Resonance in Writing Fiction, Part Two

By Grace Greene

This is the second part of my two-part post about resonance in writing and how it impacts both writer and reader. I hope you enjoyed the first part! Here’s the rest:

The day that Hannah Cooper (from THE MEMORY OF BUTTERFLIES) showed up in my writing room, and I watched her throwing a pot on that well-used potter's wheel, suddenly, I was flooded with the memory of how that soft clay felt in my hands many years ago when I visited the pottery studio in Kentucky, and even before that in the art room in high school. I relived my own hands wedging the clay, centering it, shaping it with the wheel spinning and the clay resisting until the clay body yielded to the pressure of my fingers and began changing in cooperation with them. I remembered the satisfaction—the wholeness of it as a process from unformed clay to final glazed and fired creation.

As I thought about Hannah and what her life experience had been, I also remembered those winter nights in Kentucky where, after cleaning up the clay, the tools, the wheel, I’d gone out into the freezing night to return home. My hands, tender from those hours of shaping wet clay and washing up in soapy water, would crack and bleed during the short walk to my car. Before going to bed, I would cover my hands with Nivea cream and don yellow rubber gloves. I slept wearing those gloves so that my cracked and bleeding flesh would heal quickly and I could get back to working the clay.

While writing Hannah’s story, I remembered the clay and my hands working it, shaping it. I saw my hands, but I also saw Hannah’s hands. Her fingers were longer and slenderer than mine, and her nails were shorter. Even now, I feel the rhythm of that wheel at work, turning and turning, and I hear Hannah humming softly, lost in the act of creation, in tune with the song of the turning wheel. So, I heard Hannah’s voice and I wrote the story of her early life in Cooper’s Hollow, and of her returning there as an adult. There were difficult parts and lots of painful editing, but it felt like a privilege. In many ways, Hannah Cooper’s story resonated with me and I had no choice but to write it, and to gift some of my own memories to her story. When you read THE MEMORY OF BUTTERFLIES you’ll recognize some of the story elements I’ve mentioned above.

My story. Hannah’s story. Different people, different stories—one real and one totally fictional—and I chased that resonance to the end until the book was finished. For the reader, the intersection of the finished book with their own real-life experiences completes the resonant journey. It is as if I have passed a dream or a memory—or perhaps even a small, newly-created world—to someone else via that story.

Story elements with the potential to resonate are almost limitless because it depends upon who’s doing the reading and the writing. Working with clay is one example of what resonated with me as the author writing this book, and I hope it will connect with some readers. Other elements in Hannah Cooper’s story—elements and details that may not have seemed especially important to me at the time I wrote Hannah’s story—may resonate more strongly with other readers. That’s why it’s all important—all the details and elements of our lives and our stories that resonate between us and connect us.

Happy reading and happy resonance!

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Grace Greene writes women's fiction and contemporary romance with suspense. A Virginia native, Grace has family ties to North Carolina. She writes books set in both locations. Please visit Grace at www.gracegreene.com and sign up for her newsletter there.The Emerald Isle books, BEACH RENTAL and BEACH WINDS, are set in North Carolina where "It's always a good time for a love story and a trip to the beach." Or travel down Virginia Country Roads in KINCAID'S HOPE, A STRANGER IN WYNNEDOWER, and CUB CREEK and "Take a trip to love, mystery and suspense. Her most recent release is THE HAPPINESS IN BETWEEN and her next will be THE MEMORY OF BUTTERFLIES was release on 9/5/17 BEACH RENTAL, her debut novel, won the Booksellers Best contest in both the Traditional and Best First Book categories. BEACH RENTAL and BEACH WINDS were each awarded 4.5 stars, Top Pick by RT Book Reviews magazine.
Grace lives in central Virginia. Her Social Media links are: Website  Twitter  Facebook

Resonance in Writing Fiction, Part One

By Grace Greene

My recent release, THE MEMORY OF BUTTERFLIES, resonated with me in many ways, and more strongly than my prior novels. Writing it was an amazing experience and I wanted to share my thoughts about it—lots of thoughts—thus I’m sharing them in this two-part post, and I hope some of them will resonate with you.

Resonance? What is it? For story lovers, whether as a reader or writer, resonance happens when something of shared significance or mutual interest connects a story and a reader (or writer) and evokes strong emotion or other internal responses. Because humans have many common experiences some story details or elements are more likely to evoke resonance, but resonance is often accidental or unpredictable.

What draws a reader into a story and keeps them reading despite life’s demands and distractions? Something in the story resonates with them, causing them to invest themselves in it and read to the end, perhaps lingering over it for a while after the last page is turned.

For the author, what compels them to continue crafting a story regardless of the angst and obstacles inherent in the writing process? Again, I think resonance must be part of the answer.
I was an artist. In middle school and high school, I spent every study hall and free period in the art classroom. I double-majored in studio art and art history in college. I liked to draw in pencil and paint in oils, and each piece of artwork felt like a story—almost a small world I’d created even though it was constrained by a flat surface. I worked in three dimensions, too, in clay, both on the wheel and in hand-sculpting, but after I left school working with clay became difficult because it was hard to get access to a potter’s wheel and a kiln.

Many years ago, my husband and I lived in Louisville, Kentucky. Our children were toddlers at that time. I was fortunate our home was near a pottery studio where I could buy clay, rent time on a wheel, and pay to have the clay works fired in their kiln. I did this in the evenings while my husband stayed home with the children. It was glorious. But we moved a lot. Before long, we left Kentucky for somewhere else and during a subsequent move most of the pots and other clay works I’d created there were shattered by a careless packer.

Fast forward a decade or two to when I stopped painting and started writing, and then jump ahead a few years more to the day, over a year ago, when the words for THE MEMORY OF BUTTERFLIES started flowing. Hannah Cooper showed up at my desk that day. [Yes, she’s fictional, but she showed up nonetheless.] I wondered where she lived and how she lived. Who were her people? What did she care about? I heard her story and the beginnings of her voice. But she needed something concrete to show the core truth of who she was—a creator, a caretaker, yet a loner. That’s when I saw her bending over a battered potter’s wheel in an old cabin—the same cabin on Cub Creek where her female line had been creating pottery for generations. She was throwing a pot on the wheel that her grandfather had given her as a teenager. As she leaned over her work, her long, dark blond hair cascaded forward and across her arms. I watched every movement, but her focus was so great I felt invisible.  [To be continued on Monday, October 23, 2017]

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Grace Greene writes women's fiction and contemporary romance with suspense. A Virginia native, Grace has family ties to North Carolina. She writes books set in both locations. Please visit Grace at www.gracegreene.com and sign up for her newsletter there.The Emerald Isle books, BEACH RENTAL and BEACH WINDS, are set in North Carolina where "It's always a good time for a love story and a trip to the beach." Or travel down Virginia Country Roads in KINCAID'S HOPE, A STRANGER IN WYNNEDOWER, and CUB CREEK and "Take a trip to love, mystery and suspense. Her most recent release is THE HAPPINESS IN BETWEEN and her next will be THE MEMORY OF BUTTERFLIES was released on 9/5/17 BEACH RENTAL, her debut novel, won the Booksellers Best contest in both the Traditional and Best First Book categories. BEACH RENTAL and BEACH WINDS were each awarded 4.5 stars, Top Pick by RT Book Reviews magazine. Grace lives in central Virginia. Her Social Media links are: Website  Twitter  Facebook