Inspiration Anywhere

Inspiration Anywhere

By Kelly Sokol

I first met Marleigh, the protagonist of BREACH in a group writing roundtable at The Muse Writers Center. I was taking a class called “Write Now,” in which we hand wrote timed responses to cues provided by the inimitable Janine Latus (this woman can pull creativity from a floor tile). At the time, my first novel was on submission with publishers and I needed to start creating again. I needed to lose myself in fiction and forget about the business side of writing. It was a sweltering July night in Norfolk, Virginia, and the window air conditioner in the old auto shop-turned-classroom couldn’t keep up.

The rules of the class are simple. We’re all given the same cue. A timer is set. You must not stop writing until the timer sounds. Janine instructed, “Don’t think. Just write.” The prompt was one word: home. As I started writing, I heard the crunch of a water bottle being squeezed. I think it was just someone’s water bottle expanding in the heat, but as my hand scrawled across the paper, I imagined someone was trying to extract the last drops. Nothing could be wasted. Sense images came next, in the form of a prose list. A lean hand with stripped cuticles rested on a dusty car trunk. The silver Subaru logo glinted in the parking lot light.

 Beneath that trunk were small suitcases and a dozen plastic bags full of as many pairs of clean underwear, diapers, children’s books, and worn toys as could fit. Someone’s few worldly possessions, as well as those of her kids, hidden. A mother’s shameful secret. This car was her home.

 With a ragged fingernail a woman picked nervously at the sticker on the rear windshield. I heart my sailor. Her children were asleep inside the car. Her oldest in the front seat, his head lolled against the door, open mouth fogging the bottom of the window. He’s not tall enough yet to ride in the front, but she lets him sleep there. His seat reclined until it met the infant car seat behind it. Her middle son has balled a shirt up on his booster seat and used it as a pillow. Multi-pocketed organizers hung from both seatbacks.

They contained coloring books, juice boxes, packets of apple sauce, sleeves of crackers and chips. Zipped away, out of sight, were travel-sized tooth brushes and toothpastes, the ends of the tubes rolled tighter than a birthday kazoo. Hair combs and three-in-one shampoo, conditioner and body wash—foamy from the water she added to make it last. If I saw this woman during the day, would I notice her? Or would she appear like any other young mother of three? She’s skilled at camouflage.

The sun hasn’t risen yet, but already she was panicked. She was Marleigh. She offered her name that first night and I’ve never wavered from it. She stood in a Wal-Mart parking lot and tried to figure out how to keep herself and her children afloat.

 All of that sprung from a timed writing prompt. I met this woman on the page and had to figure out how she’d gotten there. This exhausted young mother who felt she was losing the fight of her life. I needed to understand what she would do next. What was this inevitable crucible awaiting her and how would that crisis change her?  

Every story I begin starts with a character. And I’m really onto something when the character refuses to leave me alone. She intruded on my thoughts when I was out running. She interrupted other dreams. She frustrated me when she made human (read: bad) choices. I worried about her.

BREACH was Marleigh’s story from the get-go. I live in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where the military community is vibrant and abundant. We have service members from every branch of the military stationed here and a very strong special forces/special operations community. I knew from the faded sticker I imagined on Marleigh’s car that she loved a Navy man. But understanding who this man was and the role he played in Marleigh’s life was much more difficult. It felt like Jace stood just out of reach, his details out of focus and blurry.

All of this changed when I was awarded a National Parks Artist Residency at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument near Scottsbluff, Nebraska. I brought my notebooks full of the early drafts of BREACH the 1700 miles I traveled for that residency, and I wondered during the long journey there if I needed to give this novel up and begin something new. Sometimes a story’s purpose is simply in the writing and the discovery; not to find readers. My first night in that howlingly windy, remote place—thirty-five miles from the nearest gas station—with its endless sky of bottom-heavy clouds, I dreamt of Afghanistan, a place I’ve never been outside of books.

In the pages of my notebook I met a young boy from a town of 1800 people who spent his childhood desperate for escape, adventure, anything but the life he knew. During the weeks of my residency, I wrote a draft of BREACH entirely in Jace’s perspective, so I could know him as fully as I did Marleigh. I felt as though I might run into this figment of my imagination anytime I drove into town to call my daughters and check email, he had finally become so three-dimensional and real for me. And, finally, he was real enough to surprise me on the page with his own actions. Once the primary characters wrestled the plot away from my control, I knew this book had a real chance to connect with readers.

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Kelly Sokol is the author of Breach and The Unprotected, which was featured on NPR and named one of Book Riot’s 100 Must-Read Books of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author and MFA creative writing graduate. Her work has appeared in Alpinist, UltraRunning Magazine, The Manifest-Station, Connotation Press, and more. She teaches creative writing at The Muse Writers Center. When she is not reading, writing or parenting, Kelly dreams, in color, of the mountains. She can often be found running in the backcountry. She resides in Virginia with her family. 

 

BREACH

The boundary between battlefield and home front blurs. Are there wounds love can heal?

Marleigh Mulcahy grew up in a boxing gym, the daughter of hard-drinking parents who didn’t keep a stable roof overhead. In the cinder-block Box-n-Go, amidst the sweat and funk, she meets EOD specialist Jace Holt, a highly and expensively trained bomb diffuser with three successful deployments behind him. With a heady mix of hope, carelessness, and a ridiculous amount of courage, they begin a family. When Jace returns to active duty, a roadside bomb resurrects ghosts from the couple’s past and threatens the life they’ve built.An unflinching and timely gaze into the marriage of an enlisted special operator and his wife, Breach is a story of betting it all on love, a couple’s determination to change the trajectory of their lives, and one woman’s promises to the man she loves and the boys they’re raising.

What choices will a desperate mother make to keep her family whole?

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing