When I began writing Unraveling, it was a much different story compared to what it has now developed into. My early chapters and the notes for the project focused primarily on Jesse and Aaron. My vision was limited to exploring the dynamics in their lives that they were struggling with \u2013 respectively lost status stemming from familial\/social causes and hedonistic nihilism that began following undesired repercussions of previous decisions. Put another way, the two main dynamics I wanted to explore were \u201cwhat do you do when something occurs that\u2019s completely outside of your control that you don\u2019t want\u201d and \u201cwhat do you do when something happens that you don\u2019t want but that was a result of your actions.\u201d Because of this I conceived most of the other characters that I\u2019d outlined merely as foils to their foibles on the path to achieve their goals \u2013 revenge over the person that had caused the loss of status and personal enlightenment.<\/p>\n
A primary intention behind my writing, as I first conceived it, was to better understand my own personal development. Aaron and Jesse\u2019s narratives contain a number of auto-biographical elements. As I continued to write out their stories and interactions, however, I came to realize that continuing with these limits not only made me miss out on developing some great characters but also caused me to exclude some of my own areas of expertise and interest. Since you\u2019re supposed to write what you know about, I realized it was worth some time re-conceptualizing the project. Since doing that I\u2019ve radically changed what I\u2019d include in Unraveling.<\/p>\n
As I decided to expand and explore the secondary character\u2019s back stories I came to see how this not only made them richer persons in the book, but also added new depths to their interactions with Jesse and Aaron (and now others). Happy, for instance, was previously just a means for helping Jesse and Aaron get things that they needed. He became a business\/social model for Jesse as well as a sage figure for Aaron. This transition from drug kingpen to force of benevolence in the community, think Stringer Bell\/Damon Pope meets Huey Newton, required me to do more research as unlike Aaron and Jesse\u2019s stories, which I knew well given they\u2019re based on certain times in my life, I wasn\u2019t as familiar with that type of psychological development. Put less delicately, I\u2019m not black so I felt uncomfortable presuming that just through my imagination I\u2019d be able to come up with a robust character for him and those around him.<\/p>\n
To better write his character as well as those in his orbit, I decided to do research. Here\u2019s what I came up with.<\/p>\n
Autobiography of Assata Shakur<\/a> Thankfully, I\u2019ve now completed the above research I wanted to have done before really getting into Happy\u2019s chapter and am now a few books away from completing the research I\u2019ve already started for Ela. While this was a long delay on the project, I look forward to being able to be able to write Happy\u2019s chapter with greater verisimilitude to similar historical characters!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I began writing Unraveling, it was a much different story compared to what it has now developed into. My early chapters and the notes for the project focused primarily on Jesse and Aaron. My vision was limited to exploring the dynamics in their lives that they were struggling with \u2013 respectively lost status stemming … Continue reading “On Research for Unraveling”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[87,86,85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creative","category-creative-process","category-unraveling"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8e7kf-sM","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1784"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3558,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions\/3558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAngela Davis: An Autobiography<\/a>
\nBlack Against Empire<\/a>
\nBMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family<\/a>
\nRevolutionary Suicide<\/a>
\nSoledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson<\/a>
\nThe Spook Who Sat by the Door<\/a>
\nWho Becomes a Terrorist and Why<\/p>\n