SPOILER ALERT: If you have not read The Snow Fence, please do not continue to read this post. You will probably be lost. . .
I feel the need to clarify the use of barbed wire as an artistic motif for the Renewed Edition of The Snow Fence. A few people have asked, so here is my answer.
I live on five acres in Colorado where there are plenty of fences and fence builders and all the things. I know that snow fences do not typically include barbed wire. I also know that using cement to set a post is not always the best thing to do. It can cause the post to rot. Also, it isn’t advisable to build a fence in three-foot sections over a dozen years. It won’t be as tight or as strong as stretching the wire all at once.
I know. I know, I know. It’s fiction. It’s okay. But thank you for not giving the poor sheltered writer a break. Because I didn’t give you one either.
Let’s explore that gap, shall we? Writers think in symbols, and this writer also loves to give a reader goosebumps. You’ve been warned.
Fiction Fact #1: Seth had no idea what he was doing. That was the point.
Seth did not know all that stuff about fences. The only thing he knew about snow fences was what he learned from one of his mom's paintings. He liked the way the fence looked in the painting, so he built it. Seth’s mother created a painting with handmade fence posts set in cement, joined by barbed wire, and enclosed with wood slats. Seth needed it to take him twelve years to complete. That’s what he knew, so he made it work and kept at it, however misguided it began.
Was it a mistake? Should he have even built the fence?
Fiction Fact #2: The fence is a metaphor.
I have heard it said that you know a book Christian fiction when you take Jesus out of it, and the whole story falls apart.
The “Fence” ties everything together. Read the book again. You’ll see it. There is a reason that is the title. I tried to write this book without that fence and couldn’t do it. And yes, there had to be barbed wire. It bites sometimes.
Fiction Fact #3: Again, Seth got the idea to build the fence from a painting.
From his mom’s painting.
Guys. . .
She painted his fence before it existed.
Not “a” fence. Seth’s fence.
So whose idea was the barbed wire?
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