Guest Blogger -- Karyn Witmer/Elizabeth Grayson
Lots of romance writers change what they write over the course of their career. For some that change is a growth process. Mary Jo moved seamlessly from writing wonderful Regencies to writing wonderful historical romances. She tested the waters in contemporary romance and eventually added fantasy to her amazing repertoire.
Sometimes authors change the kind of stories they tell because reader tastes change or markets dry up.
I myself was hijacked.
After writing ten historical romances as Elizabeth Grayson and Elizabeth Kary, Bantam made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. They presented me with a contract for MOON IN THE WATER, a historical I had thoroughly researched and really wanted to write, on the provision that the second book in the agreement would be a contemporary story.
To say the least, I was flabbergasted. How could I write a contemporary novel when for the last ten years I’d spent most of my waking hours nosing around in the nineteenth century? But a writer has to eat, so I agreed to the contract and thought I’d figure out the contemporary story when the time came.
As it turned out, I pretty much worried about what I was going to do the whole time I was writing MOON IN THE WATER. Where was I going to come up with a contemporary idea? I wondered. I can barely use my cell phone and just didn’t think in “contemporary .”
I was eating breakfast one morning about this time of year and admiring my huge Christmas cactus abloom in all it’s brilliant fuchsia glory at the far end of the table. The plant means a lot to me. When I was little, my great-grandmother had a cactus even larger than mine growing at the end of her sun parlor. As a child of six or seven, I thought it was positively magical that it bloomed only at Christmas.
My grandmother had a cactus, too, growing in her dining room. My mom had hers in the window of the sewing room in the house where I grew up. Grandma and Mom’s plants had grown from cuttings taken from Nana’s Christmas cactus. When I moved into my first apartment, my mom brought me a cutting, too.
It’s that single scrawny cutting that grew into the great, spreading plant with its gnarled branches and canopy of paddle-shaped leaves that is flowering like crazy downstairs in my family room right this minute.
“There’s a story in that cactus,” I thought.
And at first it seemed that any story I would write about a Christmas cactus would have to be historical. Or maybe it would be the saga of all four women’s lives.
That’s when I did a little hijacking of my own, because when I received that slip of a Christmas cactus from my mom, I remembered that it felt kind of like a rite of passage. What I it said to me in a way that my mom could never have put into words was, “You’re on your own now, and I’m so proud of the way you’ve grown up.”
So what if a fictional mother presented her daughter with a cutting from the family Christmas cactus with that same message? What if the reason she was doing it was to reestablish a relationship with her rebellious daughter? What if that simple gift came with an acknowledgment that her child had become a woman in her own right, with the assurance that she accepts the choices the younger woman has made? What if it represented a mother’s enduring love?
From the time I signed the contract for the book that became A SIMPLE GIFT, I knew I wanted to write about a family in crisis. This story line would give me the chance to do that.
That’s when I met Avery, a woman who put her husband and daughter ahead of everything else and nearly lost herself when her family imploded. It introduced me to Mike, who came from a deeply dysfunctional family and was determined that to make up for that he was going to see that his own little family was perfect. It brought brilliant, headstrong Fiona to life as a daughter determined to live on her own and make her own mistakes.
As a writer of historical romance, sweeping events have almost always set my stories in motion. I’ve used an Indian attacks, a bank robberies, and Civil War battles to add action and drama. I’ve relied heavily on the conflicts in history provided me to keep my hero and heroine apart.
So when it came to writing a contemporary story, how was I going to wring those strong emotions from situations we all do every day? Things like going grocery shopping, sharing a pizza with a friend, or discussing finances? And because those events seemed so small by comparison, I had days when writing A SIMPLE GIFT felt like scrubbing Walmart's parking lot with a tooth brush.
Then I started having days when the characters helped me out. New characters show up unannounced. Existing characters revealed their fears and foibles and insights I didn’t know they had. Sometimes they told me things I wish they’d been a little more up-front about: Like the way Mike and Avery waited until three days before my deadline to reveal that – Oh, by the way, they’d had another child after Fiona.
Writing the historical vignettes I used in the story to show how each of the women in the family got her Christmas cactus were the best part of writing the book. It was challenging, too, because each of those women was determined to tell her own story in her own way. Great-grandma Letty, whose young, dashing husband gave her the first cactus, left her diary. Grandma Ada reminisced about receiving her cactus and permission to marry her true love on the very same Christmas Eve. Miriam, Avery’s mother, reminisced in her journal about how the hardships of the depression brought her not just her Christmas cactus, but the man she loved.
Even though I did kind of get hijacked into writing a contemporary novel, I’m not sorry it happened. I really enjoyed working on A SIMPLE GIFT. Because I wasn’t entirely sure what my publisher and editor expected, I explored, tried new things, played with what were for me new kinds of storytelling.
Anything that gives a writer’s creativity a quick, sharp prod in the ribs the way A SIMPLE GIFT did for me is a very good thing. It’s good for the writer herself and an even better thing for the readers who like her stories.