Control: Deconstructing My First Novel

I, Dalton Lewis, have written half a dozen books. I have written a realistic look at schizophrenia, a couple of books about high school teenagers in trouble, a sci-fi epic, a book of poetry, and a book about magic at a summer camp. I gathered everything I knew about life when writing them. I tried to show someone a reality that I knew existed that would amaze and impress them. I’m proud of working hard on these projects.

Why did I fail? Where did I go wrong? It’s hard to tell. I first wrote a book about magic at a summer camp — with a murder mystery as the central plot device. I don’t know why it failed — I was a smart college student getting good grades. I read a lot of books. I knew a lot about writing. Why didn’t it work? Why didn’t people pay attention and love it?

I have several theories, but the main idea is that I didn’t know how my audience would respond to my writing. I didn’t know to have specific scenes that would build a storyline. I didn’t understand how audiences would react to my scenes and characters. In the first novel, Illusionary Paintings, I tried to show the audience something that happened to me: a summer camp that changed my life. I went to camp when I was sixteen and learned something about myself and changed for the better.

I went to summer camp in the summer of 1994, I think. I went to a camp for smart kids who tested well at a certain test in the sophomore year of high school. I was an unhappy kid with no friends and I was considering how bad my life could get. I had moved from a suburb of Detroit to a suburb of Chicago a couple of years ago and didn’t make any friends immediately. After my sophomore year I had no friends and just knew that I wanted to be a writer.

I also liked magic and illusions. I liked the idea of magic being real. I really liked the supernatural and had grown up on pulp fantasy novels and enjoyed them thoroughly. They found me a roommate who also liked the same sorts of things as me and found me a dorm room to stay at. The camp was held at the University of Iowa. I went there for camp and enjoyed it so much I went there when it came time for college.

I learned from a famous professor of religion. He tried to teach us literature and irony — the simple idea that a writer could seem to write one thing and actually say something else. I thought that this style of misdirection could be a powerful tool when communicating something. I mean — irony meant that someone could elevate beyond the simple and understand the complex in new ways. I knew that would be an interesting way of storytelling.

I also met my first crush there, a young lady who was bisexual and had a nose ring. She was beautiful and hated Catholics and had Korean siblings who were adopted. She talked about sex and reality with a bunch of us one evening at the central common area of one of the dorms. I actually found people I could talk to.

I wanted to write about a time when I was depressed and met smart people who could talk to me about things that I cared about. We also read The Catcher in the Rye and The Old Man and the Sea for the class, and those are two of my favorite novels. We lived an interesting experience, and I wanted to write about that. The actual novel has a death and some bad guys and the like, but I also wanted to show a young man dealing with unhappiness. I’m proud of the result even if it was never a bestseller.

Thanks, and take care, friends.