Deepening the Read
You’d think that, when I sat at down with an open laptop, I knew what I was writing about, wouldn’t you?
Nope, not true.
It took a long time—and many comments by readers—for me to understand the point of my own writing. I don’t mean the characters—those came to life in the file with little help from me. (Goodness, wasn’t “on the page “so much more romantic?”) And not the plot, though I admit to being a “pantser,” as in “flying by the seat of my pants, versus a “plotter,” carefully laying out each step the characters take, like cues for actors on a stage.
My two published novels—so far—are Grab the Groom, an outrageous lampoon of reality dating shows and current culture, and the dual-time-period novel, Under Water. Under Water is literary fiction, depicting two time periods, the present and during the American Civil War. It highlights the real-life emotions and interactions of couples, married and not, and blends these with historical facts into a cohesive but fictitious story line.
Readers say they’ve learned “stuff” from reading Under Water. “Stuff” turns out to be a grab bag of items, from new words to Civil War era techniques of cooking and farming, to the history of race and anti-immigrant riots in the North during the early part of the 19th century, to accurately depicted medical interventions, and ways in which couples heal the rifts between them.
Grab the Groom, on the other hand, is irreverent, a take-off of The Bachelor, but with the production trapped on location by a storm, while the contestants die off one-by-one.
These books, I thought, were just stories, so disconnected as to be diametrically opposite: Under Water meaningful, and serious, quality writing with a story potentially cathartic to readers who’d gone through similar hardships and traumas. On the other hand, Grab the Groom was enormously fun to write, sardonic, irreverent, and goofy.
It took really listening to readers, hearing the subtext of their comments, to realize what my stories were really about. Despite their wildly different styles, both novels portray the desire for connections with others and the longing for family.
Grab the Groom focuses mainly on one ungainly and unloved little girl, who longs to be part of a loving family. It’s a classic underdog-wins-the-day story.
Under Water uses “family” as an emblem of a far bigger concept, our nation’s struggles for unity. America, which I dearly love and which was founded with a motto that states “out of many, one.”
These days, we need to honor that motto more than ever. I’d love for Under Water to help inspire that. The very definition of “family.”
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