Plot lines, Protagonists and Phantasms

I was inspired to write this article after recently having a vivid dream of my grandmother who has been dead for quite some time, leaving me with some questions. So bear with me.

Like many novelists, I am often asked, how do you come up with your ideas? It’s a good question since most people shake their head in wonder, unable to understand how a writer’s brain or inspiration works. Yet, it’s not an easy question to answer. I do have some works-in-progress that may or may not ever be finished for any number of reasons while each of my published novels were inspired differently. For instance, I was driven to write my first novel, first starting out as a memoir, but two weeks in, I felt fictionalizing it would better serve the story. It moved at a rapid clip, the first draft taking only about a month and a half. Okay, so I’d have to say it was nothing more than a very lengthy outline since I was still learning the craft while not being sure I had the patience to complete a book. But seventeen years later, after I had begun seriously writing Of Little Faith it was complete, as far as I was concerned. Yes, seventeen years is a long time but it led me to believe that maybe I was in this writing gig for the long haul. So while seeking an agent for it, I had to ask myself, what to write next?

Unlike Of Little Faith, which I knew the characters and how the story was going to end all the while writing it, I had another storyline in mind, one that I was going to base on a real happening in the town where I grew up. It involved a bank robbery, murder and a getaway using the road I lived on that went into Canada illegally. How could that not be a page turner? However, about fifty or so pages in, when the robbers were going to hold the family who lived on that road hostage, the story fell flat, the characters telling me, this didn’t happen to us. So, once I let go of that plot, the novel unfolded and Without Grace was finished and published before Of Little Faith was. I kept writing and wrote The Gathering Brood and After We Were Yours. Don’t bother looking for them since they are yet to be published. But then, Grace, from Without Grace, nudged me and told me she wanted to tell the real reason she’d walked out on her family. (Yes, my apologies to Grace, but she is a fictional character.) What followed was Before She Was a Finley published in 2024. By then I discovered that writing about the region where I was raised had a hold on me and I kept thinking about how a schoolmate in grade school had a father killed in the mines of Lyon Mountain in Upstate New York. It was a story that I couldn’t shake off, so I began researching the Lyon Mountain mining industry and started writing about a family whose father worked in the mines. But odd enough, the story shifted and was about a young girl who was forced to marry a farmer ten years her senior to get her away from the violence in the mining industry. This young girl, Jane Carter, hungered for an education while her husband demanded she help on the farm that included birthing farmhands for him. As I kept writing, the further the plot got away from what I thought was the story, and no longer were the men trapped in the mines but about how this young girl was trapped in a loveless marriage. I gave the name Pearl, which was my grandmother’s name, to one of the children. I’m not sure but I may have an idea why I didn’t give that name to the protagonist because here is where my grandmother comes in.

A few months ago, a memory came to me from when I was ten years old. I was visiting with my grandmother, who lived walking distance down the dirt road from where I lived. I was stunned when she shared how she was 16 and given without her permission to marry my grandfather who was ten years her senior. I didn’t find the story charming because she was crying as she told me, saying how much she’d missed her family but had to go live with this man, a stranger. She never said anything about regretting not furthering her schooling but that recollection stayed with me somewhere in the recesses of my mind all my life.

Even though my grandparents were married for over 50 years and seemed happy enough, I was inspired to take that story and fictionalize it without actually realizing, in part, that I was recalling what my grandmother told me. For what it’s worth, thankfully, my grandfather was nothing like the farmer in The Liberation of Jane Carter. But just a couple of nights ago, I dreamt about my grandmother and there I was walking down the road from the house I grew up in to my grandparents’ house. A couple of my dogs were walking alongside of me and as I approached the door that went into their shed and up the steps to their kitchen just as I remembered it, I kept envisioning her old and feeble, however, my grandmother opening the door and looking vibrant, exclaimed, “Carol, it’s so good to see you.” My grandfather was wordlessly standing behind her. She continued, “Come with me. I want to show you something,” taking me by the hand. She and I walked out into the field while my grandfather went in another direction into the distance as she brought me to a very big pen filled with dogs. As I was admiring the dogs, wanting to open the pen to free them, Grandma had disappeared, leaving me yearning to see her again. Was there a message in this dream? A metaphor? I wonder, though, what she’d think of The Liberation of Jane Carter. Would she see any similarities to her and Jane Carter or would she have asked, “How did you come up with this story?” while shaking her head.