The evolution of a tale

[Samples]

In the beginning, Sybil Loveworth was a girl of fifteen, the same age as Sybille Benet. Her mother, Clio, is the designated storyteller (the mozeny), one of the principal roles in the community because ownership of the stories means responsibility for the community’s interwoven myths and history and hence for its identity. Sybil is in training to inherit that role from Clio. The four governors of the community under the philosopher-king are the masters of agriculture, building, medicine, and stories. Together with the four guardians, they form the council that rules the community.

Reared in complete isolation from the outside world, the members of the community are thrown into crisis when an accident one night in the fall of 2007 breaches their security and brings them two strangers: a dying woman and her ten-year-old son. They are twenty-first-century Californians, dressed in a fashion and using a style of speech that are utterly alien to the community. The son is the counterpart of Sybille’s brother Arnaud. Sybil’s own brother Achilles died at the age of four from physical ailments resulting from inbreeding, and her parents have never ceased to mourn. Sybil takes the young stranger under her wing and becomes attached to him, soon realizing to her horror that the leaders see him as a threat. When they allow his injured mother to die and Sybil understands that his life is in danger, she vows to escape with him. Their perilous adventures in the outside world (in Felton, California) become the main focus of the story, with her eventual capture precipitating the climactic showdown.

I don’t know if I could have made this story work or not. I did get lost in research, although not as badly as I did in 1308. Founded in 1918, the community has its roots in the teachings of a charismatic college professor of philosophy and classical languages who thought he could use Plato’s Republic as the model for an ideal society. The events of World War I and the threat of plague drove him and his followers into seclusion, and there they remained for 89 years while twentieth-century America advanced around them, unseen and unknown. I had to learn a lot about what life was like at home soon after the U.S entered the war in Europe in order to depict the customs and values my people’s forebears had taken with them into their retreat and upon which they had overlaid the Platonic structures as interpreted by their leader.

But at the East of Eden Writer’s Conference in 2006, an editor who had examined a sample of my content advised me not to have a heroine so young unless I wanted my novel to be classed as a juvenile. I didn’t. So, with painstaking adjustments to my six-generation genealogy, I made Sybil nineteen.

Now all of a sudden the big-hearted, impetuous, and resourceful fifteen-year-old whom I had known so well, transported from medieval France, had romantic problems and conflicts with her mother that I hadn’t known about before. And she was no longer so close in age to the ten-year-old boy that she was like a sister to him. Relationships and motivations were getting blurry.

While I was struggling with my main characters, I wrote a series of sketches of events from the point of view of various minor characters, including Sybil’s grandfather Prometheus, a young woman named Rebecca Herman who (as recorded in her journals) was witness to decisive events at the community’s founding, and an old lady named Lydia Frazota who had lived through most of the 89 years behind the walls. And I discovered that the heirs to the founding leader were corrupt in ways that the breaching of the community threatened to expose.

Now those secondary characters started to get interesting.

In search of a main character »« From medieval France to contemporary California