Silas

 

OPENING SCENE: Introduces protagonist, setting, and conflict. (After the opening

scene, I jump a few pages to a scene with Jonas, the protagonist, and Levi, his father, because

there’s no dialogue in the opening scene.)

 

HEARTWOOD

 

The line of sheep bodies curved up the hill toward the copse of white pines (Pinus

strobus) behind the barbwire. Slick white wool matted with blood. Each neck cut clean. There

was blood on the boy’s hands but he was used to blood on his hands. Still, urgency fountained

inside him, flushing limb to limb, as he left one dead ewe (Ovis aries) and moved to the next.

Fear heated his cheeks and goosebumped his arms. He couldn’t imagine who could have killed

the sheep like this. He couldn’t think of much beyond the names of things. They were his sheep.

They were his father’s sheep. They were the descendants of the sheep raised by his father’s

father, and he had known them his whole life. He touched a ewe’s wooly nape. The wind

touched the wool. The sun touched the earth’s bright hearth.

One ewe lived, each breath loud and rasping. Odd shapes blossomed into the cool air

above its mouth, and the boy would never understand how he both loved the sheep and hated

them, which was not unlike the way he loved and hated his father, which was not unlike the way

that he loved and hated himself. The ewe’s mouth hung open, pink tongue stuck out past black

lips. He touched a patch of clean wool, and a great human lonesomeness winnowed through him,

and what he was welled up in his throat, part wheat and part chaff. He was Jonas Troutman, from

the long line of Troutmans in Snyder County, Pennsylvania, and the ewe’s last rasp settled on the

orchard grass (Dactylis glomerate) and the white clover (Trifolium repens). Jonas didn’t know

that everything he was, and everything he had been, could sick up and disgorge and evaporate

into the air with the ewe’s breath and the dew and the pollen, could wander about lost and

unclaimed by name or knowledge, splintering into smaller and smaller particles that rise and drift

and settle like frost somewhere near or blow off to God knows where.

He stood, breathing heavily. Grasses whispered against each other but nothing listened.

Every movement was an accident. Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) sung because death asked

nothing of them. The sun settled above the hills to the west. He looked out at the farmland and

homesteads of Snyder County as darkness massed in the column of smoke rising from the Hoke

widow’s chimney, and near the stems of the grasses, and in the roiling clouds.

 

 

By the stump, Levi Troutman turned his head toward his boy. He took in the dirt on the

jeans and the blood on his hands. Because he understood there was always something coming,

Levi drew in a breath, held it in his lungs, and then let it pass slowly through his nose “Go on,”

he said. “Spit it out.”

Jonas leaned his hands on his knees. “Somebody killed them,” he said.

“Killed who?”

“The sheep.”

Levi’s fingers cramped into a C shape around the axe handle. His forearms clenched.

“What’d you mean they killed the sheep?”

“In the far field.”

“How many?”

“All of them.”

Levi set the axe in the stump. His chest was thick with muscle. On one of his shoulders

was a red devil tattoo. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, and toed the split wood

toward the rough pile. His life was a knot he would never untangle.

“Why’d somebody do this?” Jonas breathed in shallow gasps.

“I guess everybody’s got disagreements.”

From the barn, Levi fetched two pairs of leather gloves and a Beretta pistol. He gave a

pair of gloves to Jonas, put the Beretta in his waistband, and got into the cab of his Ford F-150.

A shotgun sat on the dash. The road over the ridge was rough dirt. The hill rose up out of Flint

Valley and sunk down into Neitz Valley. At the bottom of Neitz Valley lay the farmhouse that

belonged to the Hoke widow.

Levi stopped beside the first sheep, and got out of the truck. The engine idled and

knocked and cycled. The air smelled of burnt oil and blood and alfalfa. He and his son each held

two legs as they slung the first body into the truck bed, and then Levi got back in the truck and

drove forward, and put the truck in park again, and got out. The rusted truck bed slicked with

blood.

The sheep were heavy, but Levi and Jonas worked as quickly as they could. Orchard

grass bent against their pant legs, and black vultures circled above. Jonas rode in the truck bed

until the sheep piled too high. They had to get the bodies back to the barn and hung up.

Butchering would take all night.

Silas Zobal

 

FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement.

 

When a drug deal goes bad at the Troutmans’ sheep farm in central Pennsylvania,

seventeen-year-old Jonas Troutman grabs a duffel bag full of cash and runs across the country,

trying to escape his abusive father, the narrow limits of his life, and the forces that tell him who

he must be.

 

SECOND ASSIGNMENT: in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in

your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world

about them.

 

My antagonist, Neil Cargill, is hired to retrieve the money that Jonas Troutman has

taken. Here’s a sketch that introduces him and the way he sees the world:

At a bench beside a picnic pavilion, Neil Cargill fished his phone from his pocket. He

opened the Tor anonymity browser, but the morning sun washed out the screen. To his right, a

teenaged brother and sister played toilet tag with a small group of kids. To his left, a couple

wandered in circles beneath a thin evergreen. Near a parked Winnebago, a fat bearded man

bounced on his toes and stretched his arms. People everywhere were ungainly and weaklimbed.

Cargill felt the need, pent up inside him, to hurt things. He’d never met anyone who

understood themselves, their desires or fears or needs. Each fragile life was no more fixed than

a line of spit. But he wanted to extinguish what they were, these people, and give them the

chance to be something else.

The woman pressed against the man beneath the evergreen. The fat bearded man

disappeared inside the Winnebago. When the sister caught the brother, he grabbed her arm

with both hands and twisted. Long ago Cargill had cut a deal with himself to hurt no one

outside the service of his work.

 

THIRD ASSIGNMENT: create a breakout title

 

Heartwood.

Because I’m lousy with titles, I’ve only included one. (But I like this one.)

 

FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: Develop two smart comparables for your novel.

 

Emily St. John Mandel: The Glass Hotel, The Singer’s Gun, and The Lola Quartet.Cormac

McCarthy: No Country for Old Men. (Too big, I know.)

 

FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound

 

When a drug deal goes bad on his father’s farm in central Pennsylvania, an abused

teenager grabs a bag of cash and runs across the country to escape the limitations of his life.

 

SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will

have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical

scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction.

 

My protagonist, Jonas Troutman, is an abused seventeen-year-old who lives on a sheep

farm in central Pennsylvania. His abusive father grows marijuana illegally. Jonas has long

yearned to escape his life. When one of his father’s drug deals goes bad, Jonas seizes the

moment to flee. He grabs a bag of money and runs from his father, from the limitations of his

life, and from the man who comes hunting him. Jonas is angry about his father’s abuse, and

about the life he’s known so far. Here’s a brief sketch of a moment in which Jonas sweeps out

the marijuana grow room in the barn:

Jonas swept the cement floor, leaving dust and leaves in small piles. Above, in the

farmyard, he heard engines turn and rumble. Barn timbers shivered. Gravel cracked as the

trucks drove out of the lane. Jonas gathered the piles in the dustpan, dumped them in the

garbage can. He set the broom and dustpan on the empty table. He leaned against a stone wall.

Had his dad always been such a fucking asshole? It was hard to tell. His gums ached, and his

cheeks felt bruised. He touched the split in his scalp with his fingers. When had he first

understood that his dad was a shitty father? God, it was hard to know your own mind, much

less to figure out how your mind, and what it thought it knew, had been warped by its

upbringing. Like, was he thinking this now because he’d grown old enough to ask such things?

Or was he thinking this because he was pushing back like some teen on TV? Or was he thinking

this now because he’d learned to be an asshole like his dad?

Jonas lifted the shotgun on the table, then set the gun back down. He went up the cellar

stairs, and sat on a milking stool in the barn. There had always been guns around. At six years

old, he’d learned to shoot wooden targets and rabbit and whitetail and turkey, but a sawed-off

wasn’t for hunting. Why had his dad sawed off the barrel? What was he expecting?

Light shimmered through the barndoor and hit the floor hard. Motes of wool and hair

and skin floated toward one another like they were going to melt together. The heat on Jonas’s

skin was a kindness. He closed his eyes.

There was the sound of the wind rustling straw in the loft, and the urgency of the field

crickets. There were his dad’s intermittent bootsteps. There was the uncomfortable beat of his

own heart. Seven doves cooed on the roof. Barn timbers creaked deep in its joinery. The

bootsteps moved into the barn, circling. A hand knocked Jonas’s shoulder hard enough that he

slipped off the milk stool.

“You lazy piece of shit,” his dad said. “Nobody ever gave me nothing. Get your ass up.”

“What for?”

“Cause I’m wanna knock you down again.”

 

Until this point, I’ve answered these questions as if my novel has a single protagonist.

But it doesn’t. In fact, the novel quickly develops three main protagonists (Jonas and two other

teens that he’ll meet in Chicago).

 

Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social

environment. Will this involve family? Friends? Associates? What is the nature of it?

 

Given the nature of this novel, there are a number of secondary conflicts. But one

involved the potential romantic relationship between two of the protagonists, Jonas Troutman

and Esme Washington.

 

FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail.

 

There are two main settings in Heartwood. Snyder County, Pennsylvania and Chicago,

Illinois. I like that there’s a kind of tension between the rural and the urban as the book moves

back and forth between these two environments.

In Snyder County, we visit farmhouses and farmland. We travel the small roads that lead

to smaller roads like veins to capillaries. Jonas Troutman lives on a sheep farm, and Jonas

Troutman studies flora and fauna, including their scientific names, so we experience the natural

environment intimately through his perceptions. We see the Mennonites that live around him,

the farm animals, the sheep, the gnats and the horseflies.

In Chicago, we have the lights, and architecture, and the flood of people that brings a

welcome anonymity. Two of the novel’s protagonists attend St. Ignatius College Prep, a private

Catholic high school. One of these protagonists, Mason Roswell, lives in Water Tower Place on

the Magnificent Mile. The other, Esme Washington, lives to the south in the Grand Crossing

neighborhood, so I get to look at two very different sides of the city.