Writers in the Storm

Today's guest, Barbara Claypole White, is a strong woman, a great mom, and a Women's Fiction Author -- a good one, as you'll see from her post. Here's Barbara:

Readers constantly ask if my debut novel, THE UNFINISHED GARDEN, is autobiographical. Since my heroine is a young widow, the answer is always, “God, I hope not.” There are, however, echoes of my life in everything I write. Writing is my escape, my coping mechanism, and the way I process my world.

A huge part of that world is dominated by son’s OCD—a debilitating anxiety disorder that is often described as an allergy to life. An award-winning poet, the Beloved Teenage Delinquent has battled OCD since he was four. He’s the poster child for fighting mental illness stigma: He’s stunningly good looking, funny, compassionate, has lots of friends, a near perfect GPA, his own band, a cute girlfriend…. But he and I have visited hell together. More than once. How have we survived? Hope, humor, and the British war mentality. Plus, we both use OCD to fuel our writing.

And yet, when I talk about the inspiration behind my fiction, I walk a fine line. My son may be out of the OCD closet, but my husband is intensely private, and not every part of our life needs to be shared. Anyone in my OCD support group will tell you that OCD destroys families. It nearly destroyed mine. Parts of that are still raw, but the experience helped craft the story that became THE UNFINISHED GARDEN.

TUG is classic women’s fiction. It’s the story of my heroine, Tilly, but only because of my hero, James. James is brilliant, charismatic, and obsessive-compulsive. He wasn’t my first hero, and yet once I unleashed him, his insights into Tilly created her character arc.

James evolved out of my darkest fear as a mother. Compulsive behavior is ritualistic and appears bizarre to people who don’t understand; obsessive thoughts are isolating. One Friday night, when my son and I were crumpled on the kitchen floor crying as he said over and over, “Make it stop, Mommy. Make it stop,” I had a horrible thought: What if, when he grew up, no one could see beyond his quirky behavior to love him for the incredible person he is? What if he ended up alone because of his OCD? That doubt led me to James.

But that was just the beginning. Once my son and I started exposure therapy—when you meet fears head on—I saw the incredible courage it takes to boss back OCD. Navigating ordinary life as an obsessive-compulsive is like walking through a minefield. To keep moving forward takes herculean bravery. Some days you’re strong enough; some days you’re not. As with any war, you have victories and defeats. That’s the side of OCD I wanted to show through James. Incidentally, he’s the least messed-up character in the novel. Despite his OCD, he has a strong sense of self.

By the time I sold TUG, my son had been OCD-free for three years and James’s struggles belonged to a life I had left behind. Then junior year of high school hit, and OCD started creeping back into our house. During my book launch, I prattled on about how my son had beaten OCD, unaware that he was drowning. Then his anxiety exploded. Within a week, we were both back to crying on the floor. It seemed nothing much had changed in thirteen years. In the months that followed, we struggled, we got back into full-blown treatment, and we both turned to our art: song writing and poetry for him, novel two for me.

Novel two may have nothing to do with OCD but it is about mental illness, issues of control, and parental fear. My heroine is the mother of a graduate student with clinical depression. A holistic veterinarian, she sees the world very differently to the way I do. She’s calm and spiritual; I’m passionate, opinionated, and I yell at inanimate objects. We had been struggling to connect, until I wrote these lines:

“Parenthood started with such optimism. Your child would achieve his baby milestones, collect gold stars, maintain a good grade point average, hang out with the crowd that didn’t drink and drive. And then, when you weren’t paying attention, it all stripped down to one horrifying truth: you just wanted your son to find the will to live.”

I was crying at the time. I cried through most of September….

Funny thing, though—once I understood my new heroine’s journey, I felt better about my own. Using the crap of everyday life to feed your fiction can be empowering. It lets you think around corners. Truth doesn’t have to hold you back. You can find joy in darkness; create your own happy ending and write a better story for yourself. Wait…that’s my new hero’s arc. Sorry, I’m off to write!

Does your life end up in your books? Is it hard for you to write? Or is it cathartic?

To celebrate visiting Writers In The Storm today, I will be giving away one signed copy of THE UNFINISHED GARDEN. To enter, please comment below with your email address.

Shannon Donnelly is back this month with a topic that I have spoken with other authors about, but never seen in a blog before. I can't wait to read the comments, to see what you all think!  Here's Shannon:

Something happens when you read a lot—very often stories come to you. A lot of folks brush these off, or just don’t want the fuss and work of trying to take those bits and make something of them. But if you start writing the ideas down, you very soon start digging into the technical stuff. And then you start reading as a writer.

It’s like knowing how a magical act works—some of the enjoyment goes away when you know how that elephant really disappeared off the stage.

Generally, this isn’t a huge problem—but it can become one if it eats away at your enjoyment of reading.

You start to look for misplaced commas, for the wrong word used, for poor characterization.

You shake your head over awkward viewpoint transitions—you start to notice viewpoint transitions.

You sigh over weak dialogue—and become envious over sparkling wit on the page.

In other words, you keep leaving the story because you’re too busy taking it apart.

This does not make for a fun read—and even great books can suffer from an overcritical mind.

However, every now and then, a book comes along that’s so good that you want to settle back and be a reader again. This is the time to turn off the editor/analyzer and read for the pleasure—for the joy. This is a place to remember why you ever wanted to be a writer—because for a short time you are transported to another time, another world, and you get to play with a bunch of cool people.

Now a really bad book can do the same—if there are so many awful mistakes, it overwhelms the editing part of the mind and you can just marvel at the awfulness. (Bad movies do the same—they’re so bad they’re good.) It’s the books in between that can be difficult to read as a reader.

The longer you are a writer, the more you tend to lose that ability to step back into reading. But it’s actually important to hang onto this joy—it’s what got you started with stories, and it’s what will keep you going. This means you have to do a lot of hunting—and a lot of reading too. And it’s a good idea anyway to learn how to turn off the editor and stop nitpicking and just enjoy. Even if you know how the elephant gets off the stage, you can activate that wonderful part of the mind—and just pretend.

Shannon Donnelly’s writing has won numerous awards, including a RITA nomination for Best Regency, the Grand Prize in the "Minute Maid Sensational Romance Writer" contest, judged by Nora Roberts, RWA's Golden Heart, and others. Her writing has repeatedly earned 4½ Star Top Pick reviews from Romantic Times magazine, as well as praise from Booklist and other reviewers, who note: "simply superb"..."wonderfully uplifting"....and "beautifully written."

Her Regency romances can be found as ebooks on all formats, and with Cool Gus Publishing, and include a series of four novellas.

She also has out the Mackenzie Solomon, Demon/Warders Urban Fantasy series, Burn Baby Burn and Riding in on a Burning Tire, and the Urban Fantasy, Edge Walkers. Her work has been on the top seller list of Amazon.com and includes Paths of Desire, a Historical Regency romance.

She is the author of several young adult horror stories, and computer games. She lives in New Mexico with two horses, two donkeys, two dogs, and only one love of her life. Shannon can be found online at sd-writer.com, facebook.com/sdwriter, and twitter/sdwriter.

I came across a quote the other day by Mortimer J. Adler - "In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you" - that was perfectly timed. Why? Because I'd recently read a beautifully written book that got through to me - loud and clear - as both a reader and writer. And I'm beyond tickled to welcome the brilliant Kimberly Brock, author of The River Witch, to Writers In The Storm. - Orly Konig-Lopez

by Kimberly Brock

An idea may come to me because of a place I visit, a photograph, a piece of trivia or obscure history that catches my attention. I love obscure history. But a story only ever begins for me with a voice.

From the time I can remember, I’ve been running lines in my head. Whether it was a voice from my family or a teacher or some stranger I encountered at the grocery store, in the airport, on the TV or radio, I tried them out in my own mind. Sometimes the words were bits and pieces of remembered conversation. Sometimes I gave them original things to say. And I would listen and wonder why they sounded the way they did and consider the feelings they stirred in me. I would mimic their intonation and emotion, their body language and expressions. I spent hours watching myself in the mirror, “trying people on.” I was a precocious and curious child. My radar was always tuned to those around me, trying to figure out for all I was worth, why they were the way they were.

I guess, more than anything, I was and am incessantly observing.

But that’s only the first piece of it because the observation is merely the seed. What springs from it is my compulsion to explain people, situations, and the whole world, to myself. And therein, lay the stories. I think all the minutes of my entire life have been spent doing this in one way or another. It won’t surprise you to learn that one of my favorite places was a library, where I could read other people’s explanations in countless attempts to make sense of their worlds. You might expect that in high school and college, I finally made it onto a stage, where I took my mirror acting to another level. I even attempted to write poetry (didn’t we all?) and published a few short stories along the way. But the day I sat down and began writing novels, a floodgate opened. The voices I had collected and dissected and obsessed over, were all waiting there in my memory, eager for their turn on the page.

The clamoring was almost enough to scare me off. In the case of The River Witch, there were eventually two voices which rose above the rest. At some point, I chose the strongest voice, the one spouting the story I most wanted to hear, and that’s when I began to know Damascus Trezevant. And really, all I did was listen patiently, in wonder, and eventually, I wrote down what she had to say about herself, her life and the people that filled her days.

I was charmed. I was in love. But at some point I realized her perspective was limited and often flawed. So I listened and waited for the voice which could speak to the other side of the coin. I followed where all my questions led and that is where I met Roslyn Byrne, bringing her own skewed perspective which somehow brought balance to the whole of the narrative.

These two characters shared a short summer on a very remote island and by allowing each of them to speak their own truths, fears, and hopes, somehow they explained not only themselves, but each other. It was a dance, really. At times, it was a battle. I spent hours staring at the computer screen, waiting for one or the other to reveal herself and terrified neither would show. Some days the story languished in coy silence. At times I could hardly keep up with the pace as these distinct voices challenged each other in every way, desperate to understand love, loss, family, abandonment, death and faith – all the same things I struggle with in my personal human experience and the very things I’ve watched those around me come up against in our journey through this life.

In the end, I know more than I could have known about these people and their worlds than if I’d simply approached the story head-on, without daring to go at it from multiple angles. I’m wiser than I was before I wrote it. And I hope that’s what the reader experiences: the gift of seeing the world through another’s eyes. I’ve always said I wished I had the eyes of a fly, so I could see the world a thousand different ways, so I could know the why and how of everything, but also the why of the why and the how of the how. For me, being a writer is the closest I’ve come to that kind of grace. That’s the true gift of story, I believe. Perspective.