Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Welcome










Everybody has a blog, right? So here goes. I'll try to answer questions that any of you may have, try to keep it interesting, if not always amusing.

There's so much I could talk about. The election campaign season is upon us here in America, and it should be an exciting time, with two viable candidates for the Democratic party's nomination for president, the likes of which we've never seen. Frankly, like most of the country, I am tired of the news coverage of the primary marathon.
I'd rather talk about writing. One of the most frequently asked questions of any writer is "where do you get your ideas?" Like most writers, I steal them. Just kidding, mostly. The answer is complicated. The idea for my first published novel, Miss McGhee, came from a character in another novel I wrote, the soon-to-be-released What's Best for Jane. So where did the idea for Jane come from? A dream. An image. And one fragment, a phrase, that kept repeating in my head.

Some books are driven by plot and action. My novels are character-driven. I think about a situation, sure, that I'd like to have a character address, an issue maybe. But usually it's all about a particular character, which I then put in a particular place and time.

Let's use Miss McGhee as our example. I had this woman in mind, and I put her in a particular era in American history, when there were rough and scary times, terrible and wonderful things happening in the country. The decades of the 1950's and 1960's then dictated some of the plot. The particular setting, Alabama during those decades, also demanded certain impacts on the plot.

I knew my character right down to the bones. I've often said that I know Mary McGhee so well, knew so deeply what I wanted her to say, that I could have put her in any situation, any time and place, and told the story I wanted to tell about her, simply because I knew her. I could make her a NASA scientist, an attorney, a school teacher, a wife and mother, a cop, a cab driver in New York, an insurance adjuster in California, a deep sea diver. For me, as a writer, it is all about knowing the character and knowing what I want to say about that character.

Some who have read this novel say that is is a romance, a love story. Some call it historical fiction. For me, it was simply about a woman coming to terms with herself.