D. Hart St. Martin

I make female heroes badass AND believable

writing process

Celebrate the Women Part 2

by

A silly start to world building

The members of my writing group are all confused. They keep expecting Lisen’s Garla, but we’re not in Garla anymore. Last week I wrote about the process of creating Garla, of what it took to make the absence of sexism, the elevation of women to absolute equality, work. This week, I’ll tell you about the creation, in the wake of that revolutionary society, of a world that isn’t a cookie-cutter imitation of Garla, a world that can stand on its own without leaving me yearning to return to that world where I spent so many years rather than staying with my new world in progress. A world called Azzur.

The story of Mari Spencer, the protagonist of my current project, begins on earth, just as Lisen’s did, but where Lisen had a destiny and her life had not begun here on earth, Mari is all human with no prophecies to bind her. I started with a magical forest. In order to move from one world to another, there must be a portal, and the forsaken forest is that portal for Mari. She also has a guide, a woman named Tula who lives within that forest. Now all of that was easy, but where could I go from there? Where was the fantasy world I wanted Mari to discover?

City of Afra with pencil notations

The world Mari ends up in is Azzur. Actually, that’s the name of a city state with Afra as its capital. I wanted something not entirely typical of fantasy settings, nothing medieval, thank you, so I settled on the fertile crescent, the cradle of civilization—Mesopotamia—as my jump-off point. That was the easy part. Plop a river down, place cities on its banks and move on from there. The physicalities were not at issue.

What was at issue was how men and women related to each other in this world. In my research, I was pleased to discover that during King Hammurabi’s time, his code may have restricted married women from participating in commercial pursuits, but many women engaged in business anyway. Property was left to them by their husbands, and they then left that property to their children. Now this may seem like a given these days, but back then, it was a very big deal.

So how was I to make this world palatable to my feminist sensibilities without simply duplicating Garla? It took a while, as it always does, but here’s what I came to. I began with Azzur having a ruler whose eldest child inherits regardless of gender. Men and women are equal in their spiritual life with the priesthood in the Temple open to both. In addition, the higher the social class, the more equal women are. But why? Why the upper classes but not the working masses?

Eventually I discovered—because world building is a process of discovery—that the existence of only female serpents (read, dragons), which are bonded to the royal family, triggered this effect. When I decided these female serpents would be parthenogenic—able to reproduce without the aid of a male—I realized this had motivated the royals into a belief that the bodies of females of any species knew somewhere deep within how to reproduce without the assistance of their corresponding males.

With their survival at risk, the male royals took their cue from the female serpents and started treating their own female counterparts as equals. The closest upper classes, including the priests in the temple, followed suit. On the other hand, the further down the social ladder a person lands, the more likely they are to think of the serpents as only a myth and—if they’re even aware of the serpents’ unique method of reproduction—parthenogenesis as part of that myth. Therefore, this equality of the sexes only goes so far, but in the upper stratosphere of Azurian hierarchy, it is a given.

If this sounds a bit contrived, it is. At this point. Book 1 of this series is in the midst of rewrite, and more will likely be revealed as I reach completion of this first story. World building is a process, with each step dependent on the last, and all steps open to reconfiguration, if necessary, until they’ve been permanently enshrined in print. We’ll see how things change by the time I publish this book.

Point of View

by

Old drafts die hard

Let me begin by saying this is not a lecture on the variations of POV or how to maintain a consistent POV or anything like that. This is, instead, the story of a decision I made a week ago to change the POV in my current work in progress from limited third to limited first and in essence junking previous drafts. I am, not coincidentally, also shifting the tense of my novel from past to present.

I jumped into this decision (well, not jumped exactly—I did consider it carefully first) knowing it would require some work. I did not, however, believe it could be all that difficult. In the past, I’d moved characters from one geographic location to another, deleting them from scenes in the initial setting and inserting them into scenes in the new location. It’s work because the information each scene provides must be preserved, and the character can’t look like they’ve been dumped into a scene (or scenes) they hadn’t occupied in the initial draft(s). Now, that’s complicated. But that change in pronouns and tense? Easy.

Not so fast. What I’ve come up against is the reality that my POV character (both in third and first person) has a distinctive voice and tone, both of which are dominating a myriad of little changes in the text now that she is the official narrator. Mari, my hero and now narrator, is fifteen years old and a contradiction in every way. She is bright, witty, snarky and insecure to the max. She suffers from more low self-esteem than your average teen, and she’s subject to occasional painful rages. All of this has risen up in the text now that she’s doing the talking.

I love how it’s turning out. I’ve just completed reading the first chapter aloud, and it’s working. I think. We authors are an insecure lot, aren’t we?

Why I Write

by 1 Comment

Writing keeps me sane.

I’ve been saying that for years. I’ve been saying it for years because it’s true. On days when I produce no words, edit no words, format no words, I end that day filled with anxiety and dread. I experience those feelings every day, but when I don’t write, I have nothing to keep me afloat. Hence, I drown in the waves of overwhelming fear, the undertow of sheared nerves pulls me into its embrace, and I become a less attractive, more-depressed-than-manic Harley Quinn.

I need to write. I cannot not write. It determines my mood and predicts every move I make from sunrise to sunrise. My life centers around my characters and their ups and downs. I talk to them. I mean, I literally talk to them. Especially late at night. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t live alone. How would I get by without my daily discussions with my favorite characters?

With Lisen of Solsta, it was Korin. For anyone who’s read the books, that should come as no surprise. He and I would play act final scenes which would then inform many of the earlier scenes. Now that I’ve left Lisen and Korin behind, I’ve turned to discussions of what-happens-next with Mari, my new hero. For some reason play acting didn’t work with her, so we sit on the edge of the bed together, in the dark, discussing where to go from here or what happens later in the next book in the series.

This is what writing is for me, a life lived in part in another world. Even if I weren’t writing fantasy, I’d spend an hour or two or three a day at the very least in whatever place and time I had set the current story. And going through life that way, with one foot in Southern California of 2019 and the other in an alternate dimension linked to earth via a sacred grove in a forsaken forest, keeps me sane.

Note: I want to thank Jan Maher for my most viewed blog yet. Her responses to my questions in that first interview sparked a lot of interest. And thank you, all of you, wherever you are, for visiting my site.

INTERVIEW – Jan Maher

by 9 Comments

Jan Maher

First, I must thank Jan Maher for volunteering to be the guinea pig for this new feature on my blog. I believe in supporting other authors, and when the idea of interviewing authors for my blog occurred to me, Jan was my first choice.

I’ve known Jan for 25 years or so, ever since our days on the Women Who Write AOL message board. I did not, however, appreciate the level of her talent until I read Earth As It Is (you can find my review here) about a year ago, and it was a natural progression to asking her to help me by submitting herself to my questionable skills as an interviewer.

A novelist, playwright, and occasional poet, Jan Maher lives and writes in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. Her novel Earth As It Is was named a Best Indie of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews; Heaven, Indiana was chosen a Best Indie of 2018. 

You can contact Jan via her website where you can also subscribe to her incredibly infrequent blog.

Hart: What genre or genres do you write in? What attracted you to that genre? Do you read more books in that genre, or do you indulge in genres outside your specialty?

Jan: I consider my primary genre to be literary fiction, which is to say it is character-driven and doesn’t fit well in any other genre category, though it often overlaps with other genres.

Earth As It Is, for example, shares a bit of the Venn diagram with LGBTQ, and Heaven, Indiana might be seen as Women’s Fiction; Earth could be considered Historical; both are the subset of Midwestern. I’d call them both “crossover” and “up market” in that they are appealing to a general audience, not solely a literary fiction or niche readership.

I also write plays and occasional poetry. Except for poetry, in which I’m more often focused on capturing a mood or set of images, it’s the characters who compel my interest. Who are they? What drives them? What do they want? What actions do they take to get it? What kind of trouble does that get them into? How do they resolve that?

I read mostly general and literary fiction. I love a good gentle mystery now and then when the world seems too complex. Every great once in a while I’ll jump into a well-constructed fantasy world (such as, ahem, Solsta) and binge read for three or four days. And I read a lot of non-fiction, especially if it’s about neuroscience (for lay folk) or health.

H: Thank you for the mention. So, tell me, do you have a current release you’d like to promote? 

J: Earth As It Is is my most current release. This novel is the story of a crossdressing dentist who, devastated by his war experiences and disenchanted by what it brings out in men, opts for post-war life presenting as a female hairdresser in the small town of Heaven, Indiana.

As Charlene, she quickly establishes her salon as the place where Heaven’s women safely share their secrets even as she deftly manages to keep her own story hidden. What she has not planned on is falling in love with her loyal customer Minnie. Anyone who is curious to know what happens next is invited to read the book! 

H: I really enjoyed Earth As It Is and am currently reading Heaven, Indiana. Both of these take place in Heaven, Indiana in the mid-20th century. The entire setting feels remarkably authentic. What is your research process when writing about a time and a place that even for us of a certain age is only a dim memory?

J: I have a few different research processes. Since I grew up in Indiana, some of the research is into my own dim memory, calling up the sensory details, experiences, and emotions of my childhood. When I go back to visit cousins who still live in Indiana, I love the storytelling: sharing what we remember, and until just a few months ago when the remaining sibling in my mother’s generation died at the age of 96, listening to the stories of the elders.

I also do a lot of book-based research and internet-based research. Right now for example, in my files for my work-in-progress, I have information about spare parts for Italian-made espresso machines, soil types of eastern Indiana, hog farming, tornadoes, and Klan activity in the year 2004 among other things.

For Heaven, I remember reading or browsing stacks and stacks of books about carnivals in the Midwest and Romani life in the United States. I wrote to small-town reference librarians and asked for notable events in their communities’ histories, especially related to the Underground Railroad. I visited small-town library reference rooms and read centennial yearbooks.

For Earth, my research topics included the Galveston, TX storm of the century, one-room schoolhouses in Texas, the 1918 influenza epidemic, and the first dental college in Texas—all of which supported writing that was edited out of the final manuscript—as well as The Battle of the Bulge, crossdressing, dentistry in World War II, night clubs in the early 1960s in Chicago, what was on television in January 1964, etc.

For this project, I literally Googled my way through by starting with the year 1900 as the presumed year my protagonist was born. One set of answers led to new questions, and those potential answers led to still more questions, and I never knew what would come next until it arrived and declared its place in the story!

H: We authors do have interesting browsing histories, don’t we. So, further to these two books and your process, when did you come upon the truth about Charlene? You mostly slip past her in Heaven, Indiana, and I found myself wondering when her back story crystalized for you to the point where Earth As It Is became your necessary next book?

J: The story of Charlene as told by Seese in Heaven, Indiana is a snippet loosely inspired by a bit of a story my mother told me about a hairdresser in her home town who was discovered, upon her death, to be a man. There were very few details in my mother’s story. I took the basic idea and created a couple of fictional details that served the purpose for Heaven, but the overall story of Charlene remained a snippet. My readers knew as much about her as I did, and it wasn’t very much.

Then, around 2002, in a writing group, we took on an exercise exploring three minor characters in work we’d already completed. Charlene was one of three I chose to explore from Heaven, and she’s the one who simply wouldn’t go away. I read and re-read the two or three pages in Heaven that describe her and started asking all the questions that had gone unanswered in those pages. Where did she come from? When did she first cross dress? Was she ever anything other than a hairdresser? Why did she choose Heaven as her adopted home town?

I filled pages in my journal with questions and what ifs. Based in the handful of “facts” in Heaven, I posited possibilities, explored them through research and writing, and using what I call the pasta method, saw what stuck to the page the way well-cooked pasta sticks to the wall.

I’m not sure when Charlene’s story became my necessary next book, but I will share with you the biggest surprise of discovering her story. At one point when I’d written her childhood, her marriage, her life as a dentist in Chicago, her war experiences, and had gotten her to Heaven, a friend in my writing group who’d been there through all those years of development (did I mention I’m a slow writer?) asked if she was ever going to be able to come out to anyone and be in a relationship with anyone or was she doomed to live out her life in her self-imposed isolation? Elizabeth insisted that she would have to have a friend and confidant; otherwise, the story would simply be too depressing.

It caught me by surprise but it felt absolutely true as soon as she asked the question: Charlie/Charlene had to have a beloved. So I again re-read Heaven, Indiana, looking for clues as to who it might be. After exploring one or two other characters and hitting dead ends, I realized the answer was in a line in the very first chapter of Heaven, where Helen Breck is described as walking past Charlene’s Beauty Shop waving to Minnie, first customer of the day.

Now, Minnie in Heaven is seen mostly as an older woman and a terrible gossip. But it felt incontrovertibly true that it would have to be Minnie. I was gob-smacked. Flabbergasted. And finally, intrigued and challenged to get to know Minnie as deeply as I’d gotten to know Charlene and figure out how the heck they might have ended up as lovers.

H: I love when characters take over the story. I’m curious. What author revs your creativity engine? Is it a particular work by this author? All of their work? Or the author themself?

J: Toni Morrison. All of her work. Every delicious word. Same with Marilynne Robinson’s fiction (her essays not so much). Most of Louise Erdrich. I like Jose Saramago’s work quite a lot, too. There’s something in each of them that makes me feel, “Oh, you can really do that in writing! Wow! Okay.”

H: Is there a quote that drives you in your day-to-day life?

J: Whether it’s a direct quote or a paraphrase is impossible to know in this day of memes and minimal citation, but the Dalai Lama is said to have said, “If you can, help others. If you cannot, at least try not to hurt them.” That’s my day-to-day life quote. My writing life quote is from Rumi: “Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”

H: What is the ratio of reading to writing in your life? Does it vary? Or is there a static give and take between the two?

J: Not enough to not enough, so maybe that’s a one to one?

H: Do you schedule time for your writing? Or do you just grab the odd minute or hour when it makes itself available to you?

J: It depends on the project and the phase. I keep a very messy journal and try to at least grab the odd minute or hour in which to jot down new ideas, work on smaller pieces, or move a longer piece forward a bit.

When I’m far enough into a project that I start to live in that world more than in what we tend to call “the real world,” I will schedule time, as much as possible, till I have a full draft. I stay in that mode through revisions and first edit. I return to it when the book is completely edited (by someone else) and it’s time for a proofreading or two or three or five before it heads to the printers.

Thank you for inviting me to share my work and thoughts with your blog readers!

H: And thank you, Jan, for your wonderful and inspiring answers.

It’s the Process

by 2 Comments

TRUST IT NO MATTER HOW &#*%ING HARD IT GETS

Chapter 7. Sounds innocuous enough, doesn’t it? Chapter 7. Somewhere close to midway or so, perhaps? It’s a chapter, simple. Nope. Chapter 7 of my current work in progress is where everything fell into a dark hole.

Into the Forsaken Forest is the first in a series of four or five books (depending on how things work out). The series will detail the adventures of a teenage girl, Mari, who is magically transported from earth to a place called Azzur on multiple occasions. I’ve been pantsing it with notes but no outline. I did, however, have a plan of sorts—thirty chapters, 60+K words.

I reached the first draft of chapter 20 near the end of July 2018 and hit a wall. I’d just brought Mari back to Azzur on her third trip and realized there was simply too much jumping back and forth for a mere 60+K words. Too much traffic between here and there. Here’s what I wrote at the top of my notes that day. → → → →

I backed up, all the way to chapter 3, and canceled Mari’s initial leave-taking from Azzur. I made her stay. This required mooshing things together. I took chapters apart and put them back together again, using the useful and discarding the rest. And when I arrived at the original chapter 12, which had been reduced to chapter 7, I decided to get the chapter breaks back in line to the original draft so I wouldn’t have to do quite so much work on transitions from that point on. But chapter 7 ended up being way too long. (Not unlike this paragraph. Sorry.)

This week, the official rewrite of the first draft with the above changes brought me back to chapter 7 (née 12). As I worked on it, I felt like I was riding a bicycle on a cobblestone road. The damn thing was bumpy, no flow at all. There’s a significant conversation in this chapter, and it had to roll, not jostle.

I’d also pulled the last 300 or so words from the chapter and repositioned them at the top of chapter 8 in order to shorten 7. But on reading the chapter aloud, I realized it simply wasn’t working without the original neat cut-off. So I edited some words out and returned the original ending to where it had begun.

If you’re still following me here, thank you. I will continue.

I took chapter 7 into my writing workshop this week, thinking they’d rip it apart and give me guidance on how to turn this bumpy thoroughfare into something workable. They didn’t. They praised it, said the conversation was great, that it gave the reader a break from the previous action while not feeling like an info dump. The chapter read smooth and worked for them. (And trust me, they would have told me if it hadn’t.)

So next week I take in chapter 8. Let’s see what they think of that one.

Why it Takes so Damn Long

by 3 Comments

Inspired by a year’s end blog post from author E.J. Dawson, I found myself pondering the relative slowness with which I produce scenes, chapters, books. I am forever berating myself for my laziness, the fact that I sit around a good portion of my day staring at the television and not writing. Hart, I say to myself, look at how much everyone else is able to write in a day, a week, a year. Why are you so slow?

As I read E.J.’s post, “Write the Darkness Within,” I felt envy for her prolific pen—6 books in a year!—and recognized in her struggles with her demons something similar to my situation. I write to ease anxiety. I write to save my soul. I’ve known this for years. I know I feel better on the days I’ve sat down and punched out a page or two. What I did not recognize until now, however, was how very hard each of those pages was to produce.

My mother didn’t love me. Oh, I know, you’ve heard that sad cliché far more times than you can count. But it was more than that. By taking away anything I started before I could finish it—all in the name of protecting me from disappointment—she taught me that I couldn’t finish anything.

And to this day I can’t. I set out to clean the house. I do the floors and vacuum half the carpeting, promising myself I’ll finish up tomorrow or the next day; I don’t. I begin neatening up my patio, and I stop with leaves remaining to be raked and only the open areas swept. I’m even having trouble finishing writing this.

But here’s one thing I can do. I can write a book. I have, in fact, published 7 of them over the last 6 years, with an 8th written and traversing the dangerous territory of rewrite at the moment. The one and only thing I consistently finish is the creation of a story and the fulfillment of the fullness of its truth in tens of thousands of words—sometimes even over 100,000 of them.

How is that? I don’t know. Save for that save-my-soul thing which I’ve always discounted. Until today when I read the aforementioned post.

Most writers must practice the most meticulous discipline, often to the point of ritual, in keeping to their goals. It’s hard to sit down in that chair and open up to the muse day after day. Much like the mind in meditation, we writers are constantly bombarded by thoughts and distractions that would steal us from our work. I’m not alone in that.

But here’s the thing. It turns out, because of my mother’s intrusions in any process I began and my lack of trust in my abilities to finish anything, writing slow is the only way I can write at all. I plod along, and that plodding gets it done. Eventually. And the fact that I’ve finished 8 books serves as testimony to my perseverance. The one thing I can do, the one thing I can finish to its end, is the creation of a story.

I am prolific. I’m just prolific at a slower pace.