When
I was taking the Masters’ Degree in English at the University of
Missouri at Kansas City I was taught the germ theory of writing. You
hear a story or read an article in a magazine and take a word or a
phrase from it and create your own story around it. It need only be a
word or two, something that triggers your imagination and sends it off
into the wilds of your creative mind. As long as you take the idea and
don’t repeat it word for word you can go where you will with it. It
really is only something to spark your creativity. You can separate the
idea completely from its source once you get going on your project
because it will have no relationship to its origin anymore and is
probably no longer even recognizable as coming from there.
I get my stories from my elders. They’re all great story-tellers. Anna’s Secret is
a case in point. The story is based on the story of Anne Beaton’s
hollow where a murder took place 150 years ago that was blamed on an
ancestor of mine. He was subsequently cleared of the deed and left
Prince Edward Island. I took the fact of her murder and fictionalized
it by changing her personality, the circumstances surrounding her life
and death, and putting in characters who never existed outside of my
imagination. I asked myself questions like: What if she had been
someone entirely different than who she was purported to be? Who was
she really? Who did she really go to see? Was it an innocent visit or
was it a clandestine affair as everyone thought? Who really murdered
her? What were the motivations? Questions of this nature lead to a
well fleshed-out novel not based on the original story, which was
probably based in truth. Then I took the original question of who she
really was and who I thought she should be and dug and explored all her
fictional relationships which eventually led to the denouement.
I
have never used an outline. I tried it once because I was told it was
the best way to work but it didn’t work for me. It kept me too bound by
the structure of the outline. I felt I had to write by the rules when
my characters wanted to do something different. I had to let them be
themselves. They become living people in my mind and you have to let
people do whatever it is they need to do. They talk to me and argue
with me and agree with me just like real people. You can’t be too
controlling or your story will become too rigid and awkward. Let you
characters tell the story. Keep notes as to who is related to whom and
when they did a certain thing and anything else you think you might get
hazy on as the story moves along. That way you don’t have to keep going
back to look for it, should you need that information again. So try
writing without an outline, you never know where your characters will
take you or why they want you to go there.
Anna
Gillis, the midwife and neighbour in Mattie’s Story, has been found
killed. The close-knit community is deeply shaken by this eruption of
violence, and neighbours come together to help one another and to
discover the perpetrator. But the answer lies Anna’s secret, long
guarded by Old Annie, the last of the original Selkirk Settlers, and the
protagonist of An Irregular Marriage. Join the community! Read Anna’s
Secret and other novels by Margaret A. Westlie.
Buy Now @ Amazon & Smashwords
Genre – Fiction, mystery, historical
Rating – G
More details about the author
Website http://www.margaretwestlie.com
