On the Writing of Wayfarer · 11:12pm Jan 27th, 2014
The original idea for Wayfarer was extremely simplistic, and it came to me around the summer of last year. There was no artist at first. In fact, in the original conception of the piece, the wayfarer settled down. It would have been told in a normal fashion, probably around 15,000 words maximum. Luckily, I didn’t act immediately on that little idea.
It kept growing in my mind though, and somewhere along the way I wondered about if and how the wayfarer would fall in love. Of course, my first reaction was to think, “Of course! That’s why he would settle down.” It was like my own little Hallmark movie, complete with cheesy lines and caricatures.
After a while, though, I began to wonder, “but what if he didn’t?” That was a tricky question. One of two things would happen. Either he would leave his love behind, or he would uproot her. It was then that I realized that maybe this little heartwarmer wouldn’t be such a happy-go-lucky authorial twittering as I had originally imagined.
Come autumn of last year, I tried to brainstorm original ways to tell a story. Not original as in “This is a pretty good premise” or “I’ve only seen this once before.” I wanted something nobody had ever even heard of. I’ve seen stories made out of journals and diaries, but what about sketchbooks? It was an entirely new concept to me, and it certainly sounded interesting. I wondered what sort of story that method would fit, and the story of the wayfarer came to mind.
National Novel Writing Month was a perfect dervish for me to write Wayfarer in. After all, if a picture makes a thousand words, then a novel would be fifty pictures. I structured accordingly, and though Fimfic disagrees, each canvas was exactly 1000 words. I had a structure; now I needed the rest of the story.
I played with it for a while. Naturally, the mare would be an artist to fit the medium of the piece, and that’s when things started to fall into place. I knew the wayfarer would uproot the artist. Where from there? If the two are constantly moving, the artist would have very little time for her passion, and that’s where the first message of the piece came in.
The wayfarer’s love is destructive. Yes, the artist dies, and the wayfarer is technically the reason why, but it’s not that sort of destruction I meant to portray. The wayfarer destroyed the artist’s passion for her art. As the piece goes on, more and more paintings are left unfinished. In the end, he’s left with those paintings, proof of what he did to her. The original question I wanted to ask my readers was whether or not love was worth all of that. Our first impulse is to say, “of course it is,” so I made sure to follow it up with “why?”
It’s no easy answer to reach, because neither character is made into a steadfast enemy. The wayfarer seems entirely naive of what he’s done until the end, and the artist certainly seems to enjoy the wayfaring herself. The answer, of course, lies in the paintings. The wayfarer did not see her paintings as a pretty scene, or even the representation of a meaning. He saw them as a means to discover her, and shared each experience with her. That’s something no artistic solitude can promise.
So, that was the message I began the piece with. I had it stuck in my mind that it would be enough to drive a story. However, as the piece went on, it became quite a bit more, almost subconsciously. Here and there, I would add a stray line or two that leapt into mind without introduction or ceremony. It was actually quite baffling until I pieced it together. The piece was beginning to mean something else entirely. Suddenly, I realized that while everything I wrote certainly pointed at my first message, the origin seemed to be centered on something else, and it had to do with my original vision for the ending scene.
When I wrote up the outline for Wayfarer, I realized that it was written primarily from the wayfarer’s perspective, which made little sense at first. After all, if it was written in pictures, would it not be the artist’s point of view? I came to understand that, in the end, the wayfarer would have to come full circle. The end of the story had to be its beginning; the wayfarer had to become the artist. To end the book directly before it began would mean to end on the dedication. Those last words were decided before the first words of the novel were written, and I had inadvertently seeded a meaning that I could not fully grasp. For those who don’t want to unroll the last canvas, here is the dedication.
“This time, your way, love, that neither of us should stand alone . . .”
That line had been pulsing through my head throughout the entire piece. I’m not entirely surprised it hijacked the novel’s central meaning. Once I saw it, though, Wayfarer became so much more to me. So, I present to you the author’s analysis of the last line, step by step.
“This time.” That’s the first catch: what’s done is done. It infers the end of a journey, and the beginning of another one. It says that the wayfarer cannot fix what has already happened, but he’s willing to give it another shot. He wants another chance from the artist.
“Your way, love.” And now we get the change he’s going to make. Ostentatiously, he’s saying that just as the artist was made a wayfarer, so he will become an artist through his rendition of their journey. However, it’s also an address to love itself, which leads us to that last bit.
“That neither of us should stand alone.” In the last chapters of the novel, the wayfarer is looking for what he had missed. This line is that last little shove towards what it was. He had neglected one of love’s axioms: dependence. The wayfarer and the artist forge every bond imaginable besides a sense of mutual dependence. While it’s certain the artist depends upon the wayfarer, the wayfarer never really leans on her. He never allows himself to need her absolutely. So, in the end, he’s left alone. He realizes that he had always been ready to rejoin his solitude, that in reality it had not been a wholly mutual interest that led the two to cross horizons on a daily basis. He had mistaken his independence as part of a wayfarer’s natural freedom. The novel ends with the word, “alone.”
But did I not say that this was both an end and a beginning? The wayfarer begins alone. Along the way, he has found love, and through the canvasses, he finds it again through her eyes. Whereas Wayfarer is a story of an artist learning to be a wayfarer, the final lines are that of the wayfarer becoming the artist, and finding in his writing the dependence he had missed for so long.
There are few things so powerful that they can command words to a page, take hold of somebody so thoroughly that words keep flowing, regardless of whether the writer wholly comprehends them. I and the wayfarer were so enthralled by that message, that apology, that every phrase began to take an entirely new meaning under its light. We could only truly see what we had written by the time we reached the end.
- Plebeian
I think the best stories are written when you get an idea that fascinates you. An idea that makes you instinctively want to reach out and discover how it works. One simple premise that makes you begin writing just so that you might glean some deeper understanding of why you find it so compelling. Such is the author's journey, and it's what keeps me writing my own stories. I also think it is the source of an author's dedication to their piece. It is the force that makes the author truly believe that what they are writing is worthwhile.
It is rare that I come across a story that speaks to me as well as Wayfarer did, but I think it's the fact that, at its core, there's that impeccable fascination which shines through. And it has got to be the single most appealing thing to me as I read, or as I write.
I have to thank you, Plebeian, for sharing that love of writing in the form of Wayfarer. It wasn't a half-assed story, but something truly beautiful in my eyes. Something that help me understand even a bit more about why I write, and what I love about certain stories. I'm also glad I got to read this blog post to better understand how the writing had come to be in the first place. Truly, it's my favourite story on this site (tied with TSC, which is also driven by that inspirational idea at its core).
Thank you for writing Wayfarer. Sincerely,
~SilentBelle
P.S. This is inspiring me to make a blog post about what I enjoy about writing stories... More specifically about inspiration. Time to get writing!