P.J. Devlin's Blog: P J Devlin Stories: Turning Points

Wishes, Sins and the Wissahickon Creek Author's Note

Because I am apparently blog-challenged, I decided to post the Author's Note to my short story collection, Wishes, Sins and the Wissahickon Creek. Here you go.

Author’s Note

I’ve known I was a writer from the moment I learned the alphabet and put pencil to paper. My mother saved a little notebook in which I wrote stories in a five-year-old’s baby scrawl, with mystifying spelling based on phonetics born of my speech defect. I wrote stories throughout grade school, high school and college. I loved entering “the fictive dream” where a story takes me beyond my original concept and characters enter uninvited, fully formed and demanding voice. Stories become reckonings where wonder, folly, love, hate, sadness, joy, rage, and regret seep from the subconscious and forge paths to understanding, sometimes even epiphany.

Because I’m a practical person, before my junior year at LaSalle University I changed my major from English to Economics to optimize my potential future income. After graduation, with a fellowship from American University, I moved to the DC area, assuming I’d return to Philadelphia as soon as I earned a PhD. Now, thirty-five years after AU awarded my doctorate, I continue to live in Northern Virginia where my husband John and I pursued careers with Fairfax County, raised our four children and welcomed five grandchildren (to date).

Over all those years I never lost my desire to write fiction. In Fall 2008, I entered the George Mason University Creative Writing Program. The three years I studied writing are among my most cherished. I continue to look back to that time with awe at the devotion of the outstanding faculty, especially Susan Shreve, and the friendship of my colleagues who continue to celebrate each other’s accomplishments with generosity and joy.

Readers often ask: Is your story autobiographical? The answer is, No. The stories aren’t about me. The characters aren’t stand-ins for me. Rather, when I enter Gardner’s fictive dream, I become the characters. The person who lives as PJ Devlin disappears into the thoughts and actions of those others. Although my characters live and breathe through me, each of them is a being apart from me just as newborn babies are beings apart from their mothers and fathers. And fictional characters, like children, say and do the most unexpected things, living on the page on their own terms. That’s the dream. That’s the wonder.

In my stories, setting is the element which emanates from my personal history. In order for my characters to make their ways through complicated situations, I drop them in places I know well – places which permeate my waking and sleeping dreams. Most often, they find themselves near the Wissahickon Creek which flows from Montgomery County, PA down to and through northwest Philadelphia until gushing into the Schuylkill River.

It’s hard to describe the draw of the Wissahickon Creek to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Yet each person I’ve met who’s hiked or biked or ridden horses surrounded by woods over fifty miles of rocky trails feels a sense of ownership and enchantment. In the Preface to the wonderful four volume book, Metropolitan Paradise: The Struggle for Nature in the City, Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Valley 1620 - 2020, David Contosta and Carol Franklin write, “Both of us have a dogged and perverse devotion to Philadelphia, and like so many Philadelphians, we are hopelessly in love with Wissahickon Park…”

My dreams of childhood ebb and flow like the branch of the creek which ran through once-farmland behind our house. Neighborhood kids spent summers down at the creek, skipping stones and floating twigs when the water ran high or when the water ran low, digging up cow bones we swore came from dinosaurs. In winter, we dragged sleds up the hill and flew over the snow to roll off at the edge of the creek or (more often for me) slide into the creek and a frigid walk home.

By the age of seven or eight, we walked down Wissahickon Avenue past Chestnut Hill College and entered Forbidden Drive, the graveled towpath along the wider and deeper Wissahickon Creek. Dense trees blocked all but shimmers of sunlight. Rough rocky ridges beckoned us to the narrow trails above both sides of the creek. As we clambered over boulders and through patches of poison ivy, we imagined we were Indian children searching for chestnuts to grind into meal. A favorite destination was across the red-covered bridge and up a rocky path to the giant marble statue of Indian Chief Tedyuscung perched on a ridge, with his left hand shielding his eyes as he searches westward. We called the statue, Teddy is come.

Now visits to Philadelphia include walks on slippery slopes and rocky trails above the wild Wissahickon Creek. Each time I watch creek waters ripple and rush over rocks on their course to the Schuylkill River, childhood memories flow into grown-up dreams. This is the dreamscape I present to my characters.

While not every story in this collection is set along the Wissahickon, each story has a Philadelphia heart. Some are long, some are short, some are set in the present, some in the past.

I wrote most of the stories in this collection between 2005 and 2016, although I wrote the earliest version of the story now titled “Withered Hope,” in 1973 after it came to me in a dream.

Come walk with me and share my dreams.

Structure

I became a better writer after I studied structure. Because I entered an MFA creative writing program with a PhD in economics and thirty years as a government financial manager, I was less qualified for advanced study of creative writing than my classmates. MFA courses introduced me to new authors and bodies of work. In workshops, I learned the value of instructors' and colleagues' close reading and criticism. I studied other genres. Wonderful writers and instructors overwhelmed me with generosity as mentors and advocates. I cherish the acceptance and friendships I experienced during those three years. Every day, I rely on lessons learned in the program. Yet, upon graduation, I recognized a gap, a missing something in the narrative momentum of my stories. I searched out books on writing craft. Oakley Hall’s, How Fiction Works, reinforced every lesson I’d learned. I read and re-read that book. My writing improved. But the craft book that changed my approach to writing fiction is Story Structure Architect by Victoria Lynn Schmidt. I came to understand the three-act structure at the gut level – how to develop the set-up, turning points, conflicts, triumphs and reversals, and character changes. Now, I have a book-shelf filled with craft books, and refer to different ones whenever I get stuck. Understanding the three-act structure changed the way I approach writing a novel. Before I write the first sentence, I think through the story to the end. I have a huge whiteboard divided into three sections. Across the top, I note the dramatic through-line, a sentence to remind me what the story is about. For each of three acts, I summarize what happens, note turning points, key scenes, conflicts, reversals, character roles. I visualize the novel’s final scene, and mark that down. The three-act structure lets me think about and map out the story’s direction. In truth, characters, once created, tend to dictate narrative momentum on their own terms, and finished stories vary from the initial structural design. Nevertheless, when I start with basic structure, as I build the narrative, I understand the story’s foundation, and create a better wrought novel.

April 24, 2017 Research

Since I write historic fiction, I often get questions about research. Stories come to me in images. Physical setting, time period, and characters arrive together, as if conjured by the plot. My stories develop backwards. For my work, the image that inspires a novel or a story is a vision of the closing scene. I guess the truth is I constantly research. I have a lifelong fascination with how people lived in the past -- from the most ancient times to the twentieth century. When the conglomeration of personal interest, dreams, random knowledge and experience leads me to a story, I begin to research the specific time and place, with the goal of deeply understanding the physical, cultural, and social elements that influence my characters' worlds. I start by reading history, as well as time period fiction, and watching films set in that era. For example, for Wissahickon Souls, set in the Philadelphia area and Haiti from 1806 t0 1836, I read John Watson's 3 volume historic account, published in 1842, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Olden Time. While I researched many other sources, Watson's work was especially valuable. I research and read until I visualize my characters' worlds and see them moving within them. Once I've commenced writing, I research on-the-go, thank you internet. My research goal is to offer authenticity, not historic fact. Indeed, the joy of fiction comes from making up stuff. Research is fundamental, but research serves the story, it doesn't drive it.