Image: A view of Lake Lure from Chimney Rock State Park in North Carolina
Last week I mentioned the terrible news out of Chimney Rock, NC and asked everyone to send prayers and money. That post was sent before the full extent of the horrific flooding was known. Virtually every place we stopped at in Chimney Rock is gone. The road through Chimney Rock is gone in many places washed away by the raging Broad River. Chimney Rock is just one community of hundreds, or even thousands, who have been impacted by Hurricane Helene. Please send money to the relief organization of your choice to help the people whose lives have been devastated by the terrible storm. If you are unsure which agencies you can trust, check out Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org). They score charities on how well they serve their stated mission and how much of your donations actually go the cause you are supporting.
As a writer, events like this terrible storm provide fodder for our work. I cannot count the number of times I have heard authors say--and said myself--"I like to put ordinary people into extraordinary events and see what happens." That's a bit of a falsehood. Ordinary people suffer and frequently die. Writers tend to be attracted to characters who through their own special character, skills or perseverance not only survive, but thrive in the midst of these kinds of life changing events. It is never just luck or random chance that propels the character forward, unless the writer is a nihilist who wants to demonstrate that perseverance and character and special skills don't mean anything in this world.
There are rewards and risks to using historical events as the backdrop to a narrative. These events can be a type of shorthand backstory that doesn't require much definition or description for the reader. If you are writing about a child growing up during the depression, or an adult who did grow up during the depression, you can count on your reader bringing a cultural understanding of the depression to your narrative and skip the history lesson. The risk, of course, is that the depression was not a single monolithic event that everyone experienced the same way. It might be more interesting to write about a child who grew up in a financially secure home while others in the community were starving than to write about the starving child. But that might conflict with your reader's ability to accept the truth of your vision. I had a writing mentor who always told us that a 'probable impossibility' was more believable to your readers than an 'improbable possibility.' It's like getting to the end of a James Bond movie and right at the end of the last dramatic action segment someone blurts out "oh that couldn't happen." Duh.
As a writer, I like to look for ways to use those big historical moments with enough of a twist that the reader brings some cultural narrative to the novel but understands they lack the full picture. In Retribution I wanted to write a story about the American mob in the 1930s, but I did not set the novel in New York or Chicago. That story has been told too many times, and readers have such strong connections to those stories that it limits the scope of what you can do, so instead, I set the story in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland has its own rich history of the mob, but that setting freed us from expectations of what had come before. And if you are someone who believes you can't write a mob story without Eliot Ness there to fight back, well he actually moved to Cleveland after his time in Chicago, while there was a serial killer at work. I was able to work both of those facts into my novel. The things you find out doing research!
My newest project, The Devil's Interval, is set in France during WWII. Reims, France, during the German occupation. The war becomes a compelling backdrop for Inspector Marc Guyere, who wonders at one point how he can be caught up in the conflagration that is enveloping the world and all he is suffering is the disintegration of his marriage. Using the war as the setting of the story allows me to craft a novel that is part domestic drama, part murder mystery and part spy thriller. Powerful events can become powerful tools in our narratives as long as we don't get lazy and let them do all the work.
Win a free Kindle edition of Love: a novel of grief and desire: I work with Reader's Favorite on the Kindle book giveaway. If you go to readersfavorite.com/book-giveaway you can sign up for the monthly giveaway. You can scroll through the list of giveaways (over 500 each month) or sort the list by title or author to find Love: a novel of grief and desire and put your name in for this month's drawing. Good luck!
Comments