...and wondering what the hell did I do that for?
Donis here. I've started writing a book that is entirely different from anything I've had published before, and it's rather frightening. All twelve of my previously published books have been historical mysteries, which I love. I love research, and I love going back in time and living there with the natives for a while. My new manuscript is a contemporary mystery set between - of all places - Arkansas and the Netherlands. I've always been interested in fish-out-of-water stories, so I decided to write about a woman who was raised by her single father in the Netherlands, always believing she was Dutch. After her father dies, she discovers while cleaning out his belongings that she was actually born in the U.S. to an American mother. Her European father is wanted in Arkansas for killing her mother twenty-five years earlier, then kidnapping our heroine and raising her in the Netherlands.
So of course she heads to the states to discover who she is, find her American family, and try to find out if her father really did murder her mother. The research has been tremendous fun for me. It's been quite an exercise to put myself in my protagonist's shoes and try to imagine what this country looks like to someone who was raised in Amsterdam. From having spent quite a bit of time in Europe myself, I already knew something of the feeling from the other side. The first time I stayed with an English friend for several weeks is when I learned first hand that English and American are not quite the same language, especially considering Allison was from Lancashire (Beatles country) and I'm from Oklahoma. Then she came and stayed with me at my house in Tulsa. Talk about culture shock. While Allison was in the states, we visited the home of a high school friend of mine whose father grew up during the depression in a tiny Oklahoma town. Lancashire girl and Oklahoma father literally could not understand one another. I ended up translating for them as though they were speaking different languages, which I suppose they were. Imagine trying to navigate the legal system of another country when you don't even know that what you said to someone is not what what they understood.
Allison and I discussed our cultural differences at length, and I came away fascinated by our cultural assumptions and how people from other countries view Americans. The Dutch heroine of my new book takes many of her impressions of the United States from Dutch people I've known over the years - constantly amazed and always bemused by our warm, friendly, scary, messy country.
One thing I adore about writing is the opportunity to see the world through someone else's eyes and judge it by their experience, which may be entirely different from your own. That's why I'm a little bit skeptical about the idea of never writing from the POV of someone of another race or ethnicity. The world is so fraught now that trying to do so is like navigating a mine field, and it's true I can never truly understand the lived experience of a Native American, for instance. But isn't it important to try and understand? Having said that, I'd never try it without running it by at least a couple of sensitivity readers. Even if I'm writing about a Dutch woman.
