Susan Rivers's Blog, page 2
August 15, 2018
Letting the Characters Have Their Say
Building a primary character is a difficult process to describe to someone who is not a writer, mainly because the process is so intuitive. But if I try to look at it analytically, I estimate that crafting a character in a novel is about 45% imagination, 40% lived experience, 10% researched detail and 5% the character's own input.
The character's own input, you ask? Don't you mean your input, masked as the character's?
A licensed therapist would no doubt disagree with me and schedule me for an emergency appointment when I answer that NO, I definitely mean that the character herself (himself) is steering her own course in the story.
Here's how it works for me: while I don't outline in the traditional sense, I do make notes on the key story elements I want to cover, I identify the key message or theme, and I often have the final scene of the novel sketched in vague terms, as a destination I'm aiming for.
Additionally, if I'm clear on the story I'm telling (always useful before launching into a full-length book), then I'm just as clear on the primary characters, with a protagonist in mind, an antagonist, some very basic notion of the climactic scene and the protagonist's obstacle or problem described in general terms. In other words, I try to have some form of working structure into which I can fit and connect the fragments of writing that begin to be generated, in a trickle initially, but eventually come pouring out in a torrent.
The funny thing is that once I'm on my way with the story, having provided essential exposition, established the setting, introduced the main characters, and started the ball rolling with the igniting incident (identifying the problem or issue that's going to move us toward the climax) -- or about 30-40 pages in -- the characters begin to move out ahead of me. It's as if they are complete enough at this point to be guided by their own desires, motives and values, and they will sometimes intercede if I try steering them in a direction they believe to be false.
For instance, I have a very clear recollection of my heroine, Placidia Hockaday, determining her own direction as I was drafting The Second Mrs. Hockaday. In my notes, I had anticipated that she would be somewhat susceptible to the flirtatious charms of her step-brother-in-law, Floyd Parris, while her new husband Gryffth was gone fighting the Civil War. I felt that as a 17 year-old, she would be fairly easily misled by someone as sophisticated and solicitous as this older man. However, I had not counted on Placidia's steely resolve, nor the intensity of her feelings for Major Hockaday. She told me quite plainly that allowing herself to be seduced by Floyd was an absurd choice for her to make, and that I better reconsider it! I did, and the novel was much more satisfying for Placidia's knowing herself so well.
Now I have learned to trust my characters' input in the process of novel-writing, and was firmly guided from the start by the disparate types who share their story in the novel just completed. I let them chart their courses, providing guidance while trying not to stifle self-discovery. Together we completed a journey that feels genuine and inspired.
The character's own input, you ask? Don't you mean your input, masked as the character's?
A licensed therapist would no doubt disagree with me and schedule me for an emergency appointment when I answer that NO, I definitely mean that the character herself (himself) is steering her own course in the story.
Here's how it works for me: while I don't outline in the traditional sense, I do make notes on the key story elements I want to cover, I identify the key message or theme, and I often have the final scene of the novel sketched in vague terms, as a destination I'm aiming for.
Additionally, if I'm clear on the story I'm telling (always useful before launching into a full-length book), then I'm just as clear on the primary characters, with a protagonist in mind, an antagonist, some very basic notion of the climactic scene and the protagonist's obstacle or problem described in general terms. In other words, I try to have some form of working structure into which I can fit and connect the fragments of writing that begin to be generated, in a trickle initially, but eventually come pouring out in a torrent.
The funny thing is that once I'm on my way with the story, having provided essential exposition, established the setting, introduced the main characters, and started the ball rolling with the igniting incident (identifying the problem or issue that's going to move us toward the climax) -- or about 30-40 pages in -- the characters begin to move out ahead of me. It's as if they are complete enough at this point to be guided by their own desires, motives and values, and they will sometimes intercede if I try steering them in a direction they believe to be false.
For instance, I have a very clear recollection of my heroine, Placidia Hockaday, determining her own direction as I was drafting The Second Mrs. Hockaday. In my notes, I had anticipated that she would be somewhat susceptible to the flirtatious charms of her step-brother-in-law, Floyd Parris, while her new husband Gryffth was gone fighting the Civil War. I felt that as a 17 year-old, she would be fairly easily misled by someone as sophisticated and solicitous as this older man. However, I had not counted on Placidia's steely resolve, nor the intensity of her feelings for Major Hockaday. She told me quite plainly that allowing herself to be seduced by Floyd was an absurd choice for her to make, and that I better reconsider it! I did, and the novel was much more satisfying for Placidia's knowing herself so well.
Now I have learned to trust my characters' input in the process of novel-writing, and was firmly guided from the start by the disparate types who share their story in the novel just completed. I let them chart their courses, providing guidance while trying not to stifle self-discovery. Together we completed a journey that feels genuine and inspired.
June 27, 2018
Crafting the Event: Will It Resonate for the Modern Reader?
The critical event taking place in your historical novel may be based on a true occurrence, but that alone isn't enough to connect with your readers. The main action in the story, certainly the pivotal action that underpins the climax, must resonate with some coherent TRUTH that modern readers will understand and relate to, even if they don't know a lot about the time period in which you're writing. In other words, it must be timeless. Universal. It must leave your readers feeling that they understand something more about the human condition.
For instance, in the novel I recently completed (it's in draft form, while I work on revisions) I've fictionalized a true event, as I did in The Second Mrs. Hockaday. In this case, the true event was a double lynching that took place in 1912 in an upstate South Carolina cotton mill town. Two African American men were alleged to have committed a sexual assault against a white man while all three of them were drinking moonshine in a deserted cemetery. Was it an assault? Was it consensual? Or was it a drinking game gone horribly wrong? The truth will never be known; the black men were murdered before a trial could take place.
What is it about this event that gripped my imagination, and why does it convey, to my mind, a larger, pervasive and resonant issue that is reflected in modern lives? Let me explain.
While it can never be known precisely what happened between those two black men and one white man that resulted in violent mob action, it is clear that this alleged assault symbolized the anxieties of impoverished, white, mill-working men to a dangerous degree. Such men had been pushed off their farms in the financial depressions of the 1890s and forced into tenant farming (working on a wealthier man's land for a share of the crop). Low crop prices and unscrupulous practices by landlords drove most of these men and their families out of farming all together well before the boll weevil's arrival around 1920 made sharecropping untenable. White farmers, however, were inclined to put the blame on African American farmers competing with them. The latter were consistently paid less by landlords for the same crop, and although these prices were set by the landowners and not by the black farmers, they were blamed for driving white farmers out of business.
White men turned in desperation to the only work widely available to uneducated southern whites at the turn of the century: working long hours for low pay in textile mills. In doing so, these men gave up their last bit of autonomy. They chafed against the oppressive regimen of the mills and felt humiliated working alongside their own children and wives. When these "lintheads" or "factory crackers" were given the vote in South Carolina in 1895, they consistently threw their votes not to the politicians who sought to enact labor reforms, improve wages, and provide public health to mill families, but to crass, profane and bigoted office-holders who preached white supremacy and condoned lynchings. Industrialization had robbed these white men of their autonomy, and in doing so it had taken away their self-respect; their fear of black men usurping their position in society was more important to them than any other issue in their lives. That is why they responded enthusiastically to a governor telling them to put "negroes" in their place, and it's why the events in the cemetery in 1912, when they leaked out, enraged the locals and motivated them to lynch the two African American men accused of assaulting the white mill worker.
This dangerous situation is reflected in current American politics, and in fact, in European nations as well, where the fear by working-class whites of being overwhelmed or harmed by the dark "Other" is resulting in major political changes, and is taking precedence over all other social and economic concerns. The South Carolina lynching reflects the universal racial paranoia experienced and expressed by white men who fear the dark man being "on top."
For instance, in the novel I recently completed (it's in draft form, while I work on revisions) I've fictionalized a true event, as I did in The Second Mrs. Hockaday. In this case, the true event was a double lynching that took place in 1912 in an upstate South Carolina cotton mill town. Two African American men were alleged to have committed a sexual assault against a white man while all three of them were drinking moonshine in a deserted cemetery. Was it an assault? Was it consensual? Or was it a drinking game gone horribly wrong? The truth will never be known; the black men were murdered before a trial could take place.
What is it about this event that gripped my imagination, and why does it convey, to my mind, a larger, pervasive and resonant issue that is reflected in modern lives? Let me explain.
While it can never be known precisely what happened between those two black men and one white man that resulted in violent mob action, it is clear that this alleged assault symbolized the anxieties of impoverished, white, mill-working men to a dangerous degree. Such men had been pushed off their farms in the financial depressions of the 1890s and forced into tenant farming (working on a wealthier man's land for a share of the crop). Low crop prices and unscrupulous practices by landlords drove most of these men and their families out of farming all together well before the boll weevil's arrival around 1920 made sharecropping untenable. White farmers, however, were inclined to put the blame on African American farmers competing with them. The latter were consistently paid less by landlords for the same crop, and although these prices were set by the landowners and not by the black farmers, they were blamed for driving white farmers out of business.
White men turned in desperation to the only work widely available to uneducated southern whites at the turn of the century: working long hours for low pay in textile mills. In doing so, these men gave up their last bit of autonomy. They chafed against the oppressive regimen of the mills and felt humiliated working alongside their own children and wives. When these "lintheads" or "factory crackers" were given the vote in South Carolina in 1895, they consistently threw their votes not to the politicians who sought to enact labor reforms, improve wages, and provide public health to mill families, but to crass, profane and bigoted office-holders who preached white supremacy and condoned lynchings. Industrialization had robbed these white men of their autonomy, and in doing so it had taken away their self-respect; their fear of black men usurping their position in society was more important to them than any other issue in their lives. That is why they responded enthusiastically to a governor telling them to put "negroes" in their place, and it's why the events in the cemetery in 1912, when they leaked out, enraged the locals and motivated them to lynch the two African American men accused of assaulting the white mill worker.
This dangerous situation is reflected in current American politics, and in fact, in European nations as well, where the fear by working-class whites of being overwhelmed or harmed by the dark "Other" is resulting in major political changes, and is taking precedence over all other social and economic concerns. The South Carolina lynching reflects the universal racial paranoia experienced and expressed by white men who fear the dark man being "on top."
June 18, 2018
The Voice, Part 2: Speaking as a Character from Another Time
In the previous two posts I explained that I craft an historical novel employing three overlapping spheres of awareness: the World of the novel, the novel's narrative Voice and the voices of its primary characters, and the critical Event in the novel that provides a kind of engine for plot. In Voice Part 1, I spoke to the writer's choice of a narrative voice: how the writer chooses to narrate the story to readers. In this second post, I want to share some things I've learned about crafting the all-important voice of your protagonist as well as other major characters.
Character voice is a tricky component of historical fiction: if you get it right, most readers won't notice, because they'll be caught up in the world you've created and the voice/person with whom they've formed a relationship. But if you get it wrong, the discordant notes in that voice will bounce the reader right out of his/her suspension of disbelief, and this will cause the reader to question the larger reality of the novel. Here are my tools for crafting an authentic character voice: read, listen, and record.
READ. Be prepared to research your character's world exhaustively, and above all, immerse yourself in primary documents -- those diaries, letters, memoirs, old newspaper articles, death notices, etc. written by people who existed in the same time and place as your character(s), and are often housed in private or government archives and libraries. These primary sources not only provide a wealth of detail, but they contain vocabulary, syntax and turns-of-phrase that distinguish your period of time in your particular place.
Here, for instance, is a letter written by a mill worker to the governor of his state: "...we are just as good as the most of these fellows that runs around here with there standing collars on and don't know what a day's work is." Do you see? The voice jumps out at you, displaying attitudes, level of education, class resentment, and more. It's authentic.
LISTEN & RECORD. Always be listening to people talk to one another, or be engaging people in conversation. I hear things standing in line at my small-town post office. I hear unique metaphors and figures of speech from neighbors who have lived in the area all their lives. I always carry a small notebook and pencil with me, no matter where I'm going, and I write everything down that strikes me as significant. Honest. Surprising. A friend who has spent forty years working in a textile mill, saying of something that got him very vexed: "That tore me out of my frame." A student I coached, trying to get him to see that he needed to work harder, telling me that he hears it all the time from his father: "Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon." The man in the diner who said: "I may do such." The woman who said she had "beaucoups of daffodils." When you hear something that has the ring of truth to it, that evokes a place or people, write it down. You will come to use these voices; they will lend authenticity to your fictional ones.
Next post: The Event
Character voice is a tricky component of historical fiction: if you get it right, most readers won't notice, because they'll be caught up in the world you've created and the voice/person with whom they've formed a relationship. But if you get it wrong, the discordant notes in that voice will bounce the reader right out of his/her suspension of disbelief, and this will cause the reader to question the larger reality of the novel. Here are my tools for crafting an authentic character voice: read, listen, and record.
READ. Be prepared to research your character's world exhaustively, and above all, immerse yourself in primary documents -- those diaries, letters, memoirs, old newspaper articles, death notices, etc. written by people who existed in the same time and place as your character(s), and are often housed in private or government archives and libraries. These primary sources not only provide a wealth of detail, but they contain vocabulary, syntax and turns-of-phrase that distinguish your period of time in your particular place.
Here, for instance, is a letter written by a mill worker to the governor of his state: "...we are just as good as the most of these fellows that runs around here with there standing collars on and don't know what a day's work is." Do you see? The voice jumps out at you, displaying attitudes, level of education, class resentment, and more. It's authentic.
LISTEN & RECORD. Always be listening to people talk to one another, or be engaging people in conversation. I hear things standing in line at my small-town post office. I hear unique metaphors and figures of speech from neighbors who have lived in the area all their lives. I always carry a small notebook and pencil with me, no matter where I'm going, and I write everything down that strikes me as significant. Honest. Surprising. A friend who has spent forty years working in a textile mill, saying of something that got him very vexed: "That tore me out of my frame." A student I coached, trying to get him to see that he needed to work harder, telling me that he hears it all the time from his father: "Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon." The man in the diner who said: "I may do such." The woman who said she had "beaucoups of daffodils." When you hear something that has the ring of truth to it, that evokes a place or people, write it down. You will come to use these voices; they will lend authenticity to your fictional ones.
Next post: The Event
June 12, 2018
The Voice, Part 1
In the previous post, I talked about my approach to building the 'world' of the historic novel so that it lives and breathes for modern readers. The second sphere of awareness that plays a key role in my method of writing is the 'voice.'
What do I mean by 'voice?' It exists on two levels: as the writer's voice -- style and form -- how the writer chooses to narrate the story to readers; and secondly as the character(s) voice -- whose points-of-view are revealing the story and how are they expressing themselves?
In the case of THE SECOND MRS. HOCKADAY, I honestly didn't make a conscious decision to tell the story without a traditional narrator. The novel came to me as it appears in its published form -- as a series of primary documents: letters, inquest records and diary entries that collectively reveal a long-suppressed mystery. I suspect this was a result of having immersed myself in Civil War-era documents for several years while researching another novel (one I abandoned for HOCKADAY); consequently, when I stumbled across the true event that inspired this novel, I was able to sit down and write it in a white-hot fury with all that 19th century correspondence and inquest-jargon fresh in my mind.
I also have a hunch that the form of narration I used was influenced by the dormant playwright in me. Subconsciously, it might have been her way of establishing a closer connection to her readers, by having her characters speak directly to the reader (in the diary entries) or indirectly but still not filtered through narration, in the letters Placidia writes to her cousin Mildred, Mildred writes to her, Major Hockaday writes to his bride, and their sons write to one another and Mildred once they are grown and starting to uncover their parents' secrets, thus resolving the mystery for the readers.
Next time: The Voice, Part 2; Speaking as a Character from Another Time
What do I mean by 'voice?' It exists on two levels: as the writer's voice -- style and form -- how the writer chooses to narrate the story to readers; and secondly as the character(s) voice -- whose points-of-view are revealing the story and how are they expressing themselves?
In the case of THE SECOND MRS. HOCKADAY, I honestly didn't make a conscious decision to tell the story without a traditional narrator. The novel came to me as it appears in its published form -- as a series of primary documents: letters, inquest records and diary entries that collectively reveal a long-suppressed mystery. I suspect this was a result of having immersed myself in Civil War-era documents for several years while researching another novel (one I abandoned for HOCKADAY); consequently, when I stumbled across the true event that inspired this novel, I was able to sit down and write it in a white-hot fury with all that 19th century correspondence and inquest-jargon fresh in my mind.
I also have a hunch that the form of narration I used was influenced by the dormant playwright in me. Subconsciously, it might have been her way of establishing a closer connection to her readers, by having her characters speak directly to the reader (in the diary entries) or indirectly but still not filtered through narration, in the letters Placidia writes to her cousin Mildred, Mildred writes to her, Major Hockaday writes to his bride, and their sons write to one another and Mildred once they are grown and starting to uncover their parents' secrets, thus resolving the mystery for the readers.
Next time: The Voice, Part 2; Speaking as a Character from Another Time
June 7, 2018
Building 'The World'
I wrote in my last post about the three spheres of awareness I begin thinking about and crafting when I start an historical novel. These are: The World, The Voice, and The Event. These areas of awareness are overlapping, naturally, but each one requires slightly different approaches. I'll talk first about The World.
My goal is to create the historic world of the novel so that it lives and breathes in present time for my reader. I do this through detail. I work to weave fact-based details into my characters' experiences, their activities, their relationships, their conflicts, and their dialogues with each other. Where do you get the details? You can start by collecting photos, especially if you're a visual person. I keep mine in a private Pinterest file, or you may print them and put them on a board. But if you're going to create an entire world for your novel, you're going to need more than pictures. You will have to experience the world you're writing about, and you're going to need to experience it with all five senses.
For instance, before writing The Second Mrs. Hockaday, I spent years visiting Civil War battlefields, museums and historic sites. When I began in earnest on the novel I sought out specific sites in my region -- notably an antebellum manor house and an historic upstate farm -- which I visited on quiet week-days and in the off-seasons. This cut down on the number of people around me (and their cell-phones!) as well as mechanical intrusions, like landscapers using weed trimmers. On a quiet day, I found I could really get in touch with the special atmosphere of these places: the smell of the manor house (woodsmoke and bitter herbs), the sounds on the farm (clink of a harness, bullfrogs singing in a spring pond, someone hefting an ax at the edge of the woods) and the feel of things (the heft of coin silver, roughness of homespun, coarse texture of a collard leaf). I photographed all these things, but more importantly, I took notes of all my sensory impressions, knowing that my characters' senses would be engaged in the same manner.
As a novelist, I'm aware I'm only going to use a small percentage of what I write in my notebook, but that small percent is priceless. It is literally food for the imagination: it's how I spin fact into fiction.
Next time: The Voice.
My goal is to create the historic world of the novel so that it lives and breathes in present time for my reader. I do this through detail. I work to weave fact-based details into my characters' experiences, their activities, their relationships, their conflicts, and their dialogues with each other. Where do you get the details? You can start by collecting photos, especially if you're a visual person. I keep mine in a private Pinterest file, or you may print them and put them on a board. But if you're going to create an entire world for your novel, you're going to need more than pictures. You will have to experience the world you're writing about, and you're going to need to experience it with all five senses.
For instance, before writing The Second Mrs. Hockaday, I spent years visiting Civil War battlefields, museums and historic sites. When I began in earnest on the novel I sought out specific sites in my region -- notably an antebellum manor house and an historic upstate farm -- which I visited on quiet week-days and in the off-seasons. This cut down on the number of people around me (and their cell-phones!) as well as mechanical intrusions, like landscapers using weed trimmers. On a quiet day, I found I could really get in touch with the special atmosphere of these places: the smell of the manor house (woodsmoke and bitter herbs), the sounds on the farm (clink of a harness, bullfrogs singing in a spring pond, someone hefting an ax at the edge of the woods) and the feel of things (the heft of coin silver, roughness of homespun, coarse texture of a collard leaf). I photographed all these things, but more importantly, I took notes of all my sensory impressions, knowing that my characters' senses would be engaged in the same manner.
As a novelist, I'm aware I'm only going to use a small percentage of what I write in my notebook, but that small percent is priceless. It is literally food for the imagination: it's how I spin fact into fiction.
Next time: The Voice.
June 1, 2018
The World, The Voice, and The Event: Turning 'Then' Into 'Now'
Recently I participated in the Greensboro Bound Literary Festival, a new author and reader fair produced by book-lovers and book-sellers in central North Carolina. I taught a workshop there to a brainy bunch of not-yet-published writers whose particular interest is historical fiction, sharing with them my own methods for crafting a novel set in the past.
In order to transform 'then' into 'now,' making the past a vivid reality for modern readers, I believe it's necessary for the novelist to focus on three spheres of awareness. These three interlocking and overlapping areas consist of: the WORLD of the novel, the VOICE of the protagonist and the voices of other characters (as well as the Narrator's voice, if he/she is not the protagonist), and the key EVENT upon which the novel turns.
I'll explain these three spheres in more detail in the next blog; for now, let me say that the tools I use for crafting the World, the Voice and the Event are simple, and these tools are "turned on" and are active at all times. I read. I listen. I inhabit, with all five senses. And I record.
More to come!
In order to transform 'then' into 'now,' making the past a vivid reality for modern readers, I believe it's necessary for the novelist to focus on three spheres of awareness. These three interlocking and overlapping areas consist of: the WORLD of the novel, the VOICE of the protagonist and the voices of other characters (as well as the Narrator's voice, if he/she is not the protagonist), and the key EVENT upon which the novel turns.
I'll explain these three spheres in more detail in the next blog; for now, let me say that the tools I use for crafting the World, the Voice and the Event are simple, and these tools are "turned on" and are active at all times. I read. I listen. I inhabit, with all five senses. And I record.
More to come!
