Diary

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Pennies from Seventh

Posted on by Laurel Weeks

This isn’t about writing at all, except that I’m writing about it.  It’s about luck and a lot of other things.  Sometime in August I decided that, although I never play the lottery, I wanted to see if using nothing but “lucky pennies” might make a “lucky dollar” and get me a winning ticket. During the summers  I run most days along a pretty heavily touristed stretch and when school starts I have a brisk twenty-five minute walk each way through downtown San Diego, so I have plenty of opportunity to scan sidewalks. I started picking up pennies and the occasional nickel or dime, and I am now up to fifty cents.

The project seems so silly that I am surprised at how much pleasure it has given me. Today I found two pennies on my walk to school, and I was so excited I sent a text message to my partner. But as I walked on, I started thinking about something that happened during the summer, when I was running along a grass easement in front of the Convention Center.  It was already a good day—about ten minutes into my hour-long run I found a dime in a crosswalk used by conventioneers to get to the Gaslamp District. That will put a spring in the step!

Not more than a minute or two later, I saw a glint in the grass and saw two quarters. Two quarters!  The dime had brought me up to twenty-seven cents at that point, and suddenly I was more than seventy-five percent of the way to my dollar.  I was astonished!

As I ran along, I started thinking about the fifty cents.  It was on a stretch where a few homeless men sack out during the day, and it must have fallen out of someone’s pocket. The rest of the run I pondered a lot of things—starting with how much more important it was to him that he had lost the money than it was to me that I had found it. I started thinking about my desire to get lucky and I realized how it was hard to get much luckier than I already was.

I decided not to keep the fifty cents but to give it to another homeless person.  A tattered, sunburned woman always sitting on a retaining wall near the end of my run and calls out “have a good run!” every time I pass by.  If she was there that day, I would give the money to her.

The rest of the run I was happier about the fifty cents than I was when i first spotted it.  I felt more of a connection to the nameless, faceless soul who patted his pockets and knew the buying power of that money had drained from his life. I thought about how it would make some small difference in the day of the woman I was running toward. But mostly I thought about the Jewish concept of a mitzvah, which is sometimes translated as “good deed” but  is so much more than that.

A mitzvah is when we do something in keeping with God’s intentions for our behavior. Take God out of the equation, and the meaning doesn’t really change that much. The world isn’t fair, and that’s not right. It’s up to each of us to do what we can to bring a little more balance, a little more equity, into it.  Call it dharma, call it words carved by divine lightning onto stone tablets on a mountain in the desert–it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t keep the money because it made the world even more imbalanced than it already was.

As I transported the coins from their old owner to their new one, I didn’t really think of it as a good deed, but about my membership in something bigger.  “Have a nice run!”the woman called out as I strode to a stop.

“I found two quarters back there,” I said with a grin.  “I think they belong to you.”

She jumped up and hugged me, despite the sweat.  “Thank you so much!” she said, almost dancing.

Her name was Kelly. I never thought to ask before.

What happened to the dime? Reader, it’s in the pile on my desk.  Finders keepers!

Maybe there’s a blessing now on my quest for a dollar’s worth of lucky change, but I don’t care.  It’s a game I’ve already won.

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At War with My Story

Posted on by Laurel Weeks

Bad habits are hard to break, and sometimes the most we can hope for is to notice a little more quickly when we are falling into them.  I had just such an experience this week with my revision of novel number five, THE INTUITIVE.

One of the main story elements involves the women’s suffrage movement.  In the course of my research I came to admire deeply the “second generation” of suffragists, women like Alice Paul in the United States and the Pankhursts in England. I really had no ideas how much they endured to get me and all other women the vote.  I wanted to do their story justice in my novel, but i was troubled by one thing.

Suffragist leaders were decidedly middle and upper class and almost exclusively white. This makes sense, for other women probably had more pressing things on their minds.  What is not so easy to feel good about is the insistence, even by some of the suffragists I admire most, not to enlist people of color in the movement.  Many people were uncomfortable with black men voting, and suffragists thought the cause would be hurt if it was pointed out that black women would get the vote too.

I’m sure Alice Paul and the others didn’t consider themselves racist, but simply practical. I’m not going to judge, but still it was something I thought my readers should know and have a chance to ponder for themselves.  So I did what every novelist does–I work my interests into the novel through the thoughts and opinions of my characters.

Zorah Baldwin, my protagonist, has been introduced to the suffragist movement through meeting Alice Paul.  After a parade in which she has been assaulted by paint-throwing protestors, she stands with Alice on the stage of Carnegie Hall, a symbol in her ruined dress, of the strength and determination of the movement.  She should be amazed to be thrust in the spotlight in that way, pleased to be standing next to Alice, and feeling a growing commitment to the movement and greater sense of purpose in her life.

And what do I have her do?  Thoughts pass through her mind about the fact that working women aren’t there because the parade was on a Saturday, which was a working day.  She remembers a comment Alice made about not wanting black suffragist groups to march.  In the middle of a fabulous scene, I just couldn’t resist stepping in to ruin it.

Okay, that might have worked out in the end, except that Zorah, over the next few chapters, makes a deeper and more passionate commitment to suffrage.  My need to throw the negative in at the first opportunity disturbed the arc of the story, because both the reader and Zorah have already found the movement a bit off-putting. Why would she throw herself into it, and why should the reader cheer her on?

The whole story rang a little false now. Zorah could no longer be perceived the way I wanted her to be, if these serious issues were just passing thoughts she subsequently ignored. Nor did I want to write pages showing her struggle with this, just to work in some rationalizations for the reader.

I hadn’t re-read these pages in some time, and when I got to them, the answer was simple. “Get out of the way of the story!” I told myself.  Let her just be thrilled and astonished standing on that stage in her paint-soaked dress.  Let her have no doubts at all about the movement. The rest can wait–after all, this scene happens only halfway through the book.  I just took out the material.  I’ll find a way to work it in later, or maybe not.

I’ve been in wars with my books before.  I wanted to write about the crazy excesses of Venetian convents so badly that I came up with a preposterous plot diversion in THE FOUR SEASONS to have Maddalena go live in one.  Fortunately I caught myself before I’d spent much time and effort, and I’ve learned to accept that I am going to know a whole lot of incredibly interesting things that don’t end up being in my books.

Susan Vreeland has very aptly called such authorial indulgences “research dumps,” and the classism of the suffrage movement was just one of these.  I catch myself more easily now throwing something in just because I know it, and I see this in other writers’ work as well.  I guess I should think of research that isn’t dumped as one of the perks of writing a historical novel.  It’s all still in my head for me to ponder and for readers to discover if my work inspires them to learn more on their own.

Alice Paul unfurling the ratification banner over the railing of the National Woman's Party headquarters on August 26, 1920 -- the day the 19th Amendment was ratified. The banner was one of the most important to the NWP. For every state that ratified suffrage, the members sewed on a star. When Tennessee ratified the amendment, the final star was sewn on.

 

 

 

The Intuitive

The Home Stretch (Sort Of)

Posted on by Laurel Weeks
Winners at the 2011 San Diego Book Awards

I have completed the first fifteen chapters of my work in progress, THE INTUITIVE, and I now have only three chapters and a short epilogue to go–probably eighty pages or so.  It’s an odd point in the process of writing a book, and my guess is it may be the most misunderstood by non-writers.  Barring the unforeseen, I should be able to finish the first draft by Labor Day, but right now I know from experience I am at no more than the fifty percent mark on the work.

How can that be?  I’m at the eighty percent mark, but only half done?  Here’s  ten reasons why.

  1. The last part is the most intense. I have to continue to weave together and differentiate the stories of a dozen or more characters, most of whom are at pivotal moments in their lives.  In some ways this writing is easier than the first chapters because I know the characters so much better now. On the other hand, I am so much more invested and that can make some of the writing really painful.
  2. My protagonist is involved in some new things in the last few chapters, and that means more research to get the facts right.  There’s no coasting to the conclusion on settings, events, and situations I’ve already described.
  3. Writing is like a continuous loop.  I reread and revise what I’ve already written more times than I could count.  The first two hundred pages of the book are in good shape, the next hundred pretty good but the newly drafted last twenty pages or so will tak almost as much work to revise as to draft.  When you work like I do, you don’t worry about the quality or even a lot of the details as you’re drafting, but the time eventually comes to do that.  So I have more to do than just those last eighty pages.
  4. My first and best critic, my sister Lynn, hasn’t weighed in yet, except to say she likes the first twenty pages.  No one else has seen it at all.  There will be a stage where I make a lot of changes based on early feedback.
  5. Revising is truly an endless process, until the editor says it’s too late to do any more.  The revising now is all on my own initiative to get the book ready to sell, but my agent may want to see some tweaks and the editor may as well.  There will be a hiatus between the time it sells and the editor is ready to pay serious attention to it, but once that happens it is back to the drawing board.  By that point revision is no fun.  I feel done with the book.  I am probably writing another.  Still, these last flurries of work are part of publication too.
  6. Writing the book isn’t all the writing in the book.  I will need to write an afterword where I “fess up” to any little facts I might have adjusted to fit the story, and provide interesting information that isn’t in the novel.  I also will interview myself (yes, most of the author interviews you read in books are done by the author, a discussion guide for book clubs, and anything else that seems like a good idea (glossary, pronunciation guide, timeline, etc.)  It is way easier to do this now than later.
  7. There’s other writing to do too.  I write the copy for the book pages on this website, for example, and may need to write out other materials that will be useful when publication nears.  As above, everything I can do now, while the book is fresh in my mind, I try to get done immediately.
  8. As I get close to publication, the writing becomes intense again, because I am sent questionnaires from bloggers or journalists, and get requests for guest posts on blogs.  For FINDING EMILIE I did around twenty of these, and each takes several hours.
  9. When the book comes out, I need to be prepared to talk about it.  For now, I just need to work on what people call the “tweet pitch” (describe your book in 140 characters) and the “elevator pitch” (describe your book in thirty seconds or less).  Later I will need five minute, twenty minute, forty-five minute, and one hour versions of a “stump speech” about the book.  I will also need to come up with variants on demands for audiences interested in specific aspects of the book (suffrage, planned parenthood, unionizing, Ellis Island, intelligence testing, etc.)
  10. And here’s the biggest reason I’m only half-done:  I keep on believing the book can be better.  I believe this because it’s true.  In every read-through, I see phrasings that could be tightened, details that could be more vivid, important emotional resonance I have missed, characters and settings I’ve lost track of, factual errors I’ve made, and even things as mundane as spacing and typos.

And, might I add, I have other things to do?  Most notably, I am headed off tomorrow to spend the weekend with my college roommates in Napa, California.  I have been trying not to let more than two weeks pass between posts, so I am writing this instead of packing!  At some point this weekend, I’ll raise a glass and toast the beautiful muse who has made my life so interesting and rewarding.  For now, I just need to figure out if I need one pair of shorts or two.

 

 

Bread and Roses

What Historical Novelists Live For

Posted on by Laurel Weeks

Yesterday I visited another world. I’d come out of nearly 100 degree heat in Vineland, New Jersey into the nicely air conditioned office of Jane Detweiler, the Executive Director of Elwyn New Jersey, one of the foremost sites for work with intellectual disabilities. I was there because of the facility’s past as the Vineland School for Feebleminded Children, one of the settings for my novel in progress.

“Feebleminded?  How archaic!” I imagine you saying, and you would be right. Much has changed since the early days of intelligence testing in the United States, when it was essentially a pseudoscience designed to make the case for the natural superiority of affluent white males, and a means of getting the upper hand on what was seen as the menace of low intellect to the American gene pool. Henry Herbert Goddard, the director of research at Vineland in the early 1900s, advocated institutionalizing the “feebleminded” in colonies like Vineland, to give them the opportunity for a dignified and productive life and of equal importance, to take away the opportunity to “breed” future generations.

Here I was, at “ground zero” of the eugenics movement in early twentieth century America.  I’d come for little more than to get a few details to add color to my novel and fix anything I had imagined incorrectly.  Now, however, I was hearing the words that historians and historical novelists may wait in vain to hear once in their entire careers:  “There are a lot of boxes of files upstairs.  Would you like to take a look?”

“It’s not air conditioned on the top floor, and the books and files were just dumped there when Goddard’s laboratory building was torn down,” Jane Detweiler explained.  She wasn’t kidding.  It was brutally hot, worse than outdoors for lack of any breeze. Dozens of boxes, many with their contents littered on the floor, filled several rooms that had once served as dormitories for some of the residents.  In one, a rotting wooden file cabinet held decrepit drawers, full of hundreds of file folders, each containing the records of a young person living at Vineland in the early twentieth century.

Faces of those who might have lived in that very room looked out at me from photographs.  Lives of the long-dead pieced themselves together before me.  A world that had been vibrant and real only in my mind was literally in my hands.

Intakes at admission were done in the neat hand of an era when penmanship mattered and spelling not so much.  Checklists of possible characteristics, like “sullen,” “whiny,” or “cheerful,” were marked.  Test results, and even raw data like the pencil tracks made by a patient trying to complete a maze, were in the file.  Quarterly reports revealed whether they made their bed neatly, dressed and bathed themselves, ate well, got along with others, and remembered what they had been told.  Because Goddard believed that weak intellect and poor morals went hand in hand, the reports were full of value judgments about the character of these children.  Diseases and conditions such as tuberculosis, epilepsy, and left-handedness were all treated as corroborating signs of degeneracy.

In another box, I found tools used for the tests–puzzles matching wooden shapes of stars and squares to the outline of the shape on a piece of paper;  cards with keys, dogs, and other objects used for identification and sentence-generation exercises; and cubes with different patterns of dots used for matching.

Elsewhere, I found a field notebook of visits to the families of children living there, containing information about the presumed mental capacities of family members, including guesses about the “moron” status of people dead or disappeared, based on anecdotes.  Again the snap judgments about the morality and intellect of these human beings made me wince.

Sweat-drenched, I left when everyone was preparing to close up for the day.  I sat in the car for a moment pondering the fact that there is no money to do anything with these files.  They’re brittle and crumbling from exposure to heat and constant light, and will be lost unless someone sees the value of a funding a project to preserve them.

I had one more stop, the Vineland School’s cemetery. On rows of markers so small the weeds nearly obliterated them, I saw the names of the dead. Experts now suggest that some of those lying underneath my feet spent their life at Vineland as a result of a misdiagnosis of a learning disability rather than any real retardation. Goddard himself lived long enough to recant many of his views about the prevalence and problems of “morons” in American society, and Vineland changed over the years to accommodate– and pioneer–better diagnostics and treatment plans.

How do we weigh the freedom these children lost by being confined at Vineland? Were the people whose files I read better off there even if they were misdiagnosed?  Many of them were from destitute families living in total desperation, children whose lives improved immeasurably when they came to Vineland. How do we evaluate the tradeoff of enforced childlessness in exchange for opportunities to live a peaceful, more interesting, and higher functioning life? Was it a “Village of Happiness,” as Goddard liked to call it?  I’d like to think so, but in a culture that values freedom above all else, it’s more than a little difficult not to squirm.

Files at Vineland

 

 

 

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Soaking Up the Scenery

Posted on by Laurel Weeks

I’m off tomorrow to New York to do research for my novel-in-progress.  I get asked sometimes about what I get out of going to the places my books are set–other than a great vacation!–and the answer may be a bit surprising.

Historical novelists rarely get to visit the places they write about, because those places aren’t there anymore.  I learned this most dramatically last summer researching THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD. The interior of the cathedral in Sevilla contains almost nothing–from chapels to altars to decorations–that would have been there when my heroine attended mass.  Granada is filled with a great deal of beautiful architecture, but baroque buildings have replaced medieval ones.  The palace where Isabella spent her childhood has not a remnant remaining of it.  You can get a sense for the warrens of medieval streets and countless tiny squares in some parts of the city, but I often feel a little bereft of what I am hoping for.

Rural locales are better.  The countryside probably hasn’t changed that much at least in places, and the plants and animals are presumably the same.  I get color from this–kinds of flowers, butterflies, shapes of hills–and the books are always the better for it. I had no idea, for example, how truly rural much of the Champagne region of France is, and I was  able to build that into FINDING EMILIE.

The main thing about going to the sites is avoiding awful mistakes.  Whoever said the devil is in the details must have been a historical novelist.  I had my heroine in THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD looking out across some hills to the sea and discovered that despite the proximity to the ocean, there was no sea view there. I like to avoid having characters watch sunsets out of north facing windows, or cross bridges that aren’t there, or not cross bridges that are. This is especially important for places that many readers may have been to.  One doesn’t want to get details about Paris or Venice wrong!

I do have have characters do things like stop at ruins I didn’t know existed until I saw them, or spend the night in a town too minor to make the guidebooks. One good part of travel is getting special details like that. I discovered, for example, that Sagres, where my heroine in THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD spent several years of her childhood, is unbelievably windy all the time–something one wouldn’t know from pictures.

I’m a college professor, so I can’t simply decide to take a trip when it suits me.  I need to go in summers or on winter break, so it’s not a matter of going before I start writing, or when I’ve finished a draft, or any other specific point.  At first I thought it would be best to go before I started writing, to soak up the flavor of a place, but it didn’t work out that way, and I think now that would have been a mistake. I can only afford to go once per book, and it’s working well to go after the first draft is done, or close to it.  That way I know very specifically what information I need.

I know where all the scenes are set, which makes it easier to put myself in the story. I stand in a garden and try to hear the characters talking.  I drive down a road and imagine what it would be to galloping on horseback. Even if I have to peel away the new housing development to see what was there before, or ignore the cars on a narrow cobblestoned street, I am there, letting it all soak in.

How much difference does travel make?  I’d say the books are ten percent better because of it.  Fiction still needs a great plot and wonderful characters way more than anything else. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft of my new novel, tentatively called BREAD AND ROSES, and I have a very good sense of every local I need to go see.  I won’t see Jewish peddlers on the Lower East Side, and it will be tourists crowding the Registry Hall at Ellis Island, but I’ll do what I always do:  pack light and take a good imagination.

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The Ruthlessness of the Long-Distance Writer

Posted on by Laurel Weeks

The provocative title of the much acclaimed 1962 film “The Loneliness of the LongDistance Runner” came to me the other day as I was thinking about some of the strange things novelists do to develop and sustain their stories.

 

People often ask if I work from an outline, or if I know from the

beginning pretty much everything that is going to happen in my novels.  I tell them absolutely, positively yes.

Here’s the rest of the truth. I write all this down in a roughly three-page treatment, which I then put in a drawer and don’t look at again until I’ve finished, at which point I say, “I was going to write that?”

 

I suppose there are authors who just start writing without any plan and see what happens, but I don’t know any.  I suppose there are others who have thorough outlines they stick to, but I don’t know them either.  For me, as I imagine for just about every novelist, fiction is a combination of planning and inspiration.

 

There are a few reasons for this.  At the first keystrokes I can’t know the characters as well as I eventually will. In my work in progress, the main character was originally fairly sensitive to social problems, mostly because I liked her that way.  As the draft went on, I realized how unlikely that was and went back to introduce–at some peril of losing a bit of the reader’s sympathy–hints of the unthinking bigotry she would have inherited with mother’s milk.

 

And speaking of mothers, there’s been a complete role reversal in my protagonist Zora’s parents.  My original thought was an overbearing father and docile, rather caved-in mother, but I discovered the plot worked much better the other way around.

 

Plot is the key.  Other than “what are my characters like as people?” the biggest question is “what makes the best story?”  For historical novelists, this usually involves figuring out a way to get the main character into the right place at the right time.

 

Here’s where the ruthlessness comes in.  If a character is getting in the way of the story, the or she has to be disposed of. Novelists kill off characters right and left.  They force them into exiles of all sorts whether they want to go or not.  Sometimes they don’t need to be disposed of, but they must influence the plot in an unpleasant way.  “Wait a minute!” I might hear a fledgling character complain.  “I don’t want to be a jerk!”  Tough luck, I say!

 

Ruthlessness has a bad name.  Sometimes it’s simple expediency.  In my work in progress, I needed a means for Zora to break away from family and friends who were constraining her to remain in the aristocratic social circle of wealthy, turn-of-the-century New York.  So many exciting things affecting women, such as suffrage and unionizing, were happening in the years before World War I, and I had to get Zora out of the house.

 

How to do this?  Invent an acquaintance with a different point of view, one who exposes her to new things.  Give this person exactly the traits that fit the needs of the plot. Piece of cake!  Enter Sophia. I create characters out of thin air to aggravate problems and facilitate solutions.

 

 

As I go further into writing a novel, things start to fall into place. I know how people will react (and if I need something different, I go back and change them). I know how the characters will get from here to there. At this point I can’t type fast enough. Still, there are plenty of surprises ahead, plot twists the characters will tell me about as they are happening, things they will say I am not expecting.

 

 

Fiction is driven by what is called “the arc of the story.”  As my sense of that arc is honed, necessary revisions are clearer. This brings up another form of ruthlessness.  Sometime whole scenes, whole characters just have to go because they aren’t helping.

 

 

At this point, the novel has its own feedback loop.  Just this morning I went back through the first hundred pages to add small details I couldn’t have put in earlier, little hints of the inevitability, or at least the natural progression, of what lies ahead.  Zora is now a little snobbier and thoughtless at the outset, and her growing dissatisfaction with herself and her world more clearly linked to specific events.  A new character is introduced quickly a hundred pages before she will show up in earnest to enter the story.  I see whole conversations that need to change in focus or subject, or be eliminated altogether.  I see new words that have to be put in characters’ mouths or minds.  I see how, once they have said or thought these things, I can go back and foreshadow.

 

Gradually, through new drafting and this feedback loop, I reach the full potential of the story.  Pass after pass, the novel is layered into what you eventually read. For right now, I’m just holding on for the wild and wonderful ride.

 

 

Penelope's Daughter, Uncategorized

Penelope is a Winner!

Posted on by Laurel Weeks

Just thought I’d post quickly to let you all know that PENELOPE’S DAUGHTER won the award for Best Historical Novel of 2010 at the San Diego Book Awards!

Two years ago UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH won Best Biography, and THE FOUR SEASONS won the Theodor S. Geisel Award for Book of the Year.  Pretty nice to  be batting a thousand for my books, and I’m hoping FINDING EMILIE can follow suit next year!

The Intuitive, Uncategorized

Ready, Set, Explode

Posted on by Laurel Weeks

I’m not sure if nearly a month has ever passed between diary entries before, but then again I have never had a month as an author quite like this one. In my last post, I talked about how I was pondering my newest work, THE INTUITIVE,  but had not yet put fingers to keyboard.

I pondered and researched for another week or so, and then in an explosion of creativity   that has left me stunned, I produced 142 pages of a first draft between May 12 and today.  That’s 23 days to produce about 40 percent of a novel.  I’m tired and feeling in need of a little break, but every day I’m up and ready to go with the next scene, and sometimes that leads into the next one, and then…well, there’s my day.

I’m doing the same thing I did last summer, posting a list of categories of time, to make sure that I put in at least an hour a day at exercise, book promotion, and life maintenance (e.g. things like bills, grocery shopping, pedicure, shower, etc.), so I don’t get all weird.  So far so good.  I’m still sociable and coherent.

It’s funny how the pondering before writing is so essential and then ends up being almost entirely irrelevant to what is actually in the book.  My character (whose name is now Zora) is involved in a significantly different plot that I expected, with different personalities around her and different events. It’s like a real life lived in the superfast lane.  She makes choices, unexpected things happen, and the story goes from there.  You know the adage about the best laid plans–sometimes what I am typing comes as a complete surprise, just like life.

What’s happening now (I’ll stay away from plot for now and stick with process) is that the other characters in the book are starting to reveal themselves a little more. In a first draft, secondary characters often function as little more than paper dolls, one-dimensional placeholders to help the overall plot gather momentum.  Just today as I was walking back from the Farmer’s Market (category: life maintenance) I saw more deeply into the relationship Zora has with an old school friend, Louise.  Before, Louise was there to allow some dialogue that developed Zora’s character, but now I see Louise a little more in her own right, and in adding to her story, I also see where the relationship will go in later chapters, and how a painful clash between Zora and her is inevitable.

I also realized that I was missing the boat on the relationship between Zora’s parents.  In my last post I speculated about some possible dynamics, and I’ve settled on one, but I am starting to have a vision of their family backgrounds and their personal past that helps me understand how they arrived at where they are in the story at the moment.  As with Louise, knowing such things tells me more about what can and can’t happen in future chapters.

That’s how writing a novel works–a little insight here, a little change in trajectory there, but it all flows naturally when I let myself be fully open to the possibilities for the main character.  In the end everything has to rise and fall in keeping with the arc of her story.  But I’m starting to know Zora, starting to see how she will get where she needs to go, and how she will react when she gets there.  This is the point at which an author begins to feel more like the conduit of a story than its creator, the point where I get up in the morning as excited as I hope you as a reader will eventually be to find out what happens next.

 

The Intuitive, Uncategorized

Pondering

Posted on by Laurel Weeks

It’s good to take a breather from writing. My time off, if you can call it that, came when I finished the final touches on The Shape of the World and got it off to my agent to market, when Finding Emilie was released, and when mid-semester papers and exams increased my workload outside of class. Since all of that happened at once, there was no time even for a thought of what novel might be waiting to be born.

Now, as The Shape of the World becomes a waiting game I can do nothing to influence, the publication flurry for Finding Emilie is beginning to die down, and summer vacation is less than two weeks away, I am starting to get restless and ready for novel number five.

The earliest stages of a novel happen only in the head.  For me it starts with a reaffirmation that despite the enormity of the task of creating a historical novel, I am happiest when I am writing and ready to get started again

That’s followed by a period in which I do a mental inventory of the ideas I’ve had and see what seems to be hovering at the door right now.  Even while I am writing another book, I am continually investigating new ideas, ordering biographies, and reading up on events and places, so there’s always a short list, but I never know what will strike me at the right minute–perhaps even a new idea someone just planted in my ear a few days before.

In all this pondering, inevitably one idea comes forward to stay.  It’s not a sure thing that will be the next book, as I learned after my false start earlier this year, but that’s the point at which the research begins in earnest, followed by the first tentative stab at a synopsis involving the main characters and a possible plot. For me this synopsis is an important first step because it gets me to focus on how I will pull the characters, plot, and historical background together.

My first question is always “what do I want readers to learn?”  From that, it becomes a question of what the main venues will be.  From there, I need to figure out how to get my point-of-view character to those places.  I also have to figure out how I will get all the necessary perspectives aired, and the conflicts and drama, both imagined and historical, set in motion.

Once I’ve gotten to that point, I pull out paper and a clipboard and start a multi-columned time line.  One column is for historical events and other columns are for the biographical events of the real-life characters.  When I have a concrete visual representation of the history, matched up with what the real-life people were up to (how old they were, where they were living, and what they were doing at the time the historical events were happening), I’m ready to start filling in some data for the fictional characters.  What’s the best year for my protagonist, Lucy, to be born so that she can be a workable age for the main events?  How can I plausibly move Lucy around so that she is in the right place at the right time?  What other characters must be filled in around her to create depth in the story and facilitate the plot?

Here, more specifically, is what I woke up asking myself this morning:

How can I use Lucy’s parents to forward the story?  What should their personalities be?  Their social and political views? What profession should the father have?  I started out thinking that mom should be sweet and supportive but a bit of a doormat to a domineering husband, and then I decided that the overall story will be so much better served if she is piously Protestant, politically conservative, and used to bullying Lucy to keep her in line.  Now that I have a domineering mother, I don’t need a similar personality in the father, so perhaps he can be the one with the bigger heart.  Or perhaps not.  Maybe this is a very difficult marriage between two clashing and demanding people.  Or maybe it’s the dad who’s the doormat, and one of the big events of the book can be his standing up for something important that matters a great deal to his daughter.

I don’t need to decide all that now.  The way a book comes alive is to make some of these early decisions about the real-life things, and introduce the fictional characters in their formative stages into this real world, and see what happens. As I go along, I will add what I need and change what isn’t working.

It may be that I’ll decide that Lucy needs a brother or sister, not arbitrarily but because something I need to accomplish can best happen by the introduction of such a character.  Will Lucy have a love interest, and if so, who should he be? What should he do for a living?  Is he suitable or socially dangerous, or maybe a little of both?

Since the setting of this book is early twentieth-century New York, and many of the early feminists will be making cameo appearances, perhaps it would be best not to fall into stereotypes about women being completed by love, but on the other hand, I write for a readership that probably would like to see Lucy have a man in her life.  Well, how about a romance that she grows out of and asserts her independence by moving on?  Always a possibility. And though I don’t want to go far afield of my own experience by making her love interest another woman, perhaps, given the place and time, this would be a good opportunity to honor relationships that did exist between some of the female leaders of the time.

Possibilities, possibilities.  Ahead of me is the excitement of not being able to type fast enough to keep up with my characters, of jumping up in the morning eager to find out what’s going to happen next. Nice to be the first to know!

 

 

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Circling

Posted on by Laurel Weeks

For authors, a new book is such a daunting process that the earliest stages, long before the first words of chapter one are put down, is a time of wary circling. You know the feeling–something interesting and unfamiliar catches your eye, and you move in, maybe just a little, to check it out more closely, maybe poke it with a stick to see if it moves.

You don’t know–you really just don’t know–what’s going to happen. Every year I must go through several dozen ideas for historical novels, some I think of on my own, but probably the majority suggested by fans and friends. Some ideas get abandoned quickly–not enough information for a historical novelist to go on, not enough interesting or appealing in the lives of the real-life characters, not enough of something else. Other ideas get put aside for another time. The circling begins with the third group, the ideas that won’t go away, the voices that say, “write about me!”

My bookshelves are full of biographies of women I haven’t written novels about and probably won’t: Cosima Liszt Von Bulow Wagner, Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel, Hypatia, Clara Schumann, Hadley Hemingway, Gertrude Caton Thompson, to name a few. Several are still possibilities: Ada Lovelace, Pauline Viardot, and Marie Curie spring to mind.

Marie Curie is the latest casualty of my circling. I read every biography of her (four, if I recall) and even wrote fifty pages of a first draft before I ran into an obstacle I didn’t know how to handle. In my four novels to date the protagonists have always been characters of my invention through whose lives fascinating real-life characters come and go. I had some doubts about having a biographical character as the protagonist, but Curie’s life is just so amazing that I set my concerns aside.

Turns out that little muse fretting on my shoulder was right to be nervous. I have had to admit in the last week that a novel about Marie Curie just isn’t working.

In my first draft, I told the story from Marie’s point of view, as a third person narration. Here are the opening few sentences:

“Don’t look,” Manya Sklodowska whispered to herself as the first snow of the season thickened the air and stuck to the lawns of the Saxony Garden outside her classroom. She knew it was snowing even without looking, because the world sounded different, as if someone had picked up the edges of Warsaw in white paper and wrapped up a gift of silence.

At neat rows of desks, twelve-year-old girls in white-collared, blue serge uniforms squirmed. They’d been waiting for snow for all day, ever since the gray sky began to lower and the air took on the faint astringency of winter….

Okay, not bad for a first draft, but here’s the problem: I am describing something that happened that day to a real person. I had the biographies open in front of me and worked from them. I did a good job, in my estimation, in dramatizing a quite traumatic event involving a surprise visit by the superintendent of schools, but the problem was that the entire book would be no more than that. I would move on to the next few pages of her biography and dramatize that, and then the next, and in the end I would have told the story of her life, but not much more.

I learned something valuable from this–that I need to be able to make up the story. I get excited about inventing characters and putting them in situations where I don’t know what’s going to happen. That gets me up at six every morning ready to put fingers to the keys and continue the adventure. That wasn’t going to happen with Marie Curie, because there wasn’t a plausible fictional character I could create who would be alongside her, observing her but having her own life story too.

I decided to try a new approach, having multiple narrators from various stages of Marie’s life–her sister, her father, her first love, her husband, her fellow physicists, her students, her lover. Here is the same scene told from the point of view of Hela, who was in the same class as Marie:

“Don’t look!” My mouth forms words I don’t dare say aloud. The first snow of the year is falling. Nothing else thickens the air indoors this way, or makes the world outside go quite so silent.

I stare straight ahead at Mademoiselle Tupalska. Over her old-fashioned whalebone collar, old Tupsia has one of the meanest and ugliest faces I’ve ever seen. Her thick brows knit into one line, and her mouth turns down in furrows that make her chin look cut through like a marionette’s. She’s taking out her ruler now and laying it on the desk. After a few months of school, there’s no need to slap it in her palm to frighten us into obedience. Most of us know from experience the damage she can do with it.

Tupsia knows what I want–what every one of the girls in our white-collared blue serge uniforms wants–as we sit in our neat rows of desks reciting Russian verbs. We’ve been waiting for snow for all day. Now the tickle in my nostrils from a draft through a cracked window has a faint astringency like the witch hazel we put on our scrapes and scratches at home. I see the other girls trying not to squirm or let their eyes drift to the windows, where we could be making halos of our breath, or punctuating the condensation on the window with the tips of our noses. Old Tupsia will have none of that. She doesn’t care if it’s snowing. She only cares about these dusty old books. I bet she eats cardboard for breakfast.

I try not to giggle at the thought as I look sidelong at my sister Maria. She’s ten, a year younger than I am. Before she was advanced into my class, I was the youngest and the smartest, but Manya knows everything I do and a lot more besides. Math, history, literature, German, French, and catechism–she’s the best at all of them, even though she is a bit too chubby around the middle and has hair that never looks nice for more than a minute…

I kind of like this approach, but deep down I still don’t think I have solved the problem. I am still stuck with too little to create except phrasings. I love to write, and I find point of view one of the most fascinating aspects of fiction, and if someone said “we’ve just got to have a book about Marie Curie and we need it soon,” I would probably go forward. But no one is saying that, and I am very glad of it, because I have decided to put this project aside until I find a way around this problem, if there is one.

This is the first time this has happened to me. Usually I get inspired and plough through to successful completion of a novel. This was a really valuable lesson, to see that there is more to a historical novel than a great real-life story. Marie Curie supplied the plot and the characters, but she couldn’t supply the inspiration. But I can wait. If she wants her story told, she’ll find a way to get in touch.