People often ask me how I go about imagining a book series. The conclusion of the Cottage Tales is in sight: I planned eight books in this Beatrix Potter series, just finished the seventh and sent it off to New York this week. So I'm starting a new project--my fourth adult mystery series. I thought I'd write a couple of blog posts about how this process works for me, with the idea that it might be interesting to readers and perhaps to other writers.
I love the challenge of writing historicals (enjoy the research, the opportunity to inhabit another world), so it was a given from the get-go that the new series would be an historical. I thought of continuing the Cottage Tales with the animals as the lead characters, but I've spent nearly eight years writing about the Lake District in the early 1900s. I love those badgers and the owl, but eight years felt like enough.
For me, writing grows out of reading. I confess. I'm addicted to books. print, ebook, audiobook, books in all forms. I read to learn (I know this sounds dweeby, but that's just me) rather than to be entertained, and I've always had a "reading project" underway. I choose a subject (nonfiction) or a writer, and begin reading everything I can get my hands on that topic or by that writer. I borrow, beg, and buy books. I annotate the books I intend to keep, make lists on the endpapers of important pages, write notes on Postits and stick them to the pages, and collect items from bibliographies. Sometimes my reading projects (yes! there can be more than one at any given time) connect with a writing project, sometimes not. But very often, I want to write about what I am reading.
When the current recession came along, I decided to read about the Great Depression. I remember hearing my mother talk about it with her mother and her sisters. Since she and my father had lived through it, my childhood (in the 1940s-50s) was very much influenced by the lifeways they adopted in the 30s--things they had to do just to get by. I'm sure that my life was influenced by their experiences in ways I don't yet understand.
The more I read, the more I began to feel that the next fiction project would be set in the 30s. The period is close enough to be familiar, far enough back in time to feel "historical." I was intrigued by the idea of writing about ordinary people (like my mother, my father, their families) who were going through what many of us are going through now: tough times. How did they handle that challenge? What kinds of resources did they have or develop? How did they work together? What conflicts were there? You get the idea. It didn't take long for me to get hooked on the period. So the new series, called The Darling Dahlias, is another historical. It starts in the spring of 1930, after the stock market crash in October, 1929.
In another post, I'll talk about the series theme and location, so watch for that. And in the meantime, if you haven't yet checked out the trailer for my upcoming memoir, Together, Alone (University of Texas Press) you'll find it here.
Reading note. Real reading, of course, is a kind of work. But it’s lovely work. To read well, you have to respond actively to what the writer’s saying. You can’t just lie there on the couch and let it pour over you. You may have to read with a pencil in hand and underline passages and write notes in the margins. The poet John Milton understood that the best readers are rare. He prayed to his muse that he might a “fit audience find, though few.”--Wendell Berry