The parable of a character gone rogue

 For me, writing is a calling. But until writing the second Mid-Mississippi Valley Mystery, Midnight Mass Murder, which should be available the day after Thanksgiving, I didn't realize how writing fiction is a spiritual work that reveals a lot about how God fully knows us and how we also have independent agency, free will, to go in a direction He has not chosen- to go rogue. I've seen hints of this before when I've read or heard an author tell about how a character's choices shifted the story even though the character is a pure invention and the author is technically in charge.

The characters I thought I knew from the first book, Stuck In the Mud, bring their same issues and habits to Midnight Mass Murder, but as they interact with some of the new characters, they reveal things about their pasts, their opinions, and their motives that I did not plan. So, I find myself surprised and delighted by what is unfolding as well as sometimes dismayed and terrified. 

I realize that it is Psalm 139 unfolding and flowing out of my pen. I have created these characters. I thought I had intricately penetrated into the deepest layers of their hearts. I know them. I know how they respond. I know what they are thinking about. I know where they are going and when and even where they rest. I know what they are going to say, until they surprise me. But even then, like the psalmist recognizes, even if they take flight and go to the farthest edges of heaven or hell or the sea, they cannot escape from my observations. As the the author, I must answer the character's rogue revelation by asserting my intimate omniscience until they yield again to the current of the plot pulling them towards the conclusion of the story.

This makes me appreciate the love of God more. He doesn't interfere when we go rogue but neither does He abandon us to our rants and wanderings. He is with us. We can't escape His notice. He doesn't let anything destroy us before out time this woos us to Himself like nothing else. Let God search me and know my heart more fully than I can ever know one of my characters.

Coincidence?

I was talking about Stuck in the Mud with a volunteer at our museum yesterday. When I mentioned that one of the three corpses washed up at the Ste. Genevieve marina, he became very animated. "I found a floater once," he said. "I was working on a barge and we saw this guy - he was falling apart in the water." Then he described how the body was removed from the river with a crane and a body board to keep the corpse intact. Do you think this is just a coincident, some serendipitous interchange that just happened to take place when I was working on the discovery and removal of a floater. I am definitely incorporating what he told me into this story

Life in other people's mind-movies

Some of my favorite people are:
Nero Wolf
Temperance Brennan
Kay Scarpetta
Nancy Drew
Cherry Ames
Olivia Paras
Miss Marple
Hercule Poirot
Ruby Rothman
Hardy Boys
Peter Whimsey
Brother Cadfael
Encyclopedia Brown
Suzanna Appleton
Sherlock Holmes
Each is terribly predictable and totally compelling. They don't take a lot of my time ever but when I get into a conversation with any of them it usually lasts several hours during which I prefer not to be interrupted. I'm sure there are others whom I should have included on the list. Of course, some of them I have outgrown but they are fond memories of Saturday and evening adventures from decades ago.

I wonder if my imagination will proliferate so contagiously....Will my characters live in other people's mind-movies? Have I mentioned that I do not tend to watch or even enjoy watching movies - I prefer the ones that play in my own mind between the covers of certain books.

Courage and Camouflage

It is hard enough to honestly evaluate secret things in our deceitful hearts when we probe them through reflection, meditation, prayer, therapy. These means may allow us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves but certainly no therapist or spiritual counselor expects us to install a window into our heart for the world's peeping Toms vicariously to peek through the slats of its blinds.

Fiction forces us to wash our windowpanes.

More than that: writing compelling fiction takes a mighty courage that tears the blinds down in the plain view of perfect strangers and long time friends.

Of course there is the camouflage of the story.

A friend of several decades called yesterday to say she had finally read Pastor's Ex-Wife. She admired what she called my courage and also enjoyed the story in its own right. Perhaps it takes even more courage to read what a friend writes. And, perhaps the mark of a true friend respects the boundaries between fact and fiction by refusing to risk asking where those boundaries are....

Historical Needles in Archival Haystacks

Yesterday I attended a women's club meeting at lunch and happened to mention that I am writing a mystery set in our town to a friend who was sitting across from me. So, rather than taking in the information and making it perhaps cause for a small conversation she shouted the information down the table. To my surprise, everyone seemed impressed and ready to read the finished product even though it truly is months away.

Rather than inspire me to write the next section, I came home tired after another meeting took care of dinner. I thought that today I would get back to it.

Grump grump grump. Today again, work turned frustrating and a bit overwhelming because a departing professional staff member leaves in three days so we spent the morning going over each of her tasks, responsibilities, and projects. To make my headache go away after I actually finished my must do list, I did something somewhat mindless.

I started an index card file of the specific dates, events, and decisions on record in the Ste. Genevieve Archive. The records are random. Deeds are with deeds and concessions with concessions but the file for 1765 can be next to one from 1800. For the past few years I have been reading through looking for historical needles in archival index haystacks. Today I invented a way to sort them that will allow anyone to meander in a more intuitive and chronological sequence.

Since my work always involves story and the work of the museum is to accurately interpret our 18th century site, taking the time to place each detail in the context of companion details is important and filled an afternoon that needed to be more low key than if I had started making a bunch of cold calls, for instance.

This is what actually happens in the planning phase of every story. Before I write the next section of Stuck in the Mud I will have figured out the sequence of the main details and then I'll improvise the dialog and sensory connections as I string the details in their sequence whether that is truly chronological or not. That's what happened as I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife too. After knowing the big picture of the book, each chapter becomes, for me, its own project.

The missing ingredient for me today is energy....however, I can probably weave in some of the eighteenth century details as I write Stuck in the Mud and my adventure to Potosi tomorrow will definitely find its way into the story.

Mood, Setting, Graffiti & No Eagles

Today I met a friend in Festus for lunch. We chatted for a long time in a pair of easy chairs next to a fire at a Bread Company store. Then we roamed the aisles at a Walmart so I could replace a microwave and buy a block of cheese. Then I chose not to take the interstate home.

I followed a two lane road that somehow managed to made me feel like Sunday with me having been transported far from the city without a care in the world.

Black cows in one field wallowed close to a black bearded billy goat. A silver stream reflected back light dividing the scenic overlook briefly into two hazy blue-green equal parts south and north.

South of Bloomsdale a multicolored flock of chickens meandered up from the ditch just feet from the road. A blue heron in a pond stretched its neck distorting a graceful gesture so that it conjured images of lake monsters or dragons for a fraction of a moment. The toppling grey barn that I wish I could capture visually in paint or on film seemed less erect than it did last week.

Yesterday I drove east over the levee past the burnt out marina to the end of the flat parking lot at the top of the muddy hill leading to the bank of the Mississippi River where the dog discovered a corpse in Stuck in the Mud. I wasn't doing research for the book, though.

I was hoping to see some eagles but there weren't any - not in the area where some were wading up to their knees fishing this time last year - not even a blue heron in the deeper pond west of where the tug boats and ferries moored during the high water last spring.

Where the road curves is pretty treacherous especially in the sections that are missing concrete. You have to slow down to less than a crawl to protect your tires and the underside of your car but if you don't know that the road has sharp hungry teeth you are probably in trouble.

The marina is not a place to go alone without at least a dog for company. Its wildness does not feel safe thanks not to the deep tracks made by heavy deer nor to the prospect of venomous snakes.

It feels dangerous to me because at my core I am a city girl. Graffiti, discarded piles of trash piles, and leftover fire rings make me worry about what human predators might possibly lurk there.

The mood created by the setting in Stuck in the Mud has everything to do with the emotional connections that each character brings to each place.

You wanted to know what else I'm writing....

Suppose Aileen, a young college graduate with a history degree, got hired to develop children's programming for a history museum thanks to the interference of her very pushy, very affluent grandmother who is acting out of guilt for the drop-out dad her only son proved to have been. As far as Grandmother is concerned, his first offense had been to side-step attending a respectable seminary and go traveling rogue as a contemporary Christian singer/preacher with charismatic tendencies. She might not have intruded so directly into Aileen's life had her mother not died just before the girl started college or if her son had been man enough to pick up any of the parenting obligations. 

Neither Aileen nor her Grandmother would ever have guessed that one spring morning the body of this same son and father would wash against the same bank of the Mississippi River where his daughter and her dog just happened to be walking. Amazingly his was not the only dead body to end up in Aileen's way....

This will be my first murder mystery. It's pretty well plotted. I'm done with the first chapter at least for this first draft. Right now it does not have a working title, though.

I started working on it last spring.

Then the tourism season took over followed by a huge turnover of my museum staff and truly this is the first time I have had to do anything but muse over the story since its beginning.

My plan is to spend about 10 hours each week writing it beginning immediately.

When it is finished, I'll let it percolate while I write another story which has been brewing for at least ten years...research is mostly done, plotting is done, it just needs to be written. I'll tell you about that one another day. In addition, there is one more pretty well developed novel and about five nonfiction books in my mind. Hopefully in the meantime I will recruit enough of an audience for Pastor's Ex-Wife that women who share Terry Soldan's story will be willing to contribute their own in the forms of letters to Terry.... which letters will become the sequel to Pastor's Ex-Wife.

I have a friend who recruited his readership by playing Mafia Wars on social media. It worked for him and now he has some traditional publishing contracts for his sci-fi fiction. It makes me jealous but not enough to emulate his strategy....I'll just blog along so you all can watch what happens......

Btw, today Pastor's Ex-Wife became available for sale on any ebook platform you like via smashwords.com. It's been for sale as a Kindle book for almost a year. If you haven't read it yet....there are links to the right on this blog....just saying.....:)

Shall I tell you......

A few days before my birthday I received at phone call at work from my childhood friend, William. He is one third of the inspiration for William in The Pastor's Ex-Wife - the bachelor retiring elementary school principal to whom Terry Soldan flees for refuge from her abusive husband and soon to be ex, Pastor Ed. We (the real William and I) chit chatted about our children - mine grown, his entering the teen years, and about friends from grade school. Our conversation refocused me on this blog, on my decision to really work on writing no matter how exhausting it is to lead the transition of a static historic house museum to a vibrant living history excursion that takes our visitors back to experience French colonial America in the mid-Mississippi valley as it was.
I identified my core or long-term aspirations recently. You see, I am also at a transition - the kids are grown and gone. I am being successful at what I do for a regular paycheck and I love my job which I hope to keep for a long time. But what I want as my legacy is to be known as a writer of compelling fiction. That is also my retirement plan so another birthday accentuates the reality that I am fewer than 10 years from retirement age. Ouch.
I have already proven that I can make a living as a freelance writer - I've been paid to write in many different genres, for different audiences and purposes. I write daily as part of my job at the museum too - web content, social media posts, articles, business letters, grant proposals, newsletters, brochures, curriculum, advertising - but my real goal is to build an audience for my fiction- which deals with the juxtaposition of authentic faith in abusive marriages. You already know about Pastor's Ex-Wife. Should I tell you about the other novels that are in various stages of completion?

The Disciplined Writer

I wrote today - a one page promo for the historic sites in Ste. Genevieve for a group of us to pick apart and refine; rewrote parts of the edited draft of the quarterly newsletter for the Museum; wrote a bunch of emails; wrote website content; updated posts via Roost for social media sites; and created additional content in the persona of Zuts the Squirrel a.k.a (per one of my sisters) my alter ego and Museum mascot. Probably I wrote more things than that. It's a usual day so why do I think I haven't made any progress on my goal of becoming known as a writer of significant fiction? Hmmm.....

Rabbi David Small

I like (and have just recently discovered) Harry Kemelman's series of "cozy" mysteries solved by Rabbi David Small by applying the methodology of a talmudic scholar. I like them because the author is more concerned about issues of faith and what it means to be an authentic practicing Jew in the New England of the 1960s than about writing a murder mystery. The mystery, always tightly composed, is incidental to the impact of the story but it serves a sneaky device that keeps the reader engaged and provokes new questions of faith and conscience along the way.

If I succeed in my life-long ambition to become known as a writer of serious fiction I will have engaged my readers around the same types of issues as Kemelman. I aim to provoke honest faith by triggering deep questions in my readers all the while providing a compelling story that doesn't let them put the Kindle down until the last page has been swiped.

Hopefully my readers will respect my characters in spite of all of their flaws as much as I respect the Rabbi.

Selective Memory

I picked up an old book by Hallie and Whit Burnett, Fiction Writer's Handbook, at the library. It starts with a preface by Norman Mailer and it's been a while since I've read a book on the craft. It is very well done - more about the philosophy behind the writing process than most books with similar titles and goals. The authors take a wide view because as the editors of Story Magazine, they had a large and diverse number of examples to choose from.

One statement matches my process in writing Pastor's Ex-Wife well: "We absorb, we sympathize, we reject, we present, it all comes from our own selective memory in the end."

And so it does in my story of how one woman, Terry Soldan, achieved enough personal courage to return to the church pastored by her ex-husband, incognito, in order to shut the door on that abusive season so that she could step into a new place emotionally.

Dead Butterfly Wings

My friend, Lisa and her husband, Gavin, were the first readers of Pastor's Ex-Wife. I emailed them a chapter every few days as soon as the first (but not the roughest first) draft was written. They responded with questions, things I needed to clarify, and they shared the emotions the story provoked in them. It made the writing process more real for me to have an audience whose questions often inspired the next chapter as it unfolded.

Oh, yes, I had an outline - really a plan, not an outline. I work best when I have determined certain requirements for each chapter - it had to move the plot forward, it had to include humor, it had to turn around a single unifying metaphor, it had to employ similes and a full range of sensory details....dialogue... an anecdote from my years teaching in an inner city school district, as well as a church building, a pastor, a congregation, a service and sermon.

I mixed and matched the church features like a crazy quilt - everything is based on reality but abstracted like a cubist painting to create a new fictional construct of a church that worked with the story.

I did not realize how important Lisa and Gavin had been to the writing process until last night.

I am working on a new novel (working title "Dead Butterfly Wings"). It is set in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and is a murder mystery which also treats the theme I dedicate my adult fiction to explore: authentic faith within abusive families.

Lisa and Gavin were my first audience for this first novel - Pastor's Ex-Wife. Lisa shared the background of the protagonist and pastor's ex-wife, Terry Soldan, so her emotional reactions predicted to me whether the story felt real, authentic, plausible....

Until yesterday, I did not have an audience in mind for "Dead Butterfly Wings." Now I do - a person to whom the book just may be dedicated. It won't be the same. I won't be showing him the chapters as they get written but I am writing as if I were telling him the story as it unfolds on the page. I don't even know whether he will ever read it. But, I learned a tremendous thing about how I write just by realizing that I am writing FOR someone specific. It motivates me to put my heart on the page more fully.

Thank you, Lisa and Gavin.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.  

Typically and Predictably

It took a day to write the first draft of each chapter after planning it out using the rubric I set myself. While I wanted to have Terry speak with an authentic voice, I did not want to trespass by having her emote from places that were under or even un-healed in me. I wanted to be faithful to the friend who started the whole thing. And, I wanted to write a story about a person betrayed by the church who was struggling to differentiate between the church and its God without minimizing the struggle for and against faith in Him that Terry had to suffer. I also wanted to have someone take the responsibility to push me through the book so that I could produce the first draft in a timely manner. So, I involved that same friend and her new husband. Thank God for email- that nearly instant means of transmitting text across long distances and deep oceans. My friend and her husband dutifully read each chapter as it was drafted. More than once her follow-up phone call started with "How did you know about __________? I never told anyone that had happened to me." It goes to show how typically and predictably abusers act.