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Lisa Tucker Talks About New Novel, Faith, and Writing
Writing without an outline takes a lot of faith.
Posted September 14, 2011
The Winters in Bloom unravels the perfect family when every parent's worst nightmare happens: their young child is kidnapped. Here's more from author Lisa Tucker:
Jennifer Haupt: How did you come up with the idea for this story? Did you do much research?
Lisa Tucker: After I wrote my fifth novel, The Promised World, I was in a strange place psychologically. The book was the darkest thing I'd ever written. When my agent read it, she remarked that "this one could only have come from opening a vein"--and it certainly felt true. The process had been so excruciating that I found myself unable to write for almost a year. Then one summer day, while I was sitting on the back porch, five-year-old Michael came to me in a sentence: "he was the only child in a house full of doubt." This became the first line of the new novel. I fell in love with his voice, and my hope was to free him from all that doubt.
Having Michael be kidnapped probably sounds like an odd way to do this, but I don't think the book is a typical "missing child" story. The kidnapper, a woman, clearly cares about Michael, and we are told very early on that she used to be close to one of his parents. Parts of the story are told from Michael's perspective, so the reader knows that he's all right. Of course Kyra and David, Michael's parents, do not have this information, and they suffer tremendously, as any parent would. Still, this kidnapping forces them to open up to each other about the lives they lived before they met and gives them a chance to free themselves from the guilt they've been carrying around for more than a decade. Most important, the whole family is given an opportunity to change.
I did do some research on kidnapping, mainly to make sure the reaction of the police was plausible. The parts of the story that required the most research occur later in the book and are difficult to talk about without giving too much away.
JH: After writing six novels, is it easier or harder to come up with characters and ideas that are fresh and intriguing to you? Do you have a favorite in Winters in Bloom? A character that you miss from one of your past novels?
LT: I wouldn't say it's more difficult now to find intriguing characters, but it certainly never gets any easier. I always have a lot of false starts; at this point, I know that it's part of my process. I have to trust that eventually I'll find the right characters that I want to follow around for three hundred pages or more.
In The Winters in Bloom, Michael is probably my favorite character-I always have a soft spot for the children in my stories. But I was very fond of all the major characters in the novel: David and Kyra, David's mother and his ex-wife, even his ex-wife's mother, Liz, who provided some comic relief.
With a few obvious exceptions (the grandmother in The Promised World, Rick in Shout Down the Moon), I miss all the characters I've written about. To me, this is what's so hard about telling stories: you have to give your heart to people you know you're eventually going to lose.
JH: Is there a question you are seeking to answer in your writing? A central theme that drives you?
LT: All of my novels are about characters that grew up in troubled families. One of the questions I find most compelling is what happens when these characters try to create families of their own. More generally, I'm fascinated by the question of how the past shapes the present. In The Winters in Bloom, I was consciously aware of moving back and forth in time, trying to depict what it was like to be someone like Kyra or Sandra Winter, for whom the past often seems more real than the present. Our memories are such a crucial part of who we are, and I wanted the reader to understand that, for example, some part of Kyra is still that seven-year-old girl whom we meet in chapter three. But I don't think the past determines the present. The story of each of us is a work in progress. And the present shapes the past as well. For all we know, the next moment of our lives will necessitate a reevaluation of everything that has come before.
JH: What is, for you, the hardest part of creating a novel?
LT: Knowing that, at some point, I'll have to stop working on it. I always feel like there's so much more I could do, but I think that's probably a common response. What is that da Vinci quote? "Art is never finished, only abandoned."
JH: Is writing novels a business or an art for you?
LT: I don't make decisions about what to write based on what I think will sell. I suppose that means writing is an art for me, though I don't think of my books as art with a capital A (despite my use of the da Vinci quote above!) Quite honestly, after years in grad school studying literature, I'm not sure I know anymore what Art is. There are books that are lauded by critics that I love and others that I find formulaic. There are books that are dismissed because they are "genre fiction" that I think are brilliant.
When I teach writing, I tell my students that they have to write the books only they can write-and that's usually the kind of book they like to read. If it sells, great, but you can't predict the market.
JH: How much faith is involved in writing a novel?
LT: If you write without an outline, without even a sense of where the novel is headed -- as I do -- you have to have faith that your characters will take you where you need to go. And you have to be patient, because if you try to push them in a direction that you're more comfortable with, they just might rebel and decide not to tell you their stories. So for me, it starts with faith in the characters. Then I have to have faith that I can do justice to them, that I'm the right person to tell their story, which is a really complicated question for me. I probably wouldn't write a book from the perspective of a 9/11 survivor, for example; I don't feel like that's my story to tell. Many authors feel differently about this, and I respect their views. It's not a rule for anyone else; it's just a sense I have that I can't inhabit a particular character and faithfully represent his or her experience.
Finally, I have to believe that the novel will find its readers. This may or may not happen, but I hold on to a quote from Wordsworth: "What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how." I have to have faith that if I write as honestly as I can, from the heart, that someone will understand what I was trying to do.
JH: What's the one true thing you learned from Kyra and David Winter?
LT: At the end of chapter two, after the narrator describes the heavy guilt and blame Kyra and David feel for what they've done in the past, the narrator says, "Neither of them ever allowed themselves to use the beautiful word mistake." I learned from David and Kyra just how beautiful that word really is, and how powerful it can be in making peace with who we've been.
Lisa Tucker is the author of six novels including the bestselling The Song Reader and Once Upon a Day, and the recently released The Winters in Bloom. Her short work has appeared in The New York Times, Seventeen, and The Oxford American. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family.
