Epiphany

For me, building a story starts with character and I love building new characters. Figuring how they look, feel, react. Seeing their backstory, feel it from their point of view. I, even, love how the idea of the character, the first beginning seed, nags and tickles and seeps into my mind and just won’t let me go. I love the way it makes me feel that I’m in my world and theirs, too, for long periods of my day.

I love that tension, that urgency I feel as the character/story grows, has needs and wants that I have to fulfill. That I have to research, find, makeup. Only it doesn’t really feel like making things up. It feels like uncovering or excavating this hidden story. And there is always this intensity, this craving to find it all, right now.

Since I began rewriting the first book in my Hearts series, I’ve been in that state and it took me by surprise. When I began the series many years ago, I knew there were four brothers and I knew three of their stories, but the fourth eluded me. Most because I had a hard time visualizing the fourth brother, Gallagher. He was there, but his face was blotted out and every time he was in a scene, I struggled with his actions and motives. Who was he? What did he want?

But as I do, I just kept stepping forward; driven by the other stories I thought I knew. There was so much I loved about this series and the three books I finally finished, yet when I sent them out, I didn’t have great luck. At the time, Western Historicals had fallen out of favor, too, but I just kept writing.

It wasn’t until I started rewriting that I finally saw the fourth story, the fourth brother and that the stories, though separate, intertwined, and of course they did. Lives are like that, though each brother’s story was his own, it couldn’t really be told completely until I knew Gallagher’s. It didn’t matter that none of them happen simultaneously, that Gallagher’s story was the last chronologically. What mattered was they were family and what happened to one affected all.

An epiphany.

Plot springs from character…I’ve always sort of believed that these people inside of me—these characters—know who they are and what they’re about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don’t type. —Anne Lamott, novelist and essayist