Once I made it beyond that rough first 100 page mark, things really started to flow. My characters came alive for me, which always makes the writing take on a life of its own. Basically I’m recording this mysterious movie/play that’s being performed in my head. I have no idea how the process of creativity actually works, I just blindly and happily play along. Kind of like the way I enjoy technology—I have no idea how it works, I just enjoy the benefits.
I think part of the reason things get easier after those first 100 pages are written is that I now have at least a little shared history with my characters. The book has some substance to it, so I can imagine a future based on the foundation of the book’s own past. And it’s easier to follow my own advice about sticking to the plot points by “using what I have.” After Page 100, I have something to use.
And so more time has gone by than it appears on this blog, since I’ve been collecting content for this for weeks now but posting daily so there will always be something up. Good, productive weeks where the joy of writing has been felt more than the frustrations.
Yesterday I touched on one part of the personal satisfaction that comes with writing—those times when we need an escape from real life. But there are other times when writing has a different sort of benefit. Not so much an escape as a way to explore our own real life, and examine it from a “safer” distance by putting it on our characters, at least for a little while. I did this more obviously with The Oak Leaves, a story where the characters are dealing with Fragile X Syndrome, the disorder that affects my son.
But I’m finding myself doing something similar, on a smaller scale, with this book as well. That leads me to believe writers do this all the time.
This is how it’s working. Earlier this year, my mom passed away. She’d been declining in health for a couple of years so it wasn’t unexpected, but that final separation still brings grief, adjustment, and grief again.
For some, this might have been an ideal time to stop writing in the usual way, and turn to something else. Perhaps something like a journal. Or a blog. Doing anything but writing stories unrelated to my grief, certainly without a romance that’s inching toward a happy ending.
However my work in progress became my journal. In this book, still tentatively titled Brother’s All, there is an elderly woman who plays a rather pivotal part in the plot setup. If it wasn’t for her, my heroine might very well have joined the other refugees who fled ahead of the German army that ultimately occupies their small village in Northern France in 1914. When I envisioned the story I knew this older woman would be important, but I had no idea how important she would become to me personally. Because I don’t extensively plot, I wasn’t sure where this character would end up. I suppose I would have placed her with the other surviving characters, frail but alive.
Well, as it turns out this character decides she’s had enough of the occupying army, enough of the war, of starvation and pain. And so she decides she’ll die. I’m giving away nothing earth-shattering by revealing this. This character is far more important to the beginning of the story than to the climax.
Have I mentioned my father was a POW in the Second World War? He once told me that when a fellow prisoner gave up on life, it took about three days to die. Of course, the conditions in a Japanese prison camp were even harsher than the conditions I’ve set up for my characters, but my father’s memory of this was the inspiration behind my character’s decision. She gives away her limited rations, a sure sign of a death wish.
As my heroine watches this beloved character die (in a process that takes longer than three days, since the conditions are different from my father’s observations) I found myself reliving the goodbye I’d just experienced with my mom. As I mentioned, she’d been frail for some time, and very much wanted to go home to Jesus. But the body lives on whether we want it to or not, unless you’re living under an enemy regime. And so as I watched this character fade away, I was able to explore some of my own mourning, and incorporate it into the characters who faced this goodbye. For me it was as helpful as it was difficult to write.
When real life visits our books, I can’t help but think the story rings more authentically. And those pages flow faster, too.
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