By Rebecca Dwight Bruff
Fiction requires imagination. Fiction demands
that we imagine the lives and experiences of other people, people who are not us,
and not like us. And even though we’re “making it up”, we want to get it right.
We want, and our readers want, our characters to be believable, and to be
appropriately represented.
I discovered, almost as soon as I began working on Trouble the Water, that there were
innumerable things I didn’t know about my characters. I knew a few dates and
places and lineages and accomplishments. But their lives and mine were
separated by more than a century. Their experiences, perspectives, motivations,
world-views, family systems, hygiene habits, vernacular – and a thousand other
things – vastly different from my own.
So how do we bridge such historical and contextual distance?
How do we write what we don’t know?
Check your
assumptions and presumptions. I had to acknowledge from the start that I
don’t know what it’s like to be male. Or illiterate. Or enslaved. And even
though I (vaguely) remember being 22 years old, I don’t know what it was like
to be 22 years old in 1862 in Charleston.
Pay attention to what
you do know. Most of us do know
what it’s like to long for something, to love someone, to grieve deeply. Most
of us have been inexpressibly angry, or frightened, or passionate, or ecstatic
or envious. Our deepest personal emotions are, paradoxically, universal. Tap
into what you know about human emotion, and bring it to the page.
Ask good questions.
“What is like to…?” “ How does it feel
when…?” I had several long and
enlightening conversations with a 30 year-old African American man; he knew I
was working on a book and I asked him to tell me about some of his experience. We
learned about one another’s lives, and we’re better for it.
Read. Read
periodicals and journals from the time period you’re writing about. Read the
history. Read first-hand accounts if they exist; I read slave narratives, and
diaries of slave-holders, and journals of abolitionists. Read outside of your
own experience, interests, and biases.
Learn about
personality types. What makes people tick? What motivates a humanitarian,
or a narcissist, or an adventurer? How and why do people change or not change
their opinions and behaviors over time? Explore the disorders; surely at least
one of your characters will benefit from your research.
Be bold! Imagine.
Stretch your mind and your capacity and your reach. Give a damn about what
matters to your characters, and give them the life to pursue it!
Rebecca
Dwight Bruff is the author of the award-winning Trouble
the Water: A Novel, inspired by the life of Robert Smalls: http://www.koehlerbooks.com/book/trouble-the-water Rebecca heard Smalls’ story on her
first visit to South Carolina. She was so captivated that she left her job in
Dallas, TX and moved across the country to research and write this book. Bruff
earned her Bachelors degree in education (Texas A&M) and Master and
Doctorate degrees in theology (Southern Methodist University). In 2017,
she was a scholarship recipient for the prestigious Key West Literary Seminar.
She volunteers at the Pat Conroy Literary Center in Beaufort, South
Carolina. She’s published non-fiction, plays a little tennis, travels
when she can, and loves life in the lowcountry with her husband and an
exuberant golden retriever. Visit Rebecca at her website: https://rebeccabruff.com and
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robertsmallsnovel,
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RebeccaBruff or
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RobertSmallsBook
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