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A girl who feels nothing; a boy who sees shadows and hears what others cannot; a baby without license to be born; a deaf teenager and scientific savant; offensive people; a general who passed law to hunt, imprison and kill them all. Where do they hide when the sub-nations of the United States draw their own lines in the ground that dictate which people get to be oppressed and who gets to be offended?
The Salvo Cartel built the tunnels to help them escape, to aid those with mental ailments, those who question, those who refuse to conform, gays, Christians, artists, people with scruples, and other deviants. Do they flee to Salvo's underground cities, with eyes set on a grander safeplace? Where do they go when Lady Liberty douses her light? Perhaps the same place she's been pointing her torch towards ever since she stepped atop her pedestal and realized at once that one day she too would be told to shut up.
Talking With David Fairchild
What was the inspiration for writing The Exodus?
I have many inspirations for The Exodus. One inspiration is the flight that pilgrims took from England when they became the target of persecution from their own society. They had somewhere to go. What if that happened today in the U.S.? That a society should oppress its own people to the point that they wanted to escape just as the pilgrims did? What if they were forced to escape? What if they missed their chance to escape because there was nowhere to go?
Another point of inspiration is that I teach on a university campus. My courses discuss the concepts of diversity in perspectives that contribute to building societies throughout the world. Over the years I have listened to many attitudes in the hallways where students who are supposed to be learning how to listen to other perspectives are silencing others through bullying them, physically harming them and being called heroes by people who encourage them to destroy and silence others. I've listened to people who brag about graduating with degrees who have no understanding of how to hear or interact with other perspectives within their own disciplines of study. I've watched professors indoctrinate and bully their own perspectives into students rather than educate their students about how to develop individual perspectives. Time and time again, I have watched my own society insist on having a villain to blame for problems in society, even if the villain isn't really a villain. I've watched people take pride in these attacks.
I've watched adults call for the destruction of children through social media simply because they wore a red hat. I listened to those adults take pride in calling for the destruction on a person that society didn't even deem to be an adult yet and I've watched those adults shrink from apologizing when they learned the child had been lied about.
I often wonder about what the long-term consequences upon a society can be when people justify why they should be allowed to take offense and then fail to apologize when they learn they have created the offense.
Everyone offends someone, everyone takes offense from someone, and it's becoming the norm to avoid the responsibility of forgiving others. This book is an exploration of what could happen in a society when offense becomes the ruler of the land and there's no more refuge.
I guess you could say that I've been inspired by an overwhelming amount of real-life events.
What was the writing process like for The Exodus?
Look. Let's face it. Talking about the writing process is boring. Seriously. What can we say that no author's said before? "I put words on paper and a story came out and so did this character. Yay me!"
I'll just tell you something I learned while writing The Exodus. It's important for authors to remember that characters they create have to be allowed to live. Too many authors try to establish rules that say things like, "My characters will never swear, or have sex, or do anything contrary to the morals that I, as an author, hold or else I might make people who know me think I'm a bad person." Here's the problem with that, this approach causes the author to create inhibited characters that are merely extensions of the author's own morals and values, which means that all the characters come off sounding and behaving the same. That's not to say that these kinds of characters can't work in the environments or genres where they may thrive. However, forcing them to fit an environment rather than letting them interact with that same environment by restricting them to hold the author's values can make the characters and their settings seem forced or false.
When we put up boundaries that don't allow our characters to hold other perspectives than what we hold ourselves; nor allow them to hold morals contrary to our own; nor speak and behave in ways that would be contrary to our own approaches as an author, then we perform what I've come to call "literary abortion." Literary abortion is when a writer kills a character from genuinely developing because the author's morals and values say "you can't behave nor speak that way." Remember, these are characters, not the author's child.
One of the most difficult lessons I've learned in writing came through writing The Exodus. I had established rules similar to what many authors have set, mitigating a character to behave according to my set of values because of how I thought people who knew me would perceive me as a person based upon how my characters lived.
I have two versions of this book, one where I edited the story to have characters that had my values imposed upon them and one where I listened to my characters when they cursed me out for making them behave or speak in ways that were contrary to how they truly would. I'm glad that I conceded that my characters were correct and that I published the version of The Exodus where my characters are probably more well-grounded than even I am as a real person.
What music did you listen to while writing The Exodus?
None. Music distracts me when I write. Even when it's just instrumental, I want to sing along with it and I don't end up writing.
What was your favorite scene in The Exodus to write?
Oh my gosh! I wish I could tell you what my favorite scene in The Exodus is, but I can't. Why? Because it's a huge twist and I can't say anything about it. My second favorite scene? Also a twist. Third? Fourth? Fifth favorite scenes? All twists.
It's frustrating for me because this book is so intertwined with twists, which I have to say I'm proud I even thought of, and I can't tell you ANY of them. But holy moly! The twists are so cool and that's part of what makes the scenes with them my favorite parts of The Exodus.
What was the hardest scene in The Exodus to write?
The most difficult scene for me to write in The Exodus was actually the prologue of the book. It's only two pages long, but it foreshadows a driving character and gives some insight as to why that character became that character. It's told entirely through the eyes of an innocent dog that loves its owner and writing it was absolutely gut-wrenching for me. Reading it is still difficult on me, but it's such an important history to a prominent character that, even today, I still can't look away when I'm reading it.
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