Just cut it in layers

by Helen DePrima

As a writer, I’m a heartless scavenger. I mine tidbits from every encounter, every memory, every situation. I try never to be mean-spirited in picking through the details of other people’s lives, but everything is fair game. A word, a phrase, or a fleeting expression is more than likely to surface in a future plot.

          A recent local news story told how a young man paralyzed from the chest down in an accident has pushed himself to regain almost total function. Heaven forgive me, I plan to ask him to share details of his recovery for use in my next book. I’ll approach him with the respect and admiration he deserves, but I’ll pick his brain like a vulture.  

          More frequently, a single impression will strike me so vividly that I stop wherever I am to record it – a freshly-plowed field looking as soft as wide-wale corduroy, a fragment of conversation rich in local color overheard on the subway, the sound of a street musician’s violin rising above the snarl and grumble of traffic, the sweet scent of freesias from a sidewalk flower vender.

          I particularly love creating dialogue with the correct regional tone, like the variations between city-Southern and country-Southern, never mind the differences

between Kentucky and Georgia and Texas. In some cases, it’s possible to research an exact word or turn of phrase, but mostly I depend on listening. The dialogue in my books about the sport of bull riding comes from hours spent at events soaking up details of how cowboys from Texas, from Oklahoma, from the deep South and the Pacific Northwest really talk. The pleasure of the quest is at least as satisfying as the finished product.

by Liz Flaherty

We are storytellers here. Harlequin Heartwarmings are contemporary stories where we write about people we know or are or want to be. We try to tell them in layers, so that the story’s residents are people and animals you care about and the events are ones you believe. When you reach the end of one of our books, we hope you sigh with pleasure because you feel like you’ve been there and go on to the next book.

So this morning I was thinking—I do this (or say I am) when the words aren’t coming and I’ve only written like 12 of them in the last hour—about where those layers come from.

From the past. My grandparents had a fire in the big brick house where they lived. My grandmother,

skinny as a rail except for her advanced stage of pregnancy, picked up the treadle sewing machine and carried it downstairs and outside. I don’t know what else they lost, but no one was hurt and Grandma had her sewing machine. This was over 100 years ago, but the story hasn’t changed by so much as a syllable in my lifetime. I don’t know how she did it—I have one of those treadle machines and I can barely move it to clean under it—but she did.

I model my heroines on that one incident. The women I write about will never be extraordinary in looks or intelligence or accomplishment, but if life demands it, they will be able to carry the sewing machine down the steps.

From experience. If not our own, ones that are close to us. An accident happens in my next 

Heartwarming, Every Time We Say Goodbye, the result of which is that entire families’ lives are changed forever. Two accidents much like the one I wrote about have happened locally. One of them was nearly 50 years ago, another 25 years ago. Our community still feels the ripples.

From listening. My nephew Kory and his wife Amy have seven children between them, so when they go as a family, they usually take two cars. In December, they went to a family gathering several hours away. The three teenage girls rode with Kory. He listened, laughed, learned, and was scared, and he knew all the girls better when they got there.

From airports. I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t love airports. We sit with our Starbucks cups and watch people and write their stories in our heads or even on our laptops if we haven’t already run our batteries down. We hear accents and close our eyes to try and remember them. We feel the emotions of people saying Goodbye. Of others saying Hello.

From music. Although I write in silence, I hear music in my stories. I see my people dancing in the kitchen—they all do—and there is joy in Writerville.

Where do you find your layers?