Giant Story, Medium-Sized – Wisdom Tree #3 Vancouver

A few years ago, I got into the habit of telling stories about giants to the four-year-old son of friends. I told him one and he liked it and asked for more. So I got online and found a few. Then my own son arrived and I got to use them a second time. Some of them were ancient stories – fables from all over the place, cautionary tales, adventures – but the second time around I made a few up myself.

Then I thought, what about writing a giant story? A story about a really, really tall human and – here’s the brave bit – not for kids. What about someone who’s father brings a giant home when the central character is young enough and small enough for the visitor to seem enormous, like a storybook figure?

Why would someone’s father bring a giant home? (So much of writing is about finding the questions and facing them, and occasionally they’re questions you could never expect. Questions weird enough that you sit there thinking, ‘Really? That’s the question I have to answer now? Why would someone’s father bring a giant home?’)

Because it’s the 70s, he’s made a packet in the Poseidon nickel boom and he’s been looking out for his next fabulous money spinner. And, in a bar in Brisbane, he meets a Texan who sells him the Australasian rights to American football. Part of the package is a crazily tall young quarterback with a wrecked shoulder, and the quarterback and the father travel the country trying to sign up franchisees for the individual teams.

I liked that idea, a wide-eyed young narrator living this weird life because of his father’s lucky break, being the only kid at school with a giant – an actual giant – at home.

The story of that time came pretty easily – the giant who lives under the house and who benchpresses old concrete laundry sinks but who tells the narrator giant stories and who wants to be a writer. The giant who gets bronzed for a photoshoot, who is good for one huge pass but who then needs his shoulder put back in. Plenty of ideas came along for that part of the story, but I wanted to do more.

So I thought, bring it to now. Close to now. Years pass without contact, but then my narrator and the giant are back in contact again. The giant’s a professor at a US liberal arts college and known for his microfiction. The narrator’s a writer too. Maybe those childhood stories were an influence. But something’s not right. It’s not a straightforward joyous reunion. Something else is going on. For some reason, the narrator needs the giant.

So I got to thinking: when, where, what is the reason? It’s happening in America, so I thought of my own experience as a writer in America. My big break there as a novelist, and the bizarre timing that made it go wrong. And I thought, I’m dropping him in that. I’m giving him my awesome meeting in the Flat-Iron Building in New York and the deal that came from it, and I’m giving him what happened next when it went wrong.

And I’m dropping that – moments from some of the more unsettling weeks of my life – into part two of my giant story.

How has the narrator changed? How has the giant changed? How has the world changed? It was a great chance to explore all of that. And to look at stories, and how they work their way into us, and what they can mean when the certainties of the world turn out to be way less certain than we’d hoped.

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