From medieval France to contemporary California
[Samples]
The new idea involved a lot of morphing. I needed a twenty-first-century analog to Church-dominated medieval society and its persecution of heretics, a heroine who somehow had the drive and courage to defy that all-powerful institution, and a physical setting familiar enough to me that I could represent it without exhaustive research.
The solution that came to me was this: a restrictive society with passionately held beliefs that set it apart, a society that had a stake in keeping its members ignorant of other ways of thinking. This concept required devising a compelling and sustaining idea or vision for the society, a divergent enough notion of community that it would be obvious why it could not coexist with that of mainstream America, and a means, method, and motivation for achieving complete physical isolation. A cult.
So I bought three books on destructive cults and learned about the psychosocial aspects of cult life. I began creating my settlement in an invented location in the nearby Santa Cruz mountains, an area where there have been and are numerous religious retreats and spiritual communities. And I started sketching counterparts for the main characters in my abandoned narrative: the young girl Sybille Benet, her brother Arnaud, the elderly sisters of Béthune, and the forces of the Inquisition.
I began writing right away, again drafting scenes and scattered segments, and again I found great difficulty in threading a continuous narrative. Again I started doing Internet research, following the trail of every question that occurred to me, always obsessed with authenticity. I amassed information on winegrowing, Platonic philosophy, the construction of drawbridges, a 14th-century saint named St. John of Nepomuk, phases of the moon, inbreeding, wood stoves, Celtic harps, recessive genes, Greek mythology, farm animals, the influenza epidemic of 1918, and the history of women’s underwear.
And I got very caught up in the backstory. My OCD had a field day. I drew maps so detailed that I could pinpoint the location of every tree and shrub in my settlement and know what was in the line of sight for any door and window of any structure. I can picture that imagined setting as clearly as I can visualize my childhood neighborhood or my college campus. And I created a genealogy of six generations, not only of my principal characters but ultimately of every member of the community, with full names and birthdates.
Why did I go through all this in order to write my story? Why didn’t I just write it? That’s what many people would have done, and if that worked for them then they would be right to do it. But just as many writers would feel that they had to “know” all about their characters and their world before they could describe what happened to them and do it with conviction. For me, the process was productive.
Over a period of months of making lists and charts and researching names, stories began to emerge. As I built families out of lists of names and dates, I began to see personal traits, incidents, dramas: rivalries, tragic losses, childhood sweethearts, jealousies, hidden relationships, and more. A community character took shape. Public and private events, long-standing antagonisms, and strong and weak personalities changed the course of shared history. Things I would not have been able to think of by the deliberate act of trying to think of them came to me almost naturally just out of working with the background materials I was developing.
As a result of accumulating deep knowledge of my characters and their interwoven family histories, the writing felt less like inventing and more like remembering. My problem began to be what to put in and what to leave out. I wanted to tell all of it.
And in the meantime I began to lose sight of my main character, the counterpart of Sybille of the Vardysts: a young woman named Sybil Loveworth, whose role in the community was that of apprentice keeper of the stories.
I was on my way to being mired again.
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