On Writing and Playing God

I sure do like it when a book leaves me with mental puzzles to think about for days after I've finished. Just now, I've hit the end of Atonement by Ian McEwan, and my mind is just buzzing with all kinds of thoughts.

First, I have to say there will be numerous spoilers in this post, because I can't talk about the things I want to say without revealing most of what happens in the book. You were warned!

Where to start? I guess I'll take on the most obvious thing first, the title theme, the atonement. As we find out at the end of the book, the whole story is a draft of a novel written by Briony Tallis to try to atone for something she did when she was 13 that drastically altered the lives of her sister and a close family friend. Briony falsely accused the friend, Robbie Turner, of raping her cousin, and because Briony was so adamant in her insistence that she had seen Robbie leaving the scene, he was wrongly convicted and sent to prison. Briony's sister (Cecilia) and Robbie had only just come to understand that they loved each other, so of course Briony's accusation makes their budding romance even more difficult. The fallout of the accusation is not all on Cecilia and Robbie, however; as she grows up, Briony's guilt pushes her into a lifestyle of self-inflicted punishment and penance. She goes into training as a nurse rather than attending college, putting herself into circumstances in which she will be forced to do nasty and humbling things (like cleaning bedpans). At some point, Briony decides the best way to make atonement for ruining Robbie and Cecilia's lives is by confessing everything in writing, through a novel.

Is It Really Time for This Again? 2012 in Review

I've always heard people say the years go faster as a person gets older, and wow, did this one fly past. There were some big events this year - I turned 50, my last living grandparent died, we had an exceedingly dry and hot summer, my son started his final year of high school, my daughter is now old enough to have a driver's permit. Between all that, I found time to read some things I enjoyed this year, including some things I wouldn't have expected to like.

Best Discoveries - Maybe this is the recency effect in action, but A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich would have to top my list this year. It was scholarly and yet created Martha Ballard as an unforgettable "character." Plus it hit several of my favorite buttons - women's history, gardening, and the drag of housework, among others.

Another discovery I enjoyed this year was an unpublished manuscript by the sister of a friend from church, about the struggle she and her siblings faced when their father began to be debilitated by dementia and they had to take control of his life. The story is dramatic and she told it well. I hope she has success in getting it published so the rest of you can read it someday.

Saddest Disappointment - When the biggest disappointment of the year was Abel's Island by William Steig, I guess it was a pretty good year of reading. That's not to say this is the worst book I read all year; I think I just had such high expectations for it that I felt unfulfilled after finishing it. I don't know what I expected....Abel to go home and reject all his "creature comforts" after a year of living in the wild?

Favorite Classic - I'm not sure if some of the things on my list that I consider "classics" would be considered so by other people, but fortunately, my favorite is undoubtedly a "classic" in everyone's book: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I say that even though I complained about the style that is part of what makes it a classic....

Favorite Love Story - It's hard for me to choose a favorite romance this year. Although the "telling" style of Pride and Prejudice occasionally got in the way (as far as I was concerned) of the love story, I was still won over by Mr. Darcy. But I think my favorite romantic moment came in Lisa Klein's Two Girls of Gettysburg; it was sweet in a young, first-love kind of way.

Favorite Historical Fiction - Ann Turnbull has another winner in this category! Seeking Eden taught me more about the history of the slave trade during the colonial period of this country than any of my history survey classes in high school or college. Not only did it give facts, but it also set those facts in a powerful emotional context, which is exactly what great historical fiction is best at doing, in my opinion.

Greatest Reading Accomplishment - I read four nonfiction books this year: A Midwife's Tale; His Excellency, George Washington by Joseph Ellis; The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum; and The Complete Guide to Successful Event Planning by Shannon Kilkenny. (Ok, that last one was for one of the classes I taught this fall, but hey, I read it, so I'm counting it!) That's not very many, I know, but I read nonfiction so very slowly that to have read as many as this feels like a big accomplishment. And I learned a great many interesting things!

Biggest Failure - I read about half of Savvy by Ingrid Law before I just decided to quit. I had seen a lot of good reviews, and my daughter liked it, but it annoyed me. And life is just too short -- those years roll past too quickly -- to read things that annoy you.

Favorite Re-Read - Hmmm. There were three things I re-read this year: The First Four Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Edge of Time by Loula Grace Erdman, and The Dark Moon and the Full, a one-act play by Joseph Hart. I enjoyed all three, so I can't really pick a "favorite." I will say that all three of them were different reading experiences for me this time than they were the first time. I'm a firm believer that although the words in a work may stay the same, what the reader brings to the work makes it different each time. Re-reading is not a waste of time.

Once is Enough (Books I Probably Won't Ever Read Again) - The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks tops this list. As part of my "market research" into what sells, I decided to check out something by Sparks, because I know he is a mega-bestselling author. My reaction? Decidedly underwhelmed. The story was ok in sort of a sappy way, but the style broke a lot of what I consider solid rules for good writing. I don't think I'll be seeking out any more of Sparks' novels. (See "Biggest Failure" above...)

Books I Thought Would Be Amazing But Were Just So-So - There are three books I would put on the "so-so" list this year: The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary Blackwood, A Painted House by John Grisham, and O'Sullivan Stew by Hudson Talbot (a picture book). I was hoping Grisham's book would be good because I had read some of his other work and liked it. But it just didn't impress me much. I was really disappointed in O'Sullivan Stew; the pictures were very attractive (which is why I bought it) and it is an Irish folktale, which I thought would be cool. But it was rather predictable.

Books I Thought Wouldn't Be Much But Were Actually Good Stuff - I was pleasantly surprised by Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz. It's not my genre, so I didn't really have very high expectations for liking it, but I'm glad I read it. It didn't convert me to trade my historical fiction for science fiction, ha ha, but it wasn't a waste of my life (See "Biggest Failure" above).

Plans for Reading in the New Year - I am feeling a hunger for fiction, and lots of it! I never got around to reading Nancy Dane's final installment in her Civil War series (An Enduring Union), so I definitely want to read it this year.

Plans for Writing in the New Year - Honestly, I had hit a slump in my writing recently. I thought when finals were over, and the Christmas preparation was over, and I didn't yet have to be getting ready for next semester, that I would have plenty of time to write. But in the first few days after Christmas, I didn't write anything and just didn't feel like writing anything. It was more interesting to clean, believe it or not. Over the last few days, though, two people have out of the blue said they'd like to read my first book, which seems to have helped bring back my motivation. (Thank you! You know who you are!)

What I'd like to accomplish in the coming year would be to completely finish the revision on my second book and get it out to some beta readers. I would also like to start a first draft of a completely different story, with new characters and new things to research.

Maybe putting it in writing will hold me responsible for doing it!

What She Said

Another snippet from A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich:

Historians have written a great deal about field agriculture in early America but not enough about the intricate horticulture that belonged to women, the intense labor of cultivation and preservation that allowed one season to stretch almost to another.

One more reason I love this book.

Some Things Never Change

I've been reading A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and there have been several points at which I thought, "Oooh, I need to blog about that!" Today, that inclination and spare time coincided, so I'm hoping I'll remember some of the things I've found so meaningful as I've been reading.

I love this book. The first chapter was pretty deadly, but every one following has been very informative and engaging. What I like best about the book is Ulrich's ability to take the seemingly trivial entries in Ballard's diary and pull them together to give a picture of Ballard's life and, by extension, the lives of women during the late 18th and early 19th centuries on the American frontier (both when it was young and as it matured). As a trained rhetorician, I am dazzled by Ulrich's scholarship - the work she must have done to pull all this together is mind-boggling! As a writer, I am so grateful to have this resource that looks at the ordinary aspects of a woman's life. As a reader, I am touched by the way Ulrich brings Martha Ballard out of the obscurity of 200 years ago and creates her as a living, breathing human. I suppose that is one of the things that most affects me about this book - despite the 200-year time interval, Martha Ballard could be one of any number of women I know. Why, I may even become Martha Ballard some day!

At first, I was reading for the differences between life in 18th-century Maine and the 21st century. The first thing that really stood out to me was the chapter when Ulrich was writing about Martha's doctoring a number of people for the "canker rash." Several of those people died, despite Martha's best efforts. Martha also lost her first patient ever to childbed fever. Ulrich goes on to explain the "canker rash" was scarlet fever, caused by a variety of streptococcus bacteria that also caused the childbed (puerperal) fever. It dawned on me (don't laugh) that she was talking about what we so casually call "strep," that annoying little infection that gives sore throats. Now, I know there are still some serious consequences to streptococcus, especially the resistant strains, but for the most part, we aren't really afraid of strep anymore. We go to the doctor and get an antibiotic, and everything is fine. We certainly don't see epidemics of strep throat that kill 15 percent of the patients (which is what happened to Martha that summer). Our "victory" over streptococcus is relatively recent, though; one of the stories my mother tells of her childhood recounts a bout of scarlet fever that nearly killed her when she was very young (two or three years old). That would have been less than 70 years ago.

I also liked reading the section in which Ulrich contrasted the work Martha did as a midwife and the way the male doctors in town related to her. Eventually, as medicine became more "professional," the men who were doctors devalued the work the midwives did and pushed them to the side as "non-professional." This is another thread that is especially interesting to me as a student of rhetoric. The doctors were able to use rhetoric and influence to completely change the way the public viewed midwives, while simultaneously building up their own position as healers. Ulrich does a good job of showing how the services each type of healer provided were not necessarily equivalent; while the male doctors came and examined the patient and recommended treatment, Martha was much more hands-on. She would sit up with the patient through the night; if the patient died, she was usually involved in preparing the body for burial. The midwife was involved with the patient's life (and possibly death) in a way the "professional" doctor wasn't willing to be.

What has been most striking to me recently, though, is Martha's relationship with her family, particularly as she aged. Throughout the book, Ulrich quotes passages in which Martha laments how "fatigued" she is from her work. Of course we would expect her to be fatigued since she's getting up in the middle of the night to go off and help deliver a baby. But it seemed to me that Martha was much more likely to complain of fatigue when she was experiencing emotionally-upsetting events. One chapter discusses the reality of the proverb, "Man may work from sun to sun, but woman's work is never done." Martha seems to have had a "martyr" streak, which led her to do things for her husband while ignoring her own needs (and then complaining about no one noticing she needed something, ha ha). What's funny about it is I hear myself saying and thinking the same kinds of things today ("I never have time to do what I want because I'm always having to go to something for the husband or kids...."). It was sort of bittersweet to read that chapter. On the one hand, I can see Martha was playing the "martyr" card, but on the other, I know what was happening. She was taking care of everyone else, while everyone else was definitely taking her for granted. Poor Martha.

The sympathy I felt for her was even stronger after I finished another chapter this morning. Poor Martha was over 70 years old at this point. Her midwife career was dwindling, and her husband had been jailed for debt (because as tax collector, he hadn't collected all the taxes due for the town). Although she was still able to take care of herself fairly well, there were also ways in which she was dependent on her grown children - in getting firewood, for example. Yet her children were too busy with their own families to remember Martha as much as she needed (or wanted). Things were even worse when one of her sons and his family moved into her house. Then she was a sort of prisoner in her own way, staying in her room to avoid the large, noisy batch of grandchildren and the inevitable conflicts with her daughter-in-law. By the end of the chapter, Martha's husband had finally been released from jail (he spent more than a year in a semi-restrictive situation - he could move about most of the town during the day, but had to sleep at the jail), and her son and his family were moved into their own new house. But I still felt sorry for Martha, probably because of something I read on Facebook the other day. It was a poem that was supposedly written by an old man in a nursing home, basically saying, "You ignore me, but I used to have a life just like you do." Now, I don't know if that story is true, but the truth is, it could be. As people get older, the world rushes past them to belong to the younger generations, who are so preoccupied with their own lives that they don't often take much time to notice their parents and grandparents.

Maybe I'm super-sensitive to that theme because my son will be leaving home in the next few months to go to college, and I know the biggest part of my job as his parent will be over. I know grown people still need their parents, but he will never need us in the same way he once did ever again - the shift of the world's focus is starting. Oh, well. It's nothing new, as Martha's diary points out.

But it makes me think I should resolve to go visit my parents more in 2013!

Biology is Not Destiny - At Least in MY Story

Everyone in the family except me is heavily involved this week with the high school choir's musical production, which means long evenings of dress rehearsals, which means I get a couple of evenings this week with no supper responsibilities. Last night was the first of those, and while I'd like to say I was able to spend the evening writing, no such luck - I still have speeches to grade. As I was working on the speeches, I turned on the TV (mainly to keep me from going to sleep as I was grading, ha ha). After perusing the various channels, I settled on the Science Channel, on a program called, "The Science of Sex Appeal."

As a communication teacher, I find the research into human attraction fascinating. One of the sections of the program discussed what I'm going to call the "match hypothesis," which says people tend to choose mates who are within one point, up or down, of their own attractiveness rating. Thus, Brad Pitt ends up with Angelina Jolie, and those of us who are more ordinary-looking end up with other ordinary-looking people.

Of course, it's not quite that simple. People are attracted to potential mates for a variety of reasons, with most women apparently more attracted to men who appear to have status and stability (traits that make him a good candidate as a long-term father and protector). The program went on to discuss a number of other factors, such as a person's unique scent, that play into attraction. All in all, it was a very interesting program. (And yes, I did manage to grade a respectable number of speeches while still learning all this about attraction!)

Just because I'm not writing doesn't mean my story has been sent to its room with the door closed. I think about it all the time, and this morning it occurred to me that part of the fantasy-entertainment value of the story is that it turns the "match hypothesis" on its head. In the story, a girl of low social status who has been labeled as "homely" all her life is matched with a handsome guy whose family is relatively well-off. Originally, the girl goes along with the "match hypothesis," not seeing the guy as a potential mate. However, circumstances force them together, and one thread that runs through the story is that biology is NOT destiny - even if the "match hypothesis" says two people of different levels of physical attractiveness shouldn't be together, it can happen.

I'm not claiming to have invented this literary theme; gosh, it's probably at the heart of any number of stories throughout time (I'm too lazy to think of any at the moment, and too hurried - got to get ready for work). One thing I like about my story, though, is that it doesn't stop at that simple fantasy. In the story, it would appear that the girl has found herself a very suitable mate. After all, not only is he more attractive than she is, but he also has status and relative wealth, which according to the program, would make him a perfect choice. As the story develops, however, the status and wealth are steadily stripped away (and even the attractiveness is lessened - the poor guy ends up with a couple of scars). At one point in the story, she gets a choice as to whether she wants to keep this mate who has turned out to not be what was originally promised, who now is actually a risk because there's no guarantee he can give her any kind of stability and protection, at least in terms of physical possessions.

Well, of course she does keep him - I mean, this is a "sappy" romance, as my husband put it. And that actually leads me into one of the major themes for the second book, which I'm working on now when I'm not grading speeches or some such. That story is told from his viewpoint, and a big part of his struggle is to provide a stable home for his wife and the children their union produces.

Wow. I'm glad I stumbled on to that program. Even if my story is a sappy little fantasy romance, I'd like for it to also have some depth to it. Looking at it from the lens of this program, maybe there's something there worth thinking about, something more than "sap"!

Where Is This Going?

When I was a kid, my family liked to work jigsaw puzzles. We had several in boxes that were stored in a bedroom closet, including some that had come to us from my mother's parents. One of the puzzles they gave us didn't have a box, which meant there was no picture to guide the person who was working on the puzzle. Instead, all the pieces were in a plastic bag that had a handwritten description of the picture (I believe it was a landscape scene with a guy fishing). Actually, I never saw this puzzle because I don't remember that any of us ever tried to work it.

Lately, I've been thinking about that puzzle in a bag as I'm reading A Painted House by John Grisham. I'm almost finished with the book now, and I still find myself asking, "Where is this going?" I've even done my trademark move of peeking ahead in the story, and I still can't figure it out! It very much reminds me of the picture-less puzzle - there are many pieces, and some of them are colorful and interesting by themselves, but I can't see how those pieces are coming together into any kind of coherent picture.

For one thing, I don't get the title of the book. The narrator of the book is a 7-year-old boy named Luke, and he and his parents live in an unpainted farmhouse with his parental grandparents. However, the disabled son of the migrant hillbillies who come to pick cotton on the farm starts to paint the house. Why? I think I get it that a painted house symbolizes more genteel living, and I think I understand that Luke's mother (who grew up in a painted house) wants to escape farm living. But I really don't understand why the disabled boy started painting the house in the first place. He's a very underdeveloped character, anyway, and to put him in charge of the action that gives the title to the book just seems, I don't know - weird.

Another of the hillbillies' sons, Hank, is a terrible bully. I won't go into everything he does because I don't want to give away any spoilers. I will say he gets in a conflict with one of the Mexican workers who is also on the farm to pick cotton. That conflict does not end well, but what brings it to a head is really the last thing I would have expected. Again, it's just kind of weird. It feels like there was a missed opportunity - there were some situations that could have led to that final conflict in a more dramatic way (for example, the Mexican and the bully's sister have been romancing when they were supposed to be picking cotton!), but those don't seem to play any role.

And then there is the dirt-poor sharecropper family that has a whole passel of children, including a 15-year-old daughter who claims Luke's uncle is the father of her surprise baby. That storyline took up a significant chunk of the center of the book, but it has more or less faded into the background as the end of the book draws near.

Honestly, I feel like I've dumped out all the pieces of the puzzle and now have to figure out how they go together with nothing more than a brief description of what  the story is about to help me. It hasn't been unpleasant; John Grisham's writing style flows nicely, and the pace of the story clips along (except when he's describing the baseball games - ugh). But it's just puzzling to me. Maybe if I keep plugging along for these last few chapters, all the pieces will suddenly fit into place and I'll see the big picture.

I Hate to Do This, But I Have to

In the past three days, I've had 30 or more spam comments about selling "cheap" prescription drugs on this blog. In an effort to stop that, I'm turning on the word verification for comments--at least for a while, until the spam-bot finds someone else to prey on. Sorry about that folks, I know it's a pain.