Driving to church this morning, I had an out-of-the-blue epiphany to solve an apparent lag in the second half of my novel--and it was strange to me that the idea was to have one of my characters experience one of my life's most tragic events: pregnancy loss. I was thinking of the advice I've read for novelists: "Keep upping the stakes"--when you've got your character in conflict and struggling, what more can you do to test him/her? The truly unbidden idea (dare i say flash of inspiration) does offer a great many features that would strengthen my second half--it'd bring other existing relatioships and conflicts to great stress and would also really change the character herself. My experience is that you're never the same after losing a baby. And i can say from experience it's quite different too, the experience of an early miscarriage versus a later loss; the latter kind affects you much more. It changed me greatly, but the early miscarriage did not so much.
Having this idea made me realize: my characters in this novel-in-progress really have been echoing little of my life experiences. Whereas my first novels were very much about my life experiences, thinly guised by fictional characters, this novel is rich with characters who are in places i've never been. I've never been a 50-something year old woman who's lived with the guilt of killing her husband, failing her children. I've never been a man who lost everything for following his heart, facing terminal illness. I've never been the only child of a single, never-married mom, whose husband had an affair, or had an affair myself. And I've never been a child of a dysfunctional family, therefore searching for love in all the wrong places... i think I'm giving myself a pat on the back for this--the idea of the pregnancy loss being the first real-life event to make it into this novel makes me feel god. I've been making characters who are truly themselves, and less of me, than ever before.
NOW my real question is to figure out the intricate dance of timing. With everything else in the book happening--another character having a baby, the outcome of the affair and broken marriage the ongoing drama of the terminal illness--where is the optimal place for this to occur? In some ways, it's pretty flexible--I mean, it could take only a few months from beginning to end. The only obvious restriction is that conception obviously has to take place, and because I want the experience to be 3 months into the pregnancy, I guess my first real decision is the timing of the conception in the context of the other events. Hmmm. I just realized a snag: I was planing to do a Part 1 d Part 2 set-up, letting me fast-forward through a few months to speed the story along. But doing that would have me fast-forwarding right through when this pregnancy could naturally occur.... I'll have to think on that some more... Maybe skip only a month or 2?
I always knew I'd someday want to put into a novel the experience of pregnancy loss--because it's something not dealt with much, and i had more than a bit of anger about how it went down, how i never knew it was possible to occur the way it did for me. It's not just a powerful experience to create drama in a plot--it's a social issue I've long wanted to be able to address. I've had little luck getting nonfiction articles on the topic published; it's a hard sell--which is precisely why women who face it find themselves completely unprepared. Even if youre' searching for the information because you know you will lose the baby, you cannot find info about what it'll be like, to prepare yourself.
I never thought of putting the experience in this novel though--but thinking about it has opened a lot of doors. Advice for novelists talk about the value of putting your characters in really vulnerable positions--this will certainly do that--and leave her at the mercy of neighbors or anyone she can get to help her, as she'll be alone when it happens. I also like the possibilities in how it will affect her husband, and her best friend...
Hmmm... I've got chew over the possibilities of the timing....
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