What i learned from writing breach

Marleigh:

Writing any novel is a journey of discovery. There are moments when the journey feels like an adventure. I’m being swept away by my protagonist’s needs and wants, and her inability at any given moment to discern the difference between a need and a want.

The adventure can take me places in my memory—like driving west across the state of Nebraska. The time when my best friends and I road tripped from my parents’ home in Omaha to my grandparents’ home in South Dakota with a stop at my Uncle’s ranch in Sparks, Nebraska, along the way. Margaret, Schuyler and I were in high school, Marg had just graduated and Schuy and I were rising seniors. I drove a green Jeep Wrangler with the old zip soft top.

We unzipped the soft top before backing out of my parents’ driveway. We wanted the wind and sun and open sky, only the roll bars holding us in. We it as far as Norfolk, Nebraska (Nor-fork for those in the know) before a summer thunderstorm ripped across the sky. The dark clouds more a tearing apart than a hovering presence in the sky.

Cold, sharp rain drops stung our faces and shoulders. I pulled over, just beside the “Welcome to Norfolk” sign that proudly proclaimed “birthplace of Johnny Carson.” The three of us frantically zipped the top back on and jumped back into the Jeep panting and sodden.

Twenty-six years have elapsed since that road trip, and I hadn’t thought about that part of it more than a handful of times in the intervening decades. But when I thought about Jace bringing Marleigh home to meet the people and the land that shaped him, I couldn’t stop thinking about that roadway sign. The giddy excitement and naivete that propelled Marg, Schuy and me west. The same flavor of giddy naivete that flung Marleigh at Jace towards each other.

We had no idea what would unfold on that trip (a manic episode, ranch fire, near abduction to name a few) but we were convinced we were ready for anything. I’m certain Marleigh felt the same way. Seated next to Jace, Marleigh could drop the burden of her worries. He was in charge; she didn’t have to be. She was somewhere foreign and striking and beautiful to her.

You know that feeling when you’re somewhere far from home and it feels as though you can see yourself more clearly against that foreign background? The opportunity, the power of reinvention. Marleigh’s grandfather, her safe place, her dependable adult, had just died. She was free of her responsibility to him and cut loose from the gym she’d managed out of love for him. And Jace’s attraction, devotion, near-worship made Marleigh feel like, indeed, anything was possible for the two of them.

It was my job, the writer’s job, to throw every impediment in her way, to make her claw and scrape and nearly drown for her happiness. Just like the road trip was time for my high school friends and I to grow up, to realize there were limits to what we actually knew about one another, about ourselves, and, most certainly, about the world.

I was tempted to let Marleigh sit in her happiness. If anyone can truly appreciate joy and family love, it’s Marleigh Mulcahy. She had so little of it in her life before Jace. But that wasn’t her story. That’s when the journey changed from adventure to pilgrimage. Marleigh had no idea how strong she was, what a fighter she was. It was my job to test her, to show her. Marleigh learned that she was a survivor. Is cruelty a writer’s requirement?  Maybe that’s just so much fiction training. We send our characters up a tree and then throw rocks at them in service of narrative tension and conflict.

Jace:

I tried, and failed, to bring Jace Holt to life on the page countless times during my early draft days from summer of 2017 into the spring of 2018. He was never more than a character sketch, and character sketches are hallmarks of lazy writing. I could see his face, his body and shape. I knew what he did for a living. But I couldn’t hear how he would speak. I didn’t understand why he’d enlisted in the Navy and then proceeded all the way through EOD school. Why did he connect so powerfully and immediately with Marleigh?

Every day, I sat with my Jace notebook and tried all of my usual character-development tricks. Write his dating profile. My beloved lists. What were his secrets? I came up with—at best—a two-dimensional character.

Turns out, I needed a change of venue to bring me to Jace. I applied for National Parks artists’ residencies in early 2018. (Yes, this is a thing and every writer should look into these programs!) I was accepted by Agate Fossil Beds National Monument in Agate, Nebraska. The timing of the residency coincided with the last month of my then-elementary school aged daughters’ school year. I had child care available. There were no excuses left.

I took a leap of faith and traveled as far west in my home state as I’d ever been. And that was where Jace Holt and I got to know each other. Place. Setting. Home. These words are big. They are so much more than our surroundings. Place shapes us, whether we want it to or not.

Writing Marleigh’s story, the way her life propelled her to Jace and on to her sons, Jace and Marleigh’s incendiary love story, took years of discovery of both characters and self. Writing this novel left me forever changed.