Elizabeth Guider: On Writing

Elizabeth Guider is a longtime entertainment journalist who has lived and worked in Rome, Paris and London as well as in New York City and Los Angeles. Born in the South, she holds a doctorate in Renaissance Studies from New York University. Currently, she divides her time between Hollywood, where she does freelance writing about the media business, and Vicksburg, MS, where she grew up and where she focuses on her fiction. Our Long Love’s Day is her fourth novel.  We are delighted to feature her on WWWB!

As the old adage goes, writing a novel is 10% INSPIRATION and 90% PERSPIRATION.

But that said, unless you feel the kind of impetus that comes from the heart and doesn’t waver — and that could mean the impact of actual events on you, something you yourself did of consequence in the world, a mystery that stuck with you, a book, a piece of music, a childhood memory, a dream, a message you want to get out to the world — it is extraordinarily hard to get through the rigors of putting a fully imagined story down on paper.

In short, it’s hard to sweat continually over something that you don’t believe in your heart of hearts is worth sweating or fretting about.

That said, the precise inspiration for each of my four novels has varied, but each has been authentic and vivid as well as flexible enough to accrue other elements to them, making them potentially richer and more accessible.

About the first three books:

Like many authors, I was inspired to write my first, The Passionate Palazzo (2013), because of amazing events I lived through and participated in as a young woman. I didn’t want to write a memoir but I did want to capture the tenor and import of the times and do it largely through the eyes of a sympathetic young person: not me personally but a composite of several people I knew.

I was living in Rome, Italy and became caught up in the heady politics of the place during the mid-1970s. Specifically, my novel dramatizes a movement that effectively changed the face and direction of the country, culminating in the year 1978.

It was the year in which three different popes sat sequentially on the throne, the year the Red Brigades kidnapped and killed the country’s prime minister,  and to my mind and even more importantly, it was the year women, including the group I was involved in, challenged a centuries’ old draconian law against abortion by actually performing the procedure themselves, saving women’s lives and galvanizing the debate about their right to control their own bodies.

Despite opposition from the Church and the long-in-charge Christian Democrats, the public came around to supporting the movement’s goals and its courage in challenging the status quo. The old law was overturned that year and the most liberal such law in Europe was passed to replace it.

There had been up until the time I began writing the book in 2010 very little written, even in Italy, to memorialize what women had accomplished in that year and how it changed society. The trick for me was how to convey all that, keeping the historic facts straight but also giving life to a central fictional character who is believable and sympathetic. By the way, The Passionate Palazzo refers to the actual (at that time abandoned) building in central Rome that women’s groups occupied and turned into the heart-beat of the feminist movement in the country, indeed in all of Europe.

As for my second novel, Milk and Honey on the Other Side, (2015) it was inspired by, of all things, a view from a hilltop.  From childhood on, I had always been intrigued when we’d drive into town — as in my hometown of Vicksburg, MS  — and eye the river below in the distance and Louisiana on the far western side. I associated that state as the land of mystery and possibility so when, as a teenager I heard snatches of stories from older locals of a white woman from Vicksburg who had disgraced her family in the 1920s, having fallen in love with a black man from across the water.

It was not that difficult to imagine such a thing, however dangerous, occurring in, well, a proximate land of unlawful opportunity. My heroine in the bi-racial love story, which is set post-WWI, is “milk,” her lover is “honey,” and “the other side” connotes Louisiana itself as well as more general ideas about race and sex at the time.

My third novel, Connections (2016), was largely inspired by growing up in a big family and realizing just how different I and my two sisters were from one another.  Although in the novel I limited the focus to two siblings, just a year apart in age, I wanted to trace their contentious, competitive but also loving relationship over the course of their lives, especially their crucial years as teenagers in the late 1960s and their subsequent ordeals as mothers and working women.

To dramatize how much they saw and did things differently, I tried to emulate a little of what Barbara Kingsolver did so brilliantly in A Poisonwood Bible, in which the story is told from the different points of views of her four main protagonists, all female siblings grappling with life in an alien land.

Finally, Our Long Love’s Day, which was published in July 2020, came about as a result of my happening upon some old faded term papers I had written in graduate school. Several of them pertained to a graduate seminar on Metaphysical Poetry, which made me re-conjure what academia was like at the time and reflect on what had changed and what hasn’t. (Not to mention the memory of rumors of sexual shenanigans which went on in and around that very seminar…) I had also been thinking — and who of us doesn’t?! —about what it’s like for women to grow older and to be tossed away by some clueless or otherwise unthinking man.

In those circumstances, we’re all supposed to rise to the occasion and “get over things” quickly and effortlessly and without inconveniencing anyone else, especially not our own personal and professional circles. Especially when a highly regarded marriage that people consider “perfect” shatters overnight (as in my plot). What we often discover in such fraught circumstances is that we’re weaker and less in control than our friends or the media or our own avatars would have us believe. We behave badly and berate ourselves for so doing. Thus:

In Our Long Love’s Day, the main character, Dr Deirdre Durrell Cole, a professor of medieval studies, fits that description. At the beginning of the story she is researching a trio of fourteenth century women who had to rise above their own challenged situations to make their mark in the world. Deirdre’s marriage to another professor, Dr Ashton Mather Cole, unravels in the very first chapter and no, she does not react in the civilized manner that the image of academics or the expectations of friends and colleagues would  suggest — or in the manner that her medieval heroines did!

Moreover, because Deirdre is forty at the time of the break-up, it is more awkward than not for her to re-establish a social and sexual life: she has sullen teenagers to deal with, a career that is sputtering, and an ailing mother way back home in Mississippi to tend to. All that said, Deirdre is resilient and generous-spirited and eventually opens herself up to new people, experiences and professional possibilities. It takes ten years, unlikely friendships and unexpected lovers to make that happen.

The title of the novel is taken from a well-known Metaphysical poem by Andrew Marvell, which is reckoned one of the most important examples of the theme of carpe diem in the language. The poem is a call to “seize the day,” and Deirdre does eventually manage to. On her own terms. (Her husband, who is a professor of said Metaphysical poetry, seizes the day too, but by leaving Deirdre for one of his students. It would be an understatement to say it doesn’t work out well.)

As for the PERSPIRATION required to write the novel, it took a month to flesh out an outline, another participating in NANOWRIMO to get 50,000 words down on paper, and then daily stints for several more months in front of the computer to bang out a first draft. For me, that was the hardest part.

Because I am a newspaper editor by training and profession, whittling things down, polishing and fact-checking and re-arranging elements and reshaping characters and eliminating others was, relatively speaking, the FUN part.  As was working with my editor at Foundations Books to curb a few of my excesses and with the cover designer to come up with art that reflected both the tone of the narrative and the backdrop of the plot.

As we all can imagine, publishing in the midst of a pandemic is a completely novel proposition, no pun intended. Like many other writers, I love physical bookstores and festivals and interaction with prospective readers, but alas, all that has vanished for the duration. I can only hope that folks will feel the urge to curl up with an actual copy or download an online version to their preferred device — and still curl up. Any feedback from readers of any of these novels would be most welcome.

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OUR LONG LOVE’S DAY

Spanning the last ten years, Elizabeth Guider’s unflinching but empathetic novel about finding yourself after divorce is a modern-day anatomy of love…

“We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give.”

Dr. Ashton Mather Cole and his wife, Dr. Deidre Durrell Cole, are two college professors in a small Ohio town with a seemingly perfect marriage. But when Ashton’s love affair with one of his students comes to light, everyone is left rattled, aggrieved, or bent on revenge.

Over the course of ten years, they and those around them strive–sometimes painfully, sometimes comically–to right themselves. New relationships don’t come without their own false starts and sorrowful stops. Until…

Fans of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” and Meg Wolitzer’s “The Wife” will devour this “insightful” and “heartfelt” Women’s Fiction novel in one sitting.

“Spoiler! I absolutely loved this book. Their lives lured me in and I was there with them – in every twist of their journey.” –Wendy Oberman, Novelist and Playwright

“The author has a knack for getting you to embrace her characters, however fallible and shortsighted, and believe in them.” – Suzy Arthur, Author

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Category: On Writing