If I could somehow tell my my teenage self that she would come to love writing fiction, she would dismiss me as a lunatic, because in school that was the thing she most dreaded. There were a couple of stages in the conversion. One was the practice of writing round robin letters that my family kept going for a number of years in the days of slow mail, and I’d write a page about once a month that hit the high points of my life. I wanted it to be entertaining and found myself using writing skills I’d first learned in high school from Mr. Pink, my sophomore year English teacher. He insisted we give specific examples to support any statement, and once he leapt onto his desk to tell us not to bother to pick up a pen if we were going to write a stereotype.
When I read to my mother an account I had written of my uncle’s funeral, rich with Eudora Welty sorts of characters, she thought I was too hard on her relatives, though she had much more derogatory things to say about them than I did. I was amazed, because I was trying to portray them honestly. I remembered that the people of Sauk Centre did not take well to Sinclair Lewis’ portrayal of them in Main Street, even though he was writing fiction. I could try changing names but that didn’t hide the real people well enough, so I picked at the details of characters and incidents. And that was my slide into fiction, and the freedom thrilled me.
I often paint my characters into a corner and surprise myself about the way they get out or not. I find out more about them that way. As an ecologist, and grown-up kid, I’m deeply concerned about the planet, coral reefs, rivers, air, trees, and wish we humans could stop messing things up. All this creeps into everything I write, whether I intend it to or not.
We so desperately need to learn how talk to each other, and I find myself exploring this in characters who disagree about how to treat the earth, for example. I like to do this using a point of view character who thinks nothing like me, because I end up with more complex, rounded, sympathetic characters than if I simply made them the villains. I can even end up liking a guy who denies science if he loves his dog. It’s a kind of rehearsal for me if I’m trying to figure out how to talk to a real person who thinks masks give you COVID, without stomping away.
There’s no end to conflict in the world, and in my fiction, but in my stories, I get to make up the ending. Not that it’s always happy or pinned down. I like to leave my readers with some mystery they can mull over long after they’ve finished reading the story.
