Nancy Allen: On Writing and Researching Grace
How does a woman carry this searing, painful memory? First kisses, the first boyfriend, and sex the first time were all good memories for Catherine. What if all that was erased by the violence, this loss of control over her body?
Nancy Allen: On Writing and Researching Grace
When I first started writing, Grace was Catherine’s story. For me, a story always begins with a character. I wanted to create a world that shows how deeply sexual harassment and assault are imbedded in our college and university cultures.
I started writing Grace more than a decade ago, an hour or two before getting ready to go to work each day and on weekends and during vacations. As an English professor, I have always taught students the importance of outlines. As a writer, I never used one. Those hours alone on my patio or at my dining room table sometimes felt aimless, but Catherine and the other characters began to emerge.
As a rule, I write in the mornings as soon as the coffee is ready. I write with pencils and yellow legal pads. Call me old-fashioned: the tactile feel of holding a pencil in my hand is necessary to get my brain and my imagination ignited.
I edit and do research in the afternoon. Editing happens at the computer as I type what I wrote in the morning. Later, I edit more globally as I consider larger structural issues. Is this a good place to end the chapter? Will I leave the reader wanting more as I make a transition to another character and her or his point of view?
A writing colleague read an early draft of Grace (what Anne Lamott would call a “first, shitty draft”) when it was only Catherine’s story. She encouraged me to develop Douglas’s story, Catherine’s father, and Hal’s as well, Catherine’s colleague at Franklin College. I took this advice, and I learned two things about myself as a writer: the characters I create are always part of a community, and I always choose to write in community.
Characters & Community
Catherine’s personal circumstances, a failed relationship, and a desire to be closer to her elderly father, Douglas, compel her to make the move from faculty member to dean at Franklin College as the novel begins.
As Catherine digs deep to navigate the external struggle on the job, she grapples with an internal struggle that forces her to confront her troubled childhood. The circumstances at Franklin College may cause Catherine to retreat or may empower her to see beyond her own survival. She finds the courage to confront the College’s dark secrets, but she doesn’t go it alone. With Hal as an ally, she tackles her antagonist.
During Catherine’s visits with her father at his shore home, her childhood antagonist surfaces. Catherine comes to understand the memories that shape her. As her father unmasks himself and shares painful memories of his own, Catherine gains greater understanding of herself. This can only develop because she is willing to try to understand her father’s story.
Each antagonist in Catherine’s professional and personal world has a name. But like her father, who wrestles with old ghosts, the antagonist is larger than any one character or ghost. It is the culture itself. Douglas confronted this antagonist a generation earlier and still wrestles with the choices he made.
Writing in Community
I finished a draft of Grace in 2015. From 2010-2015, I was a participant in Philadelphia Wordshop, a weekly workshop where we wrote from a prompt each week (pure terror turned to pure joy as time went on) and critiqued each other’s manuscripts. I worked with a fabulous editor, who taught me to leave beautiful sentences behind as I thought about the structure of my chapters, the movement from one point of view to the next. I learned the importance of audience. The characters in my head must be fully realized on the page, so the reader can know her and draw her own conclusion about the choices she makes.
I left my last college position in 2019 to give myself a year to write the second novel and to find a publisher for Grace. Pencils sharpened, yellow legal pads at the ready, I spent nine months drafting the prequel to Grace, Grace’s story in the 1960s and1970s. Nine months into drafting the second novel, I had not yet found a publisher for Grace. I asked my editor to reread the manuscript. Then, I spent the summer of 2020 revising Grace.
Revising and Editing
Revising at this stage showed me you can always dig deeper to define and develop a character. Even minor characters, like Roslyn Ashcroft, came to life in a new way through the revision process. Revising at this stage benefitted from the passage of time and the first draft of the prequel.
Revising and editing are ongoing processes. Editing is time-consuming and tedious. I read drafts out loud, listening to the distinctive voices of each character, tightening dialogue, trimming the narrative.
Research
Revising and research go hand -in -hand. Douglas’s memories carry us back to the 1960s and his involvement in the Civil Rights movement. As Douglas’ character emerged, I knew that a better understanding of the Civil Rights Movement was important. I read extensively, watched many YouTube videos and documentaries. Pre-pandemic, I traveled to important Civil Rights’ cities – Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma.
Part of the story takes place in Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor, Maine, a place each of the characters visit. Since Douglas is there in 1968, I interviewed a man who grew up in Bar Harbor and had been a teenager in the 1960s. He described how different the park and the town were then. He helped me imagine what it was like for Douglas and Grace to be there at a crossroads in their lives.
Grace is Catherine’s story, but my immersion in Douglas’s story has given me Grace, a character who will not let me go. Writing characters who live in a different time than our own is challenging. All the research for Grace benefits me now as I write the prequel, listening to Grace’s distinctive voice, coming to understand what shaped her as she came of age in the late 1950s.
As I write this, the garden is in bloom. Roses, red, white, and yellow, bend toward the earth. Siberian irises shyly show their colors, which will be gone tomorrow. Petunias and impatiens promise a summer of color and tranquility. Grace is here, too, challenging me to bring her to life on the page.
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GRACE
Catherine seeks refuge in visits to her father’s shore home, but powerful memories unsettle her. A web of memories reveals Douglas’s meaningful romance in the 1960s with Grace, a pioneer in the Civil Rights Movement, and his disappointment that social justice promised during that turbulent time was never fully realized. Catherine’s professional and personal worlds collide as she discovers the College’s secrets are woven into her father’s story.
Nancy Allen’s Grace is a stirring investigation of sexual politics and women’s tenuous relationship with power. The novel’s lyric prose conveys the power of memory to shape and redefine struggles with faith, self-doubt, and love lost.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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