My Writerly Weakness: A Novel Not about Me?

As we dive into the NaNo Prep season, we’ve asked NaNoWriMo participants who’ve published their NaNo-novels for their writing tips on everything from inspiration to avoiding plot holes. Today, Jennifer S. Brown, author of Modern Girls , shares a few tips on researching, writing, and how to branch out:

In 2001, I attempted my first NaNoWriMo novel. My masterpiece was contemporary fiction about a young woman working at a book-selling dot com in Seattle. Not coincidentally, at the time, I was working at a book-selling dot com in Seattle.

A couple of years later, I tried another NaNoWriMo novel. This one was about a young woman who escapes a bad relationship by running off to work on a kibbutz in Israel. Interestingly, at one time, I myself escaped a bad relationship by running off to work on a kibbutz in Israel.

Both novels were fun to write, but I knew that my thinly disguised autobiographies were of interest to no one but me and my family.  Okay, maybe not even my family. If I wanted to create a story that would be of broader interest, it was time to write outside the sphere of me.

The books I turn to when I want to completely escape are historical novels, so that’s what I wanted to write. Plus I had the niggling of an idea: unplanned pregnancy during the Great Depression. But how would I do it? How does one write a novel that’s not about oneself? And even worse, one that takes place in a completely different time period? Historical novels seemed like so much work.

I needed basic tools on writing about another time period. The first thing I did was take a weekend seminar on historical fiction at Grub Street, Boston’s writing center. Writing classes are available throughout the country at community colleges, writing centers, adult education programs, libraries, and elsewhere. This class gave me the fundamentals on how to research. I took the course at the beginning of the summer, so I used the rest of the summer to prepare.

“While what I did was specific to my topic, the tools I used would be valuable to any author.”

Don’t roll your eyes at me! This is not cheating. If you read your NaNo rules, planning is encouraged. The previous two novels I wrote cold, but that was okay, because I am an expert on the subject of me. This time, writing on a topic about which I knew little, researching was essential. The mother in my story didn’t want her daughter to have the child. But what were her options? I more or less moved into my town’s library, which although not big, was able to order books from other libraries in our region’s network, and I requested books on abortion in American history. My library also has electronic databases, some of which I could use from home with my library card, and I scoured newspapers from the 1930s.

Each piece of research led to more ideas. From the online New York Times, I learned that socialism was a burgeoning movement in the 1930s. I would make one of my characters politically active! To go in-depth, I made my way to old periodicals like The Nation and The New Leader. The formality of the writing in the articles reminded me that different eras have distinctive language usage, so I binge watched movies from the 1930s (checked out of the library or streamed from Netflix and Amazon) to understand the slang of the day and, as a bonus, I saw how my characters should be dressing. Creating a 1930s music playlist helped me set a proper writing mood.

While what I did was specific to my topic, the tools I used would be valuable to any author: Google maps shows what locations look like; lists of newspapers on Wikipedia tell where to find articles; map rooms at libraries have transportation and business maps. All of my ideas, notes, and facts were compiled in a notebook that lived with me during the research process.

“This is not cheating. If you read your NaNo rules, planning is encouraged.”

When November 1st rolled around, I was burning to dive into what would become Modern Girls. The period, as well as the characters, were alive for me. The resulting novel was… well, crap. But I had the first half of my first draft, which with a few years and many, many revisions became the novel that got me my publishing contract. And I did it all without a single character based on me.

Jennifer S. Brown has a BFA in film and television from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington, Seattle. This makes her uniquely suited to write film reviews, which would be great if she hadn’t stopped going to the movies when her kids were born. She’s published fiction and creative nonfiction in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, The Southeast Review, and Bellevue Literary Review among other places. Modern Girls (NAL/Penguin) is her debut novel.