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| Billie Burke as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North |
“It’s always best to start at the beginning.” Wise
words from the Good Witch of the North in one of my all-time favorite movies, The Wizard of Oz.
Then again, I doubt old Glinda ever wrote a novel or
she probably would have come up something a bit less confusing. Unlike Dorothy,
I would have asked, “What is the
beginning?”
Okay, in the context of the movie, this is
pretty much self-explanatory: If you’re heading from Munchkin Land to the
Emerald City, you start out on the Yellow Brick Road and keep going until you
reach the big gate with the broken door bell. But with a novel, it ain’t that
easy. You can start in media res (in
the middle of the action) or at square one, as in Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding, with the lead character as a baby.
You can start at the end and work backwards, or with a prologue…. The
possibilities are nearly endless.
Today’s readers are not so forgiving as Mr. Fielding’s
in the middle of the 18th century, or Charles Dickens’s in the 19th
or even Margaret Mitchell’s in the early 20th century. They
want something more fast-paced. They want to jump into a book without the long
preambles and slow development our pre-multimedia-consuming ancestors found so
appealing. Gone are the days of the family sitting around the fire, by candle-
or lamplight after supper on a long winter night, reading aloud as the sole
form of entertainment.
The fact that I write historicals places certain
restrictions on how I approach the arc of a book. The characters are vital to
the plot, and the setting has nearly equal weight when planning how the book
will be structured. I like the deep third person point of view that allows the
reader to see through the eyes of more than one character, and I try to include
just enough details of time and place without them being overwhelming.
In Where the
River Narrows (with fellow BWL author Ron Ady Crouch, to be published
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cover photo © Janice
Lang
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by in
July 2018), I’ve chosen to begin the book at a what I consider to be a logical
start-off point. The Exposition introduces the characters (Elisabeth Van Alen,
her family, servants and neighbors, and Gerrit Bosch, the groom-to-be in this
“Brides” story) without a lot of preamble. The goal is to show them going about
their normal lives while painting in the features and subtleties of the era as
a natural offshoot of their daily activities. But to simply present a bunch of
people running around in costumes performing out-dated tasks would be boring
without a hint of something about to happen. Something is brewing that will
upset this idyllic scene and have far-reaching consequences.
Before the proverbial cart is overturned, relationships
between the characters are established, the groundwork laid for the “bride”
aspect of the book, and the external conflicts put in place that are
responsible not only for capsizing the wagon but for trampling its contents
under foot.
Following the “Exposition,” we move on to the “Rising
Action.” After the inciting incident (the event that sets the wheels turning),
the story takes on an entirely different feel. What had been normal and
comfortable no longer is so. War does this, and war, in the form of the
American Revolution, has dire consequences for Elisabeth and Gerrit. There are
losses and separations. Loved ones die, confidences are betrayed, and the
survivors are forced to carry on amid harsh and forbidding circumstances. In
this part of the book, Elisabeth and the remnants of her family and servants
make a perilous trek to Canada where they hope to seek asylum among the British
troops and loyalists to wait out the conclusion of the war. On the way, they
meet up with an assortment of colorful characters based on historical accounts
from a variety of sources. Once they arrive in Quebec Province, they need to
survive further hardship and privation.
The Climax, Falling Action, and Denouement haven’t been
written yet. (Neither, for that matter, has much of the Rising Action). But the
arc of this story plays out nightly in my mind before I fall asleep. Even
though I do not “plot” per se, this book is already as indelible as it could
be. There is room for change…but not much. That depends on the research
materials I continue to pore over. As anyone who’s ever written a historical
novel will tell you, there are gold nuggets waiting to be mined from some dusty
old tome that can put a new spin on even those story elements that today seem
untouchable.
We shall see….
~*~
Kathy Fischer Brown is a BWL author of historical
novels, Winter Fire, Lord Esterleigh’s Daughter, Courting the
Devil, The Partisan’s Wife,
and The Return of Tachlanad, an
epic fantasy adventure for young adult and adult readers. Check out her BWL Author page for more information and links to order, or visit her website. All of Kathy’s books are
available in e-book from a variey of online retailers, and in paperback.
