Tag: Southern Gothic fiction

Why Do You Write What You Write?

I’ve struggled with this question now for almost twenty years.

When I wrote fiction in my first stint in graduate school, I took only one fiction workshop class. The stories I wrote there reflected a few preoccupations I had at the time that continue in my writing today–an affinity for love triangles, characters with southern accents, watching the results of a single action as it unfolded across time.

But they were pretty typical for juvenilia, often not-so-loosely based on people I knew and drawn from some of my own circumstances: one story I remember was a what-if of what might have happened if I had not reconciled with my longtime boyfriend, and another was taken almost literally from life from an incident when I was in high school of me trying to defend a kid from being bullied–and how I wished it had turned out. But–a most important distinction–they had happy endings.

Not so with the fiction that spilled out of me after my youngest child was born. Still Waters was so dark and desperate that I scared myself putting it on the page. I really wondered what had happened to me, that I was writing something that could not end happily–ever. I tried. Having Wendy go back to Ray seemed like a soul-death for her, but having her leave Ray for Judd resulted in something even worse–signing up for what could have been hell on earth.

All my fiction has been that way ever since. Very dark moods, gritty plots, morally gray or actively wretched characters. The truly miserable thing is that I couldn’t stand to read such stories written by someone else. I tried reading some books in my freelance career that were classed as Southern Gothic and wound up throwing them against the wall–literally in at least one case. I enjoyed uplifting stories and nonfiction, where I could learn something.

Where did all of this darkness come from?

It was a long time before I faced down the answer. I remembered all the tales my relatives had told of their hardscrabble lives. Every cheating song that played on country radio the summer of 1983 when we didn’t have the money to replace the lightning-struck television and listened to the radio all day, every day. Every divorce among my cousins. Every untimely, early death in my community from drunk-driving teenagers, suicidal housewives, or gun-toting men.

Desperation and sorrow was my birthright and my history. But even through it all, we–my family, myself, my characters–endured. Imperfect solutions to problems stemming from dark secrets–that was my “stuff”.

So I don’t apologize for it anymore. It’s just life. it ends, continues, begins, endures. The cushiest, most stress-free life you can imagine–it still ends. We all have to die. We’re all equal at the edge of the River Styx. I write about people who live because they’re afraid of what happens when they die.

What do you write about?

Where It Went

I drafted the first short story feverishly in my notebooks until I finished it, then I started typing it into our computer. I revised as I went, tossing in twists of the knife at every point I could find to heighten the dramatic tension. The final scene that took five minutes of story time turned into three days of wondering how to end it and get Wendy and Judd apart again. I went through draft after draft, trying to make it sound “honest” to my concept of the characters.

When I finally solved it, I felt spent. It had taken we two weeks to finish it (I think). But I had a ten-page short story, all told from Wendy’s point of view. But while I thought I was finished with Still Waters, it was not finished with me.

I let my husband read it, and if he wondered about why I had written it, he didn’t ask. He only asked why I had them sleep together. I told him that I was trying to show how far fear could take somebody. I sent it to a few of my writing friends. My friend Christine Parisen said, “Wow! I had to smoke a cigarette after this one!”

But Judd McKay wasn’t finished talking. I kept thinking about that character, and he wanted his ten-page say about the events of the story. So I wrote how he came back to Hattiesburg and discovered Wendy was pregnant, and how he became convinced it was his child. Another month of one gut-wrenching scene after another. I had never written fiction like this, where the characters became much more than thinly-disguised people I knew. Judd McKay and Wendy Magnum became real people in my mind, and they had a greater story they wanted to tell.