How Did That Happen? Writing an Historical Trilogy
Robert J. Begiebing, AWP Convention, 2007
Do authors really plan a series, or does a sequence of novels arise through some less organized, more organic process? I suppose the answer is, of course, both. And although I can only speak for myself, for my own experience of writing a series of three related novels, I've often wondered about the degree of planning ahead of time that went into some of the more famous or conspicuous, even daunting, literary series.
Of course James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales appeared by some sort of organic process, out of order and in between projects, only to be published in 1850 in a new edition of the five novels in chronological order, finally. Balzac's The Human Comedy is the title given in 1840 to a revised and rearranged series of some 90 novels and novellas. Faulkner's 14 Yoknapatawpha novels began after his books of poetry and short stories and after three other novels in 1929 with Sartoris. I take it that the case for their careful planning down to the last novel from the start would be rather hard to make. On the other hand, to suggest a few examples also from the other side of the organic vs. tightly planned coin, Durrell's Alexandria Quartet was carefully conceived, and published over just three years. They seem as remarkably unified as, say, Trollope's six Barsetshire novels (of his forty-seven!). Anthony Powell's twelve-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time is known for its ambitious and remarkable architecture, framed by its narrator Nicholas Jenkins. And then there is Tolkien's Ring Trilogy. Not to forget Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy. No doubt you can think of many others from, so to speak, both camps.
Although I would of course be an utter fool to compare my own work with any of these masters, I seem at the least to have stumbled into the organic, didn't-realize-what-I –was-up-to-till-almost-too-late process of writing a series, or more specifically a trilogy. The historical trilogy is set in New England from roughly 1638 to 1850, and includes The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin (1638-1682), Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction (1741-1748), and The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (1837-1850). It probably says much about my process that they were not written or published in chronological order. The second book in the series was published last, tying the other two together. And it probably says more that I didn't even realize I was writing a trilogy till the second draft of the second novel in the series, published, as I say, last. So once I realized what I was doing, I began to see the connections—in setting, in themes, and in character genealogies—and to develop and tighten them. This placed a rather heavy burden on that last novel and middle book in the process of writing it.
I guess it must be a little like working on a book of free verse poems that you discover absolutely needs to become a sonnet cycle. Or a literary novel that needs to become pure genre fiction. New restrictions are suddenly upon you. You are challenged in a new way. The demands, challenges, and restrictions might result in a tighter and better final book, and in a more interesting whole greater than the sum of its parts. If you're lucky. Your reviewers and readers will of course make that judgment. But as the surprised writer, all I can say is that I was delighted by the sudden discovery, and my humble opinion is that the whole is better than the parts and the third published novel better than it would have been otherwise. But who cares about the author's opinion?
Some of the things (my obsessions, my monomania?) that tied my novels together include the following: 1) the historical New England settings; 2) the various genres I mixed within the larger genre of historical fiction, proving to me, at least, that historical fiction is remarkably flexible; 3) the themes of the artist in the new world, the search for darkness in others and discovering the darkness in oneself, the roles of women in early America, the wages of religious zealotry, the overwhelming yet confining temptations of material wealth, and the strange position of the outsider in American life; and 4) economic and family genealogies across two centuries of early North American settlement by Europeans.
What were some of my challenges? I've hinted at some, but let me dwell a bit on three specifically.
I mixed characters who were once living people with entirely invented characters, a not uncommon mix in historical fiction. I force myself to play by certain rules that, I hope, allow me to retain credibility with the reader, especially the knowledgeable reader. I don't put people who once walked this earth in places they never went at times they couldn't have been there, saying and doing things they never would have. I try to avoid, in short, anachronisms of character as well as anachronisms of setting and plot and language. I recall the experience of my father-in-law reading a certain famous novel, which shall remain nameless, set during the Civil War. He discovered that the author had a train running in a place where trains did not yet run. My father-in-law happened to be a train buff, and the anachronism ruined for him the reading experience. He didn't trust novels to begin with and now he trusted them even less. I don't use the excuse, "it's only fiction." Too many readers of books are too smart for a cynical or manipulative writer to get away with the "only fiction plea." Such gaffes simply, to my mind "destabilize the text" for such smart readers. Who needs that when good readers are hard enough to come by as it is. Discovering I was writing a trilogy, finally, only compounded this challenge: I couldn't make things up that would be anachronistic just for the convenience of my interrelated plots or themes or characters, or for my own convenience. I wanted to tie three books all together without destabilizing gaffes of historical consciousness or egregious violations of human beings who are no longer alive to defend themselves. There's still plenty of room for invention (and conflation) of plot and character, especially with the fictional characters who are interacting with the historical figures.
Another question in a series is point of view. One way to tie a series together is to have a narrator or narrator-character who remains consistent throughout the trilogy or quartet, or whatever. But isn't that the less common device? It seems more likely that two or three or four different narrators—or at least two or three points of view—of varying degrees of intimacy with the reader will guide the reader through a series. In my case I had the problem of writing about women's issues (and the evolution of such issues) in American history as one of my central themes that tied the works together. The first novel has one entire section of four told from a 17th-century woman's point of view; we read the murdered woman's private diary (the rest is third person limited from the male sleuth figure's POV). The second novel in the series addresses these themes from the point of view of an 18th century male artist who gives us his view of the young female prodigy and visionary with whom he becomes more and more fascinated as she struggles to live her life and create her discomfiting art in an unwelcoming world. It's Rebecca Wentworth's story, not narrator Richard Sanborn's, but I kept Rebecca at a distance through my point of view character to enhance the reader's sense of my little visionary's strange powers and mystery. The third novel is told entirely in the first person from Allegra Fullerton's point of view—an itinerant female artist in the first half of the nineteenth century. So the women whose stories I'm telling are presented through various narrative point of view devices. I think that helps reduce a sense in the reader's mind of mere repetition and perhaps dullness—giving variety to the presentation of one unifying theme or another throughout the trilogy. There is always some risk, of course, in our time for a man to write from a woman's point of view, but if we were to burn every book that a woman wrote with a man's point of view in it and then burn every book that a man wrote with a woman's point of view in it, we'd have to be unimaginative zealots, indeed, willing to settle for the destruction of half our literary history. So not being that kind of zealot myself, I've decided not to worry about it. I rather enjoyed the variety during the lonely years of writing offered to me by mixing genres, themes, real and imagined people, and points of view, not to mention gender switching. We writers have to have some fun in our dreary, plodding lives of endless revision.
I faced one final challenge: uniting three books by family ties or genealogy. Elizabeth Higgins Browne, the 17th century woman and major character who finds herself in the middle of a tragic murder case due to her husband's connection to the murdered woman, turned out to be the great-grandmother of Rebecca Wentworth, the heroine of the second novel, and Allegra Fullerton (ne Wentworth) turned out to be the great-granddaughter of Rebecca Wentworth. I had no idea of this lineage, or that even the names would fit, until I was writing the second novel in the series, the last to be written and published. This final example of a problem and unifying device is to me one of the most interesting because it turned out to be the most unconsciously driven element of the whole story from my, the hapless writer's, experience of writing three books unified in various ways. How did that happen? I don't know. Maybe that's one of those instances where all we can say is (to paraphrase the old hair-dye commercial from the '50s): "Only his shrink knows for sure."