This is a hard time in the writing for me. Several personal and professional activities and anxieties have sprung up that are demanding large chunks of my time and creative energy. I’ve started some new employment. I took a week off to visit my father and stepmother in Las Vegas. And I have been working on a particularly difficult part in the book.
It’s not so much that I have writer’s block, as I have brain overflow—so much to think about and do with many pieces of varying degrees of urgency. Plus, I have a passel of deadlines to meet. (I confess, beautiful and warm sunny days are also distracting.) So I have let the novel and the blog sit somewhat idly for a short spell. Not good.
But not crippling, either, just distracting. However, I still consider, posit, dream and write in my head, even when I am not at the computer or holding paper and pen in hand.
For instance, during the recent Easter visit with my parents, it was interesting to me to speak to my dad about how the novel is transpiring, particularly how pieces of information from different situations and memories get bound together sometimes for dramatic effect. For example, I learned from my mother how my dad proposed marriage to her. I learned from my father how he used to mow my great-grandmother Leta’s lawn in the time period between her marriages to Claud Bassett and Richard Eckman, while he was a student at the University of Toledo and also dating my mother. And I learned from my dad’s youngest cousin how he asked Leta for a loan to purchase a car. Using information from all three, as well as some knowledge and characteristics of the participants, I wrote a fictional version of my father’s marriage proposal more germane to more great-grandmother’s story. When I told my father, he said, “But that’s not how it happened.”
Of course, not exactly, but this is a novel, and my intention is to create a portrait of a person—my great-grandmother—using the fascinating details of her life, and combining, trimming, ordering and elaborating on situations and actions to form a richer story and perspective. Sadly, sometimes the actual can be too detailed, banal or even awkward. Okay, it can be hard to write, too.
Where I am in the novel now (and please note, I do jump around a bit) is in the midst of my great-grandmother Leta’s first divorce. This is from her marriage to my great-grandfather Ralph, the father of her children. It happened in 1922, when divorce was highly uncommon and divorced folks were ostracized, as were their children, which already makes the issue a bit sensitive.
I have a copy of the original divorce filing Leta made, and while it was interesting to read the first time of her claims and charges of neglect and abuse, it has been personally painful to recreate incidents based on her charges. These are my great-grandparents, after all, whom I remember with love. To create scenes of cruelty and maliciousness between them (even acknowledging that the document contains hyperbole) is, at minimum, uncomfortable. So I have been writing it slowly, taking emotional breaks to remind myself that this is a story, and while full of truth, the detail and some of the facts are entirely my own. I am writing about my great-grandparents and not about them at the same time.
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