Kim Bullock

About Kim Bullock

Kim has an M.A. in English from Iowa State University. She writes mainly historical fiction, though has also contributed non-fiction articles to historical and Arts and Crafts publications in both the United States and Canada. She has just finished The Unfinished Work of M.A., a novel based on the rather colorful life of her great-grandfather, landscape painter Carl Ahrens.

Writing Through Turbulent Times: Using Uncertainty to Enhance Your Story

July 30, 2020 By Kim Bullock 18 Comments

Flickr Creative Commons: Patrick Marione

2020 was destined to be a year of transition for our family even before Corona Time became a thing, but since March 13^th these upcoming changes have been overshadowed by the odd reality of living in a pandemic “hot spot”. Don’t get me wrong; that reality hasn’t been all bad. Yes, my younger daughter did spend the last third of her freshman year watching TikTok videos and Netflix, with occasional breaks for pass/fail schoolwork, but her empty schedule allowed us to build a uniquely strong connection at a time when teenage daughters tend to butt heads with their moms. I have loved watching my girls turn to each other for companionship, to become friends as well as sisters. These things would not have happened if it weren’t for the pandemic.

No ceremony marked the occasion when my oldest graduated with both her high school diploma and an Associate of Arts degree in May. I’m beginning to wonder if this lack of closure, combined with that fact that “moving clutter” doesn’t look all that different from “quarantine clutter,” has kept me in a state of denial that she’s actually leaving home in two days, COVID be damned. The expected tears aren’t flowing. Instead, there is a mad rush to make sure she has her own medical insurance card and access to our reimbursement account. I’ve added masks, hand sanitizer (a.k.a. liquid gold), a non-contact thermometer and a pulse oximeter to her items to pack and noted that Medical City is seven minutes from her new home.

She’ll be two counties away, but if any of us gets COVID, she may as well be in Australia. That’s honestly what keeps me up at night—the idea that she’ll get sick and I won’t be able to be with her.

As you can imagine, I have the attention span of a gnat for most things right now, including writing this post. I have, however, learned to push past the notion that my WIP is small and pointless in comparison to overflowing hospitals, mass unemployment, worldwide protests, and a government that appears more fascist by the day. All of that underlying tension seeps through the cracks of my fictional world, infusing the story with conflicting bursts of dread and hope that would not have been there otherwise. It is morphing into a novel that is uniquely of this time.

Getting to this place took patience and a lot of soul-searching. Here are a few ideas that helped me emerge from my rut and start working again. Maybe they will be of help to some of you as well. [Read more…]

The Benefits of Sensory Deprivation for Writers

January 27, 2020 By Kim Bullock 19 Comments

My ENT didn’t call me a liar when I insisted I’m not and never have been a habitual mouth-breather, but he did smile before rolling his chair over to one of the posters on the exam room wall.

He pointed to the graphic on the left. “Normal septum.” He pointed to the right. “Deviated septum.” He drew an exaggerated zig-zag in the air. “Yours.” He suspected I’d never taken in a full breath in my life.

It took only a few minutes of paying attention to confirm that it was, in fact, possible to have both a keen sense of smell and the inability to take more than two swallow breaths from the nose before switching over to the mouth for the third. Once aware of this convoluted breathing pattern, I couldn’t shake the feeling of quasi-suffocation. Our deductible had been met and there was a surgical appointment available on New Year’s Eve.

Since I really know how to party, the choice was simple. New year, new nose, at least on the inside.

The surgery itself was no big deal. As promised, I felt like I had the worst head cold of my life for a week afterwards, with no medicinal relief possible beyond narcotics, which I took because they provided the oblivion of sleep. I had no bruising, no numbness, very little swelling, and my pain level hovered around a two provided nothing touched my nose. My annoyance level, however, held steady at about 357.

Nose splints were an effective form of torture. They not only jabbed into me with every change of facial expression, but made wearing reading glasses painful, leaving me functionally blind for anything involving my computer, phone, or books during the recovery period. After a few hours of binge watching TV, boredom set in and I had an intense craving for chocolate. The good stuff. It never occurred to my codeine-addled brain that I’d taste nothing if no air molecules of air could reach my olfactory system. The texture of a raspberry truffle is great and all, but totally unsatisfying if texture is all you get.

I had completely and simultaneously lost my two strongest senses. Worse, according to Google MD, it may take months to fully get them back, IF I fully get them back. I was not prepared for this.

The prolonged loss of multiple senses, while anxiety provoking, has come with the unexpected benefit of allowing me to experience an (I hope temporary) form of synesthesia. Two days after surgery, while applying lotion, I became aware of an odd taste. My nose was still 90% decorative at that point, but the unmistakable sweet-grass scent had been detected by my taste buds instead. It became a game over the next few days to see how many scents I could taste. Some were pleasant, like a burning candle, a rose, or brewing coffee. Others not so much, such as wet puppy or the litter box that the rest of my family had neglected until I was cleared to lift more than ten pounds.

I doubt I ever write about a character going through septoplasty, though I could, or that any of my characters will have synesthesia. Still, the experience of learning firsthand exactly how taste and smell are intertwined can only enhance my ability to portray sensory details in unexpected ways.

Yet another blessing/annoyance is that my remaining senses have become enhanced, and those are the ones I pay the least attention to unless I encounter a startling sound or an itchy tag in my shirt. For every twenty times I have a character observe something in my work-in-progress, they may hear something only once. Unless I’m writing a love scene, I rarely, if ever, include tactile details. Now that I’m aware of the lack, I can rectify it. [Read more…]

Epiphany in the (Literal) Eye of the Tornado

October 28, 2019 By Kim Bullock 28 Comments

Downed street sign in my neighborhood after the Dallas tornadoes

It wasn’t supposed to happen. October 20^th had been a warm, cloudless day here in Dallas, and though a line of thunderstorms was forecasted to roll through later that night, no one expected more than some rumbles and a bit of rain. After dinner, my husband crossed the street to watch the Cowboys game with our neighbors. My daughters and I binge-watched Glee on Netflix. My cell phone was in another room. Sasha did homework and wasn’t on hers. We might have remained oblivious if Ashlyn hadn’t been on Snapchat and felt her phone vibrate with the first alert.

Tornado warning.

It wasn’t raining or even windy, so at first we thought the alert was for somewhere far away. Wrong. By the time I got to my phone, my weather app sent out alerts faster than I could read them. We turned on a news broadcast, blaring the volume in the hope we might hear it from our interior bathroom, the only place in our house with no windows. To call it a safe room is an overstatement, but basements don’t exist in Texas and few people have storm shelters, so that’s where we went, bringing the animals in with us. It’s a semi-annual routine that raises my blood pressure and lowers my sanity, mostly because that room is the kids’ domain and I don’t go in there if I can help it. I forget how badly it needs to be cleaned until I’m faced with the prospect of cramming into a tub that probably hasn’t seen a sponge since 2016.

My husband texted, Do I need to come home?

By then the siren blared, but the tornado was apparently near downtown. Close, but not close. I told him to stay put.

The alerts continued. A confirmed tornado on the ground in Preston Hollow, an upscale neighborhood I know well because Sasha had a private tutor there during the years she’d been home-schooled. I cringed, imagining (correctly) the fate of our local independent bookstore.

The storm moved northeast at a fast clip. My husband, who remained in front of a TV in a room that included not one, but two windows, texted me updates of the path, which started to include intersections I drive through daily. Confirmed tornado by Sasha’s community college, three neighborhoods west of our house, and headed our direction. The lights flickered.

This will be close, my husband texted.

Are you in a safe room?

Not yet. It’s raining a little.

How do you know that?!

I was sitting on the floor and glanced at Ashlyn over the bulk of our portly black lab. Her head was bent over her phone, totally unfazed by the reality that our house might be ripped up within moments. Sasha listened to the news report through the cracked-open door. Her eyes grew enormous when she heard the tornado had moved just south of Kroger, headed east. We were slightly southeast of Kroger.

I’m pretty sure I hear it. Going inside now. [Read more…]

The Positive Side of Envy

April 22, 2019 By Kim Bullock

Trashing a little book called The Bridges of Madison County was a popular sport in the English department when I was in graduate school. Professors and creative writing students alike could not find a single thing to praise about the plot, the writing, the characters, or even the setting. My school was located less than an hour away from those famed bridges and most Iowans I knew revered anything associated with their beloved home state, so this extreme loathing seemed strange.

As fifty million copies of this “pretentious fluff” (as one professor repeatedly called it) sold, the nastiness escalated.

I had picked up the novel the previous summer because it looked like an entertaining love story – something I was certain not to have time to read once I became both a grad student and a composition teacher. I got exactly what I paid for – three hours of entertainment. Would I read it again? Probably not. Had I enjoyed it the first time? Sure. Clearly there was something wrong with me. Maybe I didn’t recognize good writing. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to make it in academia. I sunk lower into my seat each time “that book” was mentioned in class and kept my mouth shut, not wanting to announce my ignorance to the brilliant masses.

And then one day, while meeting with the most vocal of my professors, I happened to glance at the bookshelf in her office. Her name appeared on the spine of a book I’d never heard of, a book I later sought out and could only find tucked away on a forgotten shelf in a local bookstore. (This was in the pre-Amazon days.) I could not have named a single character or plot point a week after reading it.

Those students who bashed Waller the most violently were the same ones who had nothing good to say about anyone else’s work in critique sessions. They read their own work aloud with a smirk, laughed at their own jokes, and paused at key areas to make sure everyone listening had time to appreciate a clever turn of phrase. They ignored all feedback.

At twenty-two I lacked the courage to suggest that the bashing stemmed from jealousy or insecurity, but I certainly thought it. I also made up my mind not to fall victim to that poison. I still don’t bash. Not publicly. Not among other writer friends. Rarely even in my own mind. [Read more…]

Vanquish Emotional Overwhelm to Increase Productivity

January 28, 2019 By Kim Bullock

Flickr Creative Commons: in lovely memory

My older daughter is six months shy of being a legal adult. The approach of this milestone has been fraught with anxiety, so I anticipated a rough night before she embarked on a new semester at the local community college. She’s taking an extra class this time. She has a part-time job. She worries about keeping up with it all. What I did not expect was for her to lament that she saw nothing to look forward to in the years to come. Community college will only lead to a regular college, which she is lukewarm about attending. College will only lead to a job she hates.

“What’s the point in any of it?” she asked. “Every adult I know is miserable.”

The weight of her negativity made remaining in her presence physically uncomfortable for this empath, but I couldn’t allow that comment to slide unchallenged. True, her father comes home shell-shocked from work most nights, but he isn’t all adults.

When I balked that I’m not miserable, she bestowed that special expression teenagers reserve for parental observations that conflict with their worldview. “Well, you’re not happy.”

I hadn’t given much thought to the idea of happiness lately, having spent the last four years as an involuntary sponge, absorbing the stress of one family member after another. I’d wring myself out only to fall into another puddle. I self-medicated with almost daily mocha lattes I no longer tasted, let alone savored. On particularly stressful days, I’d add a muffin, too.

I now own fat clothes.

She was right. I wasn’t happy, but what she had not lived long enough to understand is that happiness isn’t something that simply happens. It must be chosen. Every day we get to choose.

She had thrown down a challenge to prove her wrong, to show her another way. This was a wake-up call.

I’m convinced that much of what we call “writer’s block” is a consequence of emotional overwhelm. We are wired to put ourselves into the shoes of others, to share and, let’s be honest, sometimes to exploit their struggles by weaving them into a story. Easy prey to the perils of empathy, we become ensnared in that cycle of absorb/wring out/absorb and forget to allow ourselves to dry off in the sun. We forget to take care of ourselves. We forget to do the things that help us recharge, to pursue joy. Under these circumstances, when we have nothing left to give, is it any wonder our work can suffer, or even stall? [Read more…]

Resurrecting a Shelved Manuscript: Good Idea or Waste of Time?

October 22, 2018 By Kim Bullock

I had grand plans for my next historical manuscript. The idea was solid, the plot outlined, and an experimental first chapter written. I’ve read that chapter twice now. The voice is compelling, the writing a level or two above ‘crappy first draft’ and it is still a story I want to write.

Just not now.

Getting this story down will require me to willingly break my own heart on a daily basis for over a year; it’s already broken each time I pull up the day’s headlines or log into social media. The parallels between the manuscript’s era and today are clear. An argument could be made that now is exactly the time for such a novel, but this writer knows her own mind enough to understand that reality must be a shade or two brighter before she can mentally take that risk.

Had I not vacationed in Maine this past summer, I would never have considered opening a manuscript I wrote and promptly abandoned back in 2004. While driving on the familiar roads of my youth, I made a passing comment that this story, which was in some ways a ‘you have no further power over me’ letter to my old home town, would be much richer if I were writing it today.

I still would never have considered opening the document had Ruth, the cantankerous grandmother from the story, not invaded my dreams and (colorfully) reminded me that my perspective on the minefield of mother/teenage daughter relationships is now immediate, not speculative. Since this is a major theme of the book, I had best get cracking while I have captive beta readers who will roll their eyes if Mama gets something wrong.

I tried arguing with Ruth, a futile concept if there ever was one. I write historicals now, I said. It’s all women’s fiction, she countered. It’s bound to be dated, I said. She laughed. You’ve been in those mountains recently, Dimwit. Add some damn cell phones if it makes you feel better. Nothing else has changed.

She had a point, so I read. I read until 2:00 AM. Several times I had a grand idea about how I’d handle a plot point, only to find out the same thought had occurred to me fourteen years ago. I even cried once.

There were issues, of course. [Read more…]

Changed Perceptions Equals Character Growth

July 30, 2018 By Kim Bullock

I left home at sixteen and spent the next two decades hemming and hawing when asked where I was from. Upon hearing I’d lived in nine different places before I was three, most people assumed my entire childhood was equally nomadic, a perception I rarely corrected.

In truth I had roots, reluctant ones, thrust deep into the unforgiving soil of the western mountains of Maine. I knew every ski trail on Sugarloaf, every snowmobile trail in Kingfield, and every swimming hole in the Carrabassett River. I encountered moose and bear and lived to tell about it. I lost a notch out of my ear to frostbite. I knew the sweet agony of plunging into Rangeley Lake a month after ice cleared and the exhilaration of galloping my horse across abandoned farm fields.

My childhood brimmed with freedom and imagination, but being “from away” meant that much of it was spent alone, communing with tree friends instead of human ones. Seven years of isolation at a formative time of life hardened me against a home that could never be Home. Maine became my soul’s purgatory, a place I endured until my sentence ended and the cage door creaked open enough for me to fly away.

Nearly thirty years later, my children teenagers, it saddened me that they had no concept of how I grew up. Maine was a place on a map, interchangeable with Nebraska, Kentucky, or any other place to which they hadn’t been. They had never picked wild blueberries, ate lobster, dipped their feet in a frigid mountain stream, or seen a moose.

“We have to go,” I told my husband. “They’ll never truly know me if we don’t.”

Little has changed in the world I left behind. Sugarloaf has more condos. A few shops in Kingfield went out of business, replaced by new ones. The school I attended from grades 3-8 has added a couple rooms and PE classes now include snowshoeing. The high school has a newish sign but, thanks to an accommodating secretary, my family toured a building completely frozen in time.

“All it took to get in is to say you went here,” my older daughter said, “and she’s not even following us around. People are so nice here.”

I’d noticed this, too, but years of believing otherwise conditioned me to assume it was due to the importance of tourism to the area or that the internet had softened insular tendencies. Tourists never ventured into Mt. Abram High School, though. No one would claim to have attended there if they hadn’t. That I brought my family all the way from Texas and made a point to stop in proved I was trustworthy.

The towns hadn’t changed. The people hadn’t changed. My perception of myself and my place in that world had. [Read more…]

When You’re Not Okay: A Mental Health Checkup for Writers

April 11, 2018 By Kim Bullock

I ignored the signs for months, convinced the anxiety, crying jags, insomnia, and moments of rage were hormonal potholes on Perimenopause Lane.

In my defense, life has thrown a few curveballs since December. Before I could send out queries on my newly completed manuscript, I came down with the flu. On Christmas Eve. This illness transitioned into a violent asthmatic/allergic cough that remained until mid-March. I lost fifteen pounds (good) but only because I could barely eat or sleep (bad). During this time one of my daughters was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. A few weeks later her best friend received a lymphoma diagnosis. An elderly aunt and special needs cousin moved to Dallas and their new home required a major face-lift. I threw myself into helping them, trying to ignore the lack of response to my initial queries. I later discovered those same queries, unwisely proofread and sent between coughing bouts, contained a glaring typo in the second paragraph.

The ‘I am a complete failure’ refrain began and spread its venom into all aspects of my life until I questioned every decision I’ve ever made. After decades of writing and little published work to show for it, I must be a talentless hack. My daughter would not struggle so much if I’d recognized earlier how crippling her condition had become. My marriage of twenty years would be richer if I’d encouraged my husband’s full involvement and support with the children rather than letting him play computer games while I juggled everything on my own. (To be fair, he involves himself when asked.)

The only glimmer of happiness came when my other daughter discovered that her crush not only liked her back, but that he embodied the word “gentleman” and came from a family who welcomed her into their fold with open arms. Being a romantic, empathic by nature, and teetering on the brink of depression, the temptation to vicariously experience her joy proved irresistible. This high doubled when I saw the adoring expression he perpetually wore in her presence, though over time this feeling was accompanied by a sharp pang of motherly protectiveness. (For him!)

Perhaps I sensed that it was only a matter of time before she’d bristle when teachers referred to her not by name but as the girlfriend of a popular kid, before she’d decide she was too young to be with a boy who claimed (quite earnestly) that he hoped she’d be both his first and last girlfriend. When that day came and she let him go, I struggled to praise her self-awareness and maturity.

It was at that moment I realized I was not okay.

I’m in a place where many creative types find themselves at some point. According to a large-scale Swedish study at the Karolinska Instituet, families with histories of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety syndrome, drug and alcohol abuse, ADHD, anorexia and suicide are more likely to include people in creative or scientific professions. The study concluded that writers in particular were common among sufferers of schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and substance abuse, and were almost fifty percent more likely to commit suicide than the general population. [Read more…]

Novels We Could Never Write

October 23, 2017 By Kim Bullock

The helicopters are out in force again. The whir of propellers has become so commonplace since the morning of October 7^th that the sound has faded into the background, a white noise machine only heard when the power’s cut.

Today it’s two news helicopters, and they’ve hovered over a field a couple miles due west of my house from mid-morning until nightfall, a field I’ve driven by daily since 3-year-old Sherin Mathews disappeared. I pass by her neighborhood, an enclave of McMansions one subdivision northwest of where I live, each time I mail a letter or go to the grocery store. If I look south while crossing the railroad tracks I can see the tree beside which Sherin’s adoptive father apparently made her stand at 3AM as punishment for not drinking her milk. It stands maybe fifty feet from the track, clearly visible from a busy street, in an area coyotes often roam. People leave flowers and balloons and hold prayer vigils, though the police dogs have all but proved she was never there.

It doesn’t matter that the smiling little girl seen in the news reports isn’t white or that she was born in another country. It doesn’t matter that she has developmental issues or that she has a limited ability to speak. She’s the community’s daughter now and the air grows heavier with each passing day she isn’t found. Things like this don’t happen in this area of Dallas, at least not in the twenty years I’ve lived here.

We’re all holding our breath.

When police reported one of the family’s three cars had been missing between 4 and 5 AM on the morning of Sherin’s disappearance, I gave up all hope she’d be found alive. “That proves it,” I said to my pre-teen daughter. “He killed her and removed the evidence.”

“You’re jumping to conclusions, Mama,” she said. “Isn’t it possible that he searched near the house, didn’t find her, and then took the car out to look?”

I’ve run the toddler-gauntlet twice and know that any three-year-old left alone outside at night would scream loud enough to wake the neighbors. Any father, upon finding his child gone, would at the very least wake his wife, who reportedly slept through the whole ordeal. He’d call the police and pound on neighbors’ doors, organizing a search party. He would not, as he claimed, do laundry and wait for her to turn back up. For five hours.

I bit my tongue, though, because my daughter asked a valid question. It WAS possible he had an innocent reason to leave the house, just as he had a plausible reason to attempt to give the girl milk in the middle of the night. (Her developmental issues required her to eat often.)

My daughter and I had both heard every publicly known detail of the father’s story. One of us was willing to suspend disbelief enough to objectively consider all possible motives. The other will not easily be convinced the man does not deserve to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

As a mother, I’m horrified by what has likely happened to this child.

As a writer, though, I’m intrigued. [Read more…]

Motivation: Make Writing Dessert Again

July 12, 2017 By Kim Bullock

I admit it. For years I hesitated to invite anyone into my home, cringing even when my parents crossed the threshold. If there is a way to keep a house clean while sharing it with a husband, two children, three dogs and a Maine Coon cat, I haven’t found it. Dust happens. Fur happens. Clutter happens.

My kitchen was the stuff of nightmares. The forty-year-old popcorn ceiling literally came apart at the seams, raining bits of plaster on me while I attempted to cook. My husband unsuccessfully tried to pry up the once-white kitchen sink years ago, leaving behind a buckled and rusty patch on the lip. The counters didn’t quite match the back-splash, which no longer matched the cabinets because the chipping paint had become dingy. “This summer,” I told my husband, “we will tame this eyesore.”

In our family, there is not actually a ‘we’ in household projects involving cosmetic improvement. If you want to build the largest computer network in the world, my husband is your guy. He can scatter neutrons and is a whiz at calculus. Coordinating colors, though? Evenly painting a cabinet door? Um…not so much.

Determined not to lose all writing momentum during the remodel, I promised myself I’d do that first each day. Write a scene in my manuscript and then I could scrape the ceiling! Finish the chapter and then I could paint the inside of the pantry! What did I do on day one? Facebook. What did I do on day two? Errands. Word count: 0. Work done on kitchen: 0.

It took me weeks of floundering to realize the flaw in my plan. You see, I didn’t really want to scrape that ceiling. In fact, cleaning a public restroom with a toothbrush sounded more appealing than standing high on a ladder under a deluge of falling plaster bits. No writing = no dust in my hair.

Nearly every writing advice book or column I’ve read emphasizes putting the writing first, but it turns out that this strategy doesn’t work for me and, in fact, may have been working against me for years.The next morning I forbid myself from opening my manuscript until the ceiling was down and the mess cleaned up. Work done on kitchen: Goal met within two hours. Word count: 1200. The next day I painted the ceiling and still wrote 700 words.

Psychologically this makes sense if you look at the situation as a five-year-old might. Pretend your writing is an ice cream sundae and a dreaded chore is a heaping bowl of lima beans. [Read more…]

When Good Characters Behave Despicably (and They Should)

April 24, 2017 By Kim Bullock

Several years ago I read The Underpainter, a novel by Jane Urquhart. The protagonist, Austin Fraser, creates a series of paintings depicting the people who have touched his life, then erases the details by applying progressively lighter shades of paint. Over the course of the novel, the paintings become a metaphor for how an emotionally crippled man has avoided true connection. Urquhart herself said in a June 2001 interview with January Magazine that she ‘hadn’t expected [Austin] was going to do what he had at the end’ and was so furious with him that she nearly couldn’t publish the book.

I was furious with him, too. The Underpainter remains the only novel I’ve ever thrown across the room in disgust. It took a full day for me to cool off enough to retrieve it and keep reading. As awful as Austin was, I still wanted to love him. Even as I write this, his rejection stings.

Shortly after I finished The Underpainter, I inherited a box filled with drafts of a memoir written by Madonna Ahrens, the protagonist of my own novel-in-progress. The manuscripts served as a series of portraits of her husband, landscape painter Carl Ahrens. The top, most recent version, was identical to the one she had self-published in 1945. It featured a Brontesque hero—tall, dark, brooding, and a trifle too perfect.

Earlier drafts made allusions to Carl’s temper, always followed by an anecdote illustrating his extreme gentleness. Yes, he could be cantankerous and difficult, she admitted, but illness and pain were the cause. Only a kind, compassionate man would revive a stunned honeybee or engineer an artificial leg for his rooster. The takeaway message, in modern terms: cut the guy some slack.

Tucked inside the earliest draft, on a loose, handwritten sheet, I discovered a truth that left me seething, one Madonna had taken great pains to conceal.

He was afraid of my youth, my [singing] voice, even my appearance, and wanted to make sure of keeping me all for himself by shutting out every aspect of my life which he could not entirely dominate. It was quite understandable. He had changed the whole course of his life because he loved me…As he gave his love freely and without compromise, entirely to me, he not only wished, but demanded, the same in return. He must be first, before the children, before music, before anything at all, and not only first but second and third as well.

It was not a happy moment to discover that the hero of my WIP was (at times) a controlling ass-hat, especially since I share DNA with said ass-hat. I did not want to know about, much less ‘excuse’ this aspect of his personality. An easy solution would have been to tuck that sheet away and feign ignorance.

A few things made me choose a different path:

If the regal woman with the steady gaze and defiant chin didn’t want the truth out there, she wouldn’t have left a paper trail. She was no victim.
Pain exuded from every line on the painter’s face, yet he gazed upon Madonna with naked adoration. He was no tyrant.
That they were both behaving in ways contrary to their natures intrigued me.

It was quite understandable, she had said.

Despicable behavior can be both wrong and understandable. Characters who infuriate can leave more of a lasting impression upon readers than ones who are simply likable. Think Nick and Amy in Gone Girl or Humbert Humbert in Lolita. I despised all of them, but I remember their stories years later. I don’t remember the name of the perfectly upstanding main character in the novel I read last week.

Why is that? [Read more…]

Use Genealogy to Enhance Your Writing

November 14, 2016 By Kim Bullock

Kim's great-grandmother doing the wash - San Diego 1906 — Kim’s great-grandmother doing the wash – San Diego 1906

With the popularity of shows like Who Do You Think You Are, Finding Your Roots and Genealogy Roadshow, compiling a family tree has transformed from a hobby for grandparents and history geeks to a mainstream pursuit. The shows illustrate that true connection happens when someone in the present gains insight about themselves by learning how traits, personalities, attitudes and even phobias have passed down through generations.

Names and dates are secondary. It’s the stories that move us.

I grew up with tales of an adventurous young artist who made a catastrophic attempt to fly off a barn roof, contracted a tubercular hip, became a cowboy in pioneer Montana, traveled with Calamity Jane and was adopted by an Ojibwa chief. My grandmother occasionally slipped and referred to him as ‘Daddy.’ Beaming with pride, she recounted each tale while we sat surrounded by paintings of trees that laughed, danced, grieved and embraced—tangible proof that her hero had once been a flesh and blood man. I saw echoes of his face when I looked in the mirror, from the set of my eyes to the bump on the bridge of my nose. I’ve long sensed myself being watched over, guided, and sometimes cajoled into writing my work-in-progress, a novelization of the scandalous relationship that led to Carl Ahrens’ downfall in the art world.

I was lucky enough to have my story handed to me. Yours may take some digging to unearth.

I Don’t Write Historical Fiction. Why Would I Look to the Past for Story Ideas?

Not every story will be grounded in the past. You may get the kernel of an idea from a historical reference and alter details to fit a present day story-line. Novelists do this all the time when they write updated versions of classics. If a story can’t work in the age of smart phones or, for that matter, automobiles, it might lend itself to a duel timeline, fantasy, or dystopian novel.
Nothing stops you from combining your aunt’s childhood trauma, your grandfather’s years as a POW, your second cousin’s extreme aversion to itchy fabrics, and your own inability to whistle into a single character. Writers often borrow traits from people they know. Why not cast a wider net?
The face in that faded photograph might be exactly the one you imagine for your heroine. Use it.
Where did you get your stoicism in the face of an emergency? Why have you always been deeply religious (or not)? Why do tears spring to your eyes when you hear bagpipes played? Why have you always felt compelled to protect homeless animals? From whom did you inherit your pale green eyes, and do you see the world as they did? The answers may touch nerves you didn’t realize you possessed. You may discover that your voice echoes that of one or several who came before you. Will you be inspired to follow the same path or avert disaster while you still can? Is there a crime you wish to expose or a tarnished legacy you hope to restore? Why? Such introspection can lead to a story that’s uniquely yours, one that comes as much from your soul as your mind.

[Read more…]

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