Searching for that grain of sand

Before I explain that title, I want to second Rick's excellent suggestion about buying a book (or more!) from your local independent bookstore as a gift this holiday season, and I love the idea of Type Mers buying one another's books. Read and transport yourselves this holiday!

Now for my actual blog. I'm probably not the first person to use the oyster metaphor to describe writing a novel. An oyster starts with a single grain of sand inside and then works layer upon layer around it to create a beautiful pearl. For me, that's how my novels start. With a single intriguing idea. It can be a simple image like a pair of shoes, a character that I am curious about, a small snippet from the newspaper. No matter how small, it's a toehold that allows me to start spinning the story around it, expanding and developing and adding until sometimes the original germ of the idea has completely disappeared as it's subsumed by the bigger story it inspired.

I am just embarking on the fifth Amanda Doucette novel, and at the outset I knew only one thing; it would be set in British Columbia. Because of the constraints I'd set upon this series, it should involve Amanda creating a charity event somewhere in the wilderness. Luckily, British Columbia has plenty of absolutely spectacular wilderness, so there was a lot to choose from. After some thinking and some reading, I narrowed it down to the west coast of Vancouver Island, in part because I always travel for research and it's on my bucket list. But a setting does not make a story by itself. I needed an idea. So I started to read about the history and people of the area, looking for that inspirational grain of sand. Lots of history. Lots of drama. Shipwrecks and swindles and epidemics and heartbreaking loss. It was way too big a canvas. Most novels, especially mystery/ thrillers are about struggles and triumphs on a more intimate scale. So I continued to read, asking myself all the time "what is this book going to be about?"

Then this morning, the idea came to me in a single word. Hermits. Apparently the wild west coast of Vancouver Island is a haven for hermits. Every hermit has a very intimate story, of tragedy, triumph, rejections, and perseverance. And in that single word lay a world of possibilities. A grain of sand I can build a story around. In the few short hours since reading that, the tiniest pearl has already begun in my head. It will mean a whole lot more research but now it will be focussed. I will no longer be casting about aimlessly but slowly building the knowledge I need. I am still far from setting pen to paper, and I know there will be moments of despair and frustration as the story develops, but it's an exciting moment.

I even came up with the title, far earlier than I usually do. But that's a secret until I'm more confident about the pearl I'm hoping is in there.

 

Weekend Guest C. Michele Dorsey

We're delighted to welcome C. "Michele" Dorsey to Type M. Michele is the author of No Virgin Island and Permanent Sunset in the Sabrina Salter mystery series set on St. John in the US Virgin Islands. Michele is a lawyer, mediator and adjunct professor of law, who finds inspiration and serenity on St. John and on Cape Cod. She is co-chair of New England Crime Bake, Vice President of Mystery Writers of America, New England, and served on the board of Sisters in Crime, New England.

The Seeds of Story

I heard Walter Mosley use the term “unconscious writing” several times during this past weekend at the New England Crime Bake, where he was guest of honor. I haven’t been able to shake it. He talked about connecting with your unconscious mind. I think that is where the seeds of a story begin before the writer ever knows it. What follows is an evolution that can take years, even decades to root and grow.

Twenty years ago, my husband and I went on a trip to Ireland to visit our daughter who was attending Trinity College for her junior year. They waited in line to kiss the Blarney Stone, but I felt restless. I admitted to already being too full of blarney and walked through the grounds of the Blarney castle where a ground fog had risen and sent shivers throughout me, but not from the damp. Something intangible, visceral filled and excited me. Later, while visiting monk huts and other stone formations, I felt stirred by something close to being spiritual I still haven’t quite identified. But it remained with me.

During the intermittent years as I wrote more and more, I discovered myself using language that was not part of my daily vernacular, but had been used by my Irish grandmother. When I traveled to Mexico, I commented that a woman “hangs a nice wash” when I observed her colorful and orderly laundry drying on a clothesline, a phrase I later remembered my grandmother using. The more I wrote, the more her words surfaced.

Fast forward to June 2017 when I returned to Ireland for a five-day stopover on my way to Provence. A friend recommended a tour of Newgrange, a monument that is a thousand years older than the Pyramids, where historian Mary Gibbons leads you inside the oldest astronomical observatory in the world. Outside, on a cool misty day I looked out at fields of green that seem to extend forever, and I felt it again. But this time, I knew I felt like I had come home. Later as I stood on the Hill of Tara, the ancient royal site of the High Kings of Ireland, I could see twenty-three of Ireland’s thirty-two counties. While I had never been there before, it felt familiar.

By the time I arrived at the Dublin Writer’s Museum, I was relieved to be inside looking at concrete images in photos and at books and journals of Joyce, Wilde, and Yeats. I wondered why I hadn’t read more of them. But my TBR pile was already so high.

This September, I wandered onto an announcement for a course on James Joyce’s Dubliners at my local Open University, which I didn’t know existed. (To be fair, I’m new to the community.) The inner rumblings could no longer be disregarded. I enrolled and was ignited by the images of fictional people created by Joyce a hundred years ago that I felt I knew.

It was inevitable. The seeds had been planted long ago, maybe forever. I have an Irish story sitting inside of me now that is now screaming to be let out. The geographical images are there. The people are there. And the stirring from my unconscious mind can no longer be ignored. Now I must go write it.