smell the wood smoke from the author's campfire clinging to his hair, he wants to see and hear the banners snapping in a fresh breeze laden with the smell of drying grain. He wants to do this so vividly that the texture of the blanket wrapping his bare ankles, and the drone of the television in another room, are lost to him, supplanted by the experience the author creates in concert with him. He wants to be played by the writer like Itzhak Perlman plays his Stradivarius-but remember that it is from the reader, the Stradivarius, that the music must issue.

He wants the same experience from your characters. Not only does he want to love them, or hate them, or fire them, or reward them, but he wants to see then in his mind's eye, and smell them, and hear them. He wants to know them intimately, with the details of their warts and maladies, the infusions of a credible past and the promise of a tomorrow, and make his own judgements. The more of the reader's senses you can involve, the more profoundly will he be co-opted and driven to participate.

Every one of us has, at one time or another, become so engrossed in a task that when we looked up from our activity, hours have gone by without notice. This absorption with task, and the concomitant absence of linear perception (thus, time) indicates the Alpha state of consciousness that researchers describe, and it is in this state that the reader is so joined with the read that he becomes it. This is the region where fiction is best experienced. Reviewers allude to it with adjectives like "hypnotic" or "riveting", and more or less miss the point.

Our quarry is immediacy; the absence of a mediating agent, or the quality, if you will, of directness of perception. Nothing gets in the way; nothing intervenes in the reader's experience. He isn't distracted by tiny errors in fact, or by an unanticipated syncopation of rhythm and flow. He never wonders to himself, "I wonder what he meant by that!" The work must be transparent, seamless.

We find our quarry in symbolism and in syntax; in connotations and in the very rhythm of our words. We find it in the common experience we remind the reader of. It is like gold, this elusive element; it lies hidden in the rubble of the river-bottom of our limbic brains, and buried in the till of our intellects. Our task is to bring it forth to the reader, refined, and amaze him with his own profundity. We must decide where to lead the reader, and invite him there unobtrusively, and with such conviction that he can only follow.

Our quarry is ephemeral and elusive; it's capture is an art form. It is in the Chase-the search for the perfect cord-where we find our reader.

And, more importantly, where our reader finds us.