Writing Challenges: Part I of III: Who Are You To Tell This Tale?

Who Are You to Tell This Tale?

It took me a long time to love writing. When I first started out, my writer friends and I used to commiserate about how horrible it was, how hard it was to make ourselves sit in that chair, how we couldn’t wait to get something, anything, on the page and get the chore over with. We all laughed about “this miserable profession.” I still feel that misery but only in rare moments, because over time I have come to be in love with writing, and it was in this state of infatuation that I started work on the novel Once Again.

Winter was fading and spring was brightening, and I had a few scattered notes about a story I wanted to tell, but the idea was shapeless and inchoate, and I knew I had some questions to ask myself at the outset. The first of those questions was, Am I the right writer for this story? The premise had come to me in a dream, and to stick with that initial inspiration, the story would need a foundation in quantum mechanics. That fact presented me with a personhood problem—the write-what-you-know problem. 

Clearly, I don’t believe a writer should write only about themselves and the bank of knowledge they already possess, but I am certain that we should steer away from writing about things that are foreign to us emotionally. The event in my dream was triggered by grief, with which I am unfortunately well acquainted, but I didn’t have the science background to give the story its structure.

The closest things I had to lessons in physics were memories from childhood of my brother—six years older than me and a serious science-fiction devotee—reading in the backyard or sitting at a table in a restaurant, madly scribbly on a paper napkin about the impossible existence of lithium stars if the Big Bang was truly the birth of the universe. His passion left me baffled but curious. As time went on, I remained curious. I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I skimmed articles about quasars, black holes, and time crystals, but I was just a dabbler, not a serious student.

Rising early to work on this new novel, I struggled with the notion that maybe I wasn’t the right person to translate that dream into a workable piece of fiction. But I wanted to try; I wanted to live out the story realistically to its resolution. Nothing in my background gave me authority, but I yearned to create an authentic rendering.

So as I set out into the story, I had only the barest necessities—emotional knowledge, a smattering of factual information, and my curiosity.

Curiosity is a grand thing, isn’t it? I see it as one of the prime responsibilities of a writer—the duty to pay attention, to notice every small detail, to reveal the meanings beyond the surface of things. Sometimes, this duty makes us snoopy and intrusive, but it’s part of the job. On the other side of the page, I believe it is the most curious among us who make the best readers.

When someone takes a book into their hands and enters the world of a story, they expand the reach of human experience by going through what the characters go through but without the risk of actual destruction. A reader can live the life, for a few hours, of a bereaved parent or an interpreter of lithium stars.

As writers, we look up from within the page, bringing with us everything we could find to make our story meaningful, and the reader looks back at us through the typeface, bringing with them their willingness to believe and their curiosity about who these characters are and what will happen to them. It’s a stunning collaboration.

As I rolled my story idea around in my mind like a chunk of clay, a couple of things occurred to me. The first was that my main character, the “me” in my dream, would not/could not understand why she was caught up in the events of the plot. She would have to fight through what happens, ignorant to the reasons. This fact put me as the writer in synchrony with her as the protagonist and drew me a step nearer to believing I could be the right person to tell the story.

But then I had to face the immensity of the research. That second thing. How could I possibly rise to a level of understanding that would give me the authority to write within this complex topic? A feeling of despair knotted in my throat as I doubted myself and nearly decided to give up on the idea. But I felt an attachment to the people I’d dreamed into existence, and I couldn’t resign myself to denying them their wishes and snuffing them out. 

I began studying, step by step, reading at first on the most basic level, and then trying to grasp things about astrophysics in a more elegant way, and an interesting thing happened. The more I read, the more fascinated I became. I remembered the excitement in my brother’s voice as he questioned how the universe could be what it seems to be, and I felt that same thrill of curiosity and wonder. I realized how much there is to know and how vast my deficits were, and in a turnabout way, my ignorance qualified me for the job. I became a metaphor for my own character because no matter how little I knew (in the same way she knows so little), I had to find a way (could she find a way?).

For what it’s worth, I’m proud that I stuck with the effort to see this story through to the finish. And the first step was to answer that initial question. I became the right person to tell the tale of Once Again because I made myself be the writer who could do it. And in return the writing gave me numerous gifts along the way—coincidences of fact and myth that made the story more complete, an admiration for the poetry in the mysterious workings of our existence, and the reward for my curiosity of finding out what happens to these characters in the end.

What is the first challenge you face when you start a new project? I’d love to know.

—

Award-winner Catherine Wallace Hope grew up in Colorado, the setting for her thriller Once Again. She earned her degree in creative writing at the University of Colorado. She also delved into dance in New York and art and psychology in California. When she returned to Colorado, she became an instructor at the renowned Lighthouse Writers Workshop, offering creativity workshops for writers. Currently, she and her family are living on an island in the Pacific Northwest where they serve at the pleasure of two astonishingly spoiled dogs.

 You can find more at catherinewallacehope.com.

ONCE AGAIN

An imaginative, emotional debut novel for fans of Ann Patchett about one woman’s fight to save her daughter from repeating a deadly fate.

What if you had one chance to save someone you lost?

Isolated in the aftermath of tragedy, Erin Fullarton has felt barely alive since the loss of her young daughter, Korrie. She tries to mark the milestones her therapist suggests–like today, the 500th day without Korrie–but moving through grief is like swimming against a dark current.

Her estranged husband, Zac, a brilliant astrophysicist, seems to be coping better. Lost in his work, he’s perfecting his model of a stunning cosmological phenomenon, one he predicts will occur today–an event so rare, it keeps him from being able to acknowledge Erin’s coinciding milestone.

But when Erin receives a phone call from her daughter’s school, the same call she received five hundred days earlier when Korrie was still alive, Erin realizes something is happening. Or happening again. Struggling to understand the sudden shifts in time, she pieces together that the phenomenon Zac is tracking may have presented her with the gift of a lifetime: the chance to save her daughter.

Unable to reach Zac or convince the authorities of what is happening, Erin is forced to find the answer on her own, Erin must battle to keep the past from repeating–or risk losing her daughter for good.

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