Serendipity by Sarah Bryant

“Where do you get your ideas?” is probably the most common question people ask me when I tell them that I’m a writer, and it’s definitely the most difficult to answer. It’s not so much that I don’t know (although at some point, flash-in-the-pan inspiration is always a factor) but that the origins of my books are usually so distant, so mundane, or so apparently unrelated to the finished product, that people either don’t believe me, or are disillusioned by the utter banality of the truth.
“Serendipity” is no exception. Its point of origin is seventeen years ago, my second year of university, when I was a competitive dinghy sailor. I woke up one morning from a dream about an old white wooden sailboat named “Heaven”, wanting to write about it, and sailing’s addictive quality, and of course, being a rose-tinted twenty year old, about love. The result was an abysmal short story about a girl who loved sailboats, and a boy who loved her. It sank into my “stories” folder without ever seeing the light of day, and I forgot about it until the following year, when my first real relationship ended in a spectacular mess.
Among other fallout, I quit sailing. I had to, if I didn’t want to see the boy in question every day. I missed it at least as much as I missed him, but there was no question of going back to either one. So what to do with the sudden, gaping hole in my life? Write about it, of course! I dusted off the sailboat story, trashed most of it, but kept the two characters and a few sentences belonging to each of them. Then I started listening. The guy was silent. But the girl had a lot to say about love and loss and disillusionment. I started writing.
It wasn’t until the following summer that Meredith’s pages of broken-hearted rumination began to take shape as a novel. But oddly, it had nothing at all to do with Meredith, or even sailboats. I was working that summer on a small teaching farm – a little bit of the nineteenth century marooned in the Massachusetts suburbs. Before I knew it, a world was forming in my head: one which took shape around that farm, as it might have been in a different time or place. And out of it, unexpectedly, the silent man began to speak. He was intelligent and wry and as-yet-inexplicably damaged. I put Meredith aside, and started writing Silence. I knew that they were connected, but how? Writing a novel about a sailing prodigy and a farmer seemed like a fool’s errand.
The answer came out of nowhere. Well actually it came from Adam, a friend I’d made at that farm, who announced one day, “My new favourite word is ‘serendipity’.” I asked him why, and he said, “Because serendipity explains everything.” I said, “Right, whatever,” but I found the word knocking around my head the next few days as I demonstrated the joys of cow milking and composting to a lot of hot, bored suburban children.
And then Adam took me to see his family’s farm. It had a huge old red barn, intriguingly empty. It was like a cathedral. It was big enough to hold a boat. And that was it, the flash in the pan: Silence was building a boat in his barn! And sooner or later he was going to need help; enter Meredith. Serendipity, indeed.
I’d like to say it all went smoothly from there, but that quote about love’s course hold true for novels too. I took “Serendipity” with me onto a writing masters program, thinking it was great. The tutor hated it, and did her level best to fail me. A year later, I was lucky enough to find an agent who loved it, and I thought I was sorted. Wrong again: the agent couldn’t sell it, and ultimately gave up on it. So did I.
I wrote other books, found publishers for them. It wasn’t until I was writing my third historical novel that “Serendipity” got its Eureka moment. I was bogged down in that third book, with two small children and too little time to do the research it required. Then something strange happened: I was slogging away at 19th century Edinburgh, but it was Meredith and Silence who kept speaking to me. And they were saying, “When are you ever going to figure it out? Our story belongs here!”
I still can’t believe that when I emailed my editor and said, “Um, about that book you’re expecting…is it okay if I write a completely different one?” she said yes without hesitation.
I took “Serendipity” back out, rewrote the first section as set in the 1890s rather than 1990s, and everything just fell perfectly into place. I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to see that this story had always belonged in an earlier era. At long last, despite myself (and with a little help from Bob Dylan – just read it, you’ll see!) I knew exactly how to make “Serendipity” into the book it was meant to be. And if it took me seventeen years? Well, better later than never!

http://www.sarahbryant.net/

The Poet's Wife by Judith Allnatt

John Clare is often referred to as peasant poet, genius and madman and it is true that mental illness dogged his later life, his identity fragmenting so that sometimes he would think himself to be Admiral Nelson, Lord Byron or a boxer of the day called Jack Randall.
Although I had enjoyed John Clare’s poetry for years, I had no knowledge of his madness until I came to live in his home county of Northamptonshire and started researching his prose writing at my local library. On that day, I was only intending to spend an hour researching but three hours later I was still scrolling through the microfiche, interpreting the elegant but curlicued handwriting of his letters. The letters that had caught my attention so thoroughly were those written to his family from the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. Through his own words you could trace his heartbreaking mental decline.
Despite being kindly treated and given every comfort at the asylum, at times he is clearly distressed and afraid; he refers to it as a ‘Hell’ and a ‘Bastille’. He speaks of his ‘captivity among the Babylonians’ and warns his sons not to visit him in case they are ‘trapped as prisoners’. Most touching of all is his continuing desire to return home; he longs to ‘hunt in the woods for yellow hyacinths, Polyanthuses and blue Primroses as usual and go in the Meadows a-fishing.’
His final letter, written in 1860 in reply to a well-wisher, Mr. James. Hipkins, reads:
Dear Sir
I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of & why I am shut up I don’t know I have nothing to say so I conclude
Yours respectfully
JOHN CLARE

Reading a man’s actual words as he becomes more and more lost and bewildered is a moving experience and I felt that I had made an emotional connection with the person and not just the poet. I decided to find out more about his family, and how his illness had affected them: in particular his wife, Patty Clare.
It was while reading his journal, ‘Journey out of Essex,’ that it became apparent that John had absconded from his place at a previous asylum and walked the eighty miles home, not to return to his wife and family but to find his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce. I discovered that he had remained obsessed with his early love and believed himself twice married, to both Patty and Mary. What must it be like to be married to a man, have nine children with him, two of whom die in infancy, and then find that you are losing him to his illness and to his delusions about another woman? This was something I just had to write to find out. I felt sure that there was a powerful story to be told: of love and loss, broken identity, poems and passion.
My journey took me along field margins and through brambled ways, from the mansion of Burghley House, where John once worked as a gardener, to tiny cottages dwarfed by the vastness of a fenland sky. The contrast between the splendour of a building where even the hallway is as big as a barn, and the cramped accommodation of the cottages with their dirt floors and low eaves, was sharp. At one point, eleven of the Clare family were sharing a cottage with only two rooms. Such proximity wasn’t only an inconvenience in terms of privacy; when illness struck it ran rampant through a family forced to share their sleeping quarters. As I stood in the hall at Burghley with its marble and richly painted ceilings, the huge polarity between rich and poor was starkly evident. Another theme began to develop, the greed of the powerful at the time of enclosure of the common land, and its impact on the rural poor who no longer had grazing for their beasts or were even allowed to collect firewood on land owned by the huge estates.
I visited most of the settings used in the book, not only to collect the small details and sense impressions that help a writer to bring a place to life for the reader, but because I needed to get as close as possible to my characters. There’s nothing quite like standing where you imagine a character to have stood for allowing you to fully inhabit them and to see with their eyes. Standing at the foot of Mary Joyce’s grave in the churchyard at Glinton, I remember pondering a while upon Patty’s ambivalent feelings about her rival. Placing yourself in the character’s setting and just being quiet and still is one of the best ways I know to listen in, as it were, to their thoughts.
This novel evolved to include many things. It’s about a woman’s attempt to restore her husband to his true self, as his identity begins to fragment. It’s about the struggle to hold a family together and about memory and its power to sustain us through the trials of a difficult present. But most of all it’s a story about married love, widely experienced but written about less often than romantic courtship, a love that is inevitably more difficult when rooted in the reality of everyday life and assailed by losses and misfortunes over time but also deep, knowing and forgiving. In writing the novel I hoped that readers of ‘The Poet’s Wife’ would become as fond of Patty as I was and that her story would move them, just as I was moved when I first read John Clare’s letters home.

http://www.judithallnatt.co.uk/
Blog at : http://authorsplace.co.uk/judith-allnatt/

Kill-Grief by Caroline Rance

A scribbled sentence in sepia ink; the scrawl of someone who drew the short straw and took the minutes of a meeting in 1756. I was looking through the archives of Chester Infirmary when I found a detail that spoke of lives and stories lost to history.

The note recorded that the infirmary's porter had been sacked for drunkenness. This wasn't a one-off bender – he'd been warned about his drinking before, and had now used up his last chance. The governors paid him his wages plus an extra 10 shillings, and sent him on his way. That note is pretty much the porter's entire contribution to posterity. Without the booze, he wouldn't have left any impression on the historical record at all. And if that had happened, he'd be like most people who have ever lived.

What was he like as a person, I wondered? Why did he drink so heavily? What had happened in his past and where did he go after he was booted out of the hospital? Why did the governors give him that 10 shillings?

This snippet of information inspired the gin theme of Kill-Grief and the porter, Anthony Wells, became one of the main characters. He's not a typical romantic hero. On the contrary, he's wasted much of his past and, to begin with, doesn't see much of a future either. But the story isn't really about him. It's about Mary Helsall, a young woman who becomes a nurse, challenges the prevailing stereotypes about women in medicine, and fights for survival against the shadows of her past and her own flawed character. The inspiration for her, too, came from brief mentions of nurses in the infirmary records. I was intrigued by the fact that a nurse called Mary Kelsall (I changed the spelling for the book) only lasted a few weeks in the job, to be replaced by someone called Mary Jones. What if, I wondered, the two names belonged to the same person?

Eighteenth-century nurses didn't (and still don't) have a great reputation – they are often seen as drunk, incompetent slatterns – but they were individuals coping with exhausting work, inadequate resources and violent patients. It would hardly be surprising if they sought to numb their emotions with alcohol, but I wanted to bring them into the light and portray them as individuals.

Mary finds herself on the receiving end of the stereotype – her perceived lack of morals meets with either disapproval or prurience from others – but although she is sometimes infuriating and self-destructive, she begins to discover just how capable she really is. She and Anthony realise that they don't have to accept what life has dealt them. Instead, they can use the only thing they have left – determination – to carve out their own future.

Although I started out by looking at historical sources, the book is completely fictional. I've no idea whether the real Chester Infirmary had anything to do with smuggling, murder, gin-fuelled romance or dodgy dealings in body parts – but through some tiny snapshots of real lives long forgotten, the characters emerged, and their story took shape around them.

Website: http://www.carolinerance.com/
Blog: http://thequackdoctor.com/

Sweetsmoke by David Fuller

Inevitable

By David Fuller

I hold in my hands a hardcover copy of Sweetsmoke. It is real, it is solid, and when I open it, familiar words fill my eyes. The words seem to have a life of their own as they carry me into the 19th Century and into Cassius's world, and it takes a moment for me to remember that these words were written in this chair, here at this desk, in this office. The book rests in my hands as if it were inevitable, as if the future held its breath waiting for these pages to arrive.

Couldn't be further from the truth. There was nothing inevitable about the creation of this novel. Its birth followed a series of steps and missteps that played out over years of work, and if not for other supposedly "inevitable" projects that fell short of their inevitable status, Sweetsmoke would not have existed at all. My life could easily have traveled a different path whose final destination would have been far afield, yet appeared equally inevitable.

Let me take a moment to note the distinction I make between inevitability and Fate. Fate, to me, is Homerian. Fate suggests gods and goddesses with some soothsayer's sense of foreboding.  Fate determined the early death of Achilles, but first he had to make the choice to go to Troy. And it was a choice, offered by his mother, Thetis: he could live a quiet life into anonymous old age, or go out in a brilliant, explosive flame of combat that would cause his name to chime through history. Even in Homer's world, fate was not inevitable, although many would argue that Achilles could make no other choice.

In my definition, fate has a storybook sense of propulsion. The best writers foreshadow fate in their texts so that a reader is not taken by surprise when a character reaches his or her... inevitable end.

Inevitable is a different beast. Inevitable plays out in hindsight. By that rule, everything in life is inevitable. I choose not to see Sweetsmoke as inevitable. Certainly, key elements in my life guided me to Sweetsmoke. To begin with, family history. I have been told that more than 140 of my ancestors fought, on both sides, in the Civil War — also known as the War Between the States, or the Recent Unpleasantness. Among those ancestors was a famous Confederate general. I discovered, while doing research for the novel, that he was a slave owner. The fact of this history (including the slave-owning ancestor) does not make a book about a slave on a tobacco plantation inevitable, of course, nor does it make inevitable that I would write about the Recent Unpleasantness. But it is a marker by which you can track the decision to start the research (research that took over eight years) that led me to write the book. Here is another marker: when I was seven years old, my family moved to Europe and we lived there for four years. This gave me an outsider's perspective, one that allowed me to see the world through the point of view of other human beings. I'd like to think that I had a natural empathy, as well, but this experience certainly turned on that light. The most important outsider's perspective came to me in a stunning revelation when I returned to the United States: I suddenly saw my country in a different, unexpected, and unflattering light. This was a larger step to seeing through the eyes of a slave in Civil War Virginia. But again, it did not make writing the novel inevitable.

As a teenager, I worked for an African American production company and did illustrations, paintings, for a multi-media presentation about black history in the United States entitled We Are Black. Add that marker to the path, but keep in mind that it was by accident that I absorbed African American history. In college, I gave up painting as a possible vocation and took to filmmaking. I recognized I would need to learn to write if I was to become the filmmaker I hoped to be. Another marker, this time a step in the direction of eventually writing prose.

My screenwriting career touched many moments of inevitability while it was unfolding, at least from the point of view of friends and family. If certain movies had been blessed with better timing, more appropriate directors, different studios or producers or stars, it is possible I would never have written prose at all. If that big budget action movie had been better and sold tickets, I might have been typecast as an action writer, and possibly, inevitably, evolved into a director of action films. One television pilot seemed, at the time, so inevitable to everyone in Hollywood that my agent began to look for new clients so that he could start to build their careers, as my career (with my writing partner) was obviously set. The pilot had a fine script, a hot actor, a major studio, and one of the big four networks behind it. Agents of other writers were so certain we were on the air that a stack of writing samples began to arrive so we could build our writing staff. We did not make it on the air, and to this day, that pilot remains unseen. The reasons for its demise were so random, that as the façade of inevitability fell away, I was left baffled by the entire experience.

Very well. Let's just say that Sweetsmoke stands on the backs of many failures. Had any one of those failures come to fruition, then that piece of work would have seemed inevitable and left Sweetsmoke somewhere out in the rain.

What is inevitable, if you know me and my writing, is that for this work to exist, Cassius could not be a victim, despite the fact that he lives in a world of extraordinary oppression. In order to be able to write Sweetsmoke, this was an absolute. It was my way into the story, through Cassius's strength, not the horror of his circumstance. It was also inevitable, if I was to tell the story, that I would not depict noble slaves toiling under the gaze of mustache-twirling, Simon Legree-like masters. Slaves and planters alike would have to be complex, conflicted, political human beings, as intelligent, stupid, conniving, and generous as every other human being. While this may connote an unfair use of the word inevitable, it is the only way I see it applying to my book.

The story of Sweetsmoke was born and evolved inside me, maybe from the moment I returned to the United States as a boy, or maybe from the time I learned African American history. When it emerged, it came fully formed into my mind. I knew it would have to be set in Virginia, on a tobacco plantation, during the war. I knew Cassius would be a carpenter, as carpenters had more freedom than other slaves. I knew there would be a mystery and a murdered woman, and I knew she would be a freed slave and a spy for the North. I knew that her back story would involve Cassius on a personal level. I also knew that the mystery would provide the bones that would allow me to apply the muscles, blood, and skin of historical fiction in order to explore the character of Cassius. I did not know that Cassius and his story would bother me, push me, and force me to continue until the book was done. It would not let go. It was as if, once the story came to me, seeing it through to its conclusion was inevitable. Or perhaps it was Fate.

http://www.sweetsmokedavidfuller.com/