First Looks And First Confessions
A preface before we jump on the road that leads our two lovebirds together
We are Mom and Dad Write A Romance (otherwise known as Megan and James) and we are holding our feet to the fire — we promised we would share excerpts from the book today and we are going to, very shortly. But before we do that, an update on where we are and where we’re going:
Words written: ~25,000 of an expected 80,000, representing 15 chapters out of 51
Chapters plotted out in detail: 15 drafted, ~10 in detailed outline, 26 or so in skinny outline
Decisions made about characters, settings, and plot points: All of them! (we just had an hour-long session this morning to review some of the later chapters and we’re confident where the plot points will fall).
It’s getting exciting, as is our “research” trip we’re planning for March 28 to see La Traviata at The Met in period attire! Of course, we know nothing about how to do this and we’re making it all up as we go so who knows how many chapters we’ll end up with and how many words. One thing we know for sure, at least 5,000 of the current 25,000 words we’ve written will end up getting cut. We’re getting our feet on solid ground, we’ll go back and trim when we have a better understanding of how to do this. Which leads to this confession:
We don’t know how to write a period romance
Did we say we’re making this up as we go? Please understand, we realize romance is a serious business and the real pros don’t do what we do and they end up with books that sell, which we may not. Selling our book would be amazing but it’s not our primary goal, so genre readers may especially find our approach out of sync with expectations. Hopefully they’ll come to understand that that’s okay. Historical fiction readers, including those who love period romance, may get out their red pencils when they read what we post below and that’s okay, too! At present, we’ll share some of the decisions we’re making and conclusions we’ve arrived at before we paste in the two excerpts we promised.
Period Fiction Can’t Be Period Perfect
There, we said it. From our experience, we find two things about period fiction that can trouble a writer and that are definitely troubling us. First, is the desire to situate modern characters in the past and enable them to be amazing figures in their time period by simply thinking, speaking, and acting more modern, more in line with things we prefer and evidencing mores which we approve of and might assume readers would as well. We absolutely want to avoid this. There’s a place for it, evidently a large one, since most period fiction we encounter falls into this pattern pretty comfortably. But because that market is pretty well served, we might be tempted to swing the other way, to pack this book with proof that we did the historical research and these people could be real! To wit, below is an actual paragraph from our draft that will not make it to the final cut — even though it pains one of us severely to have to cut it:
But Charles was persuasive, especially on the topic of Jane Avril, the wild woman of the eccentric dances that were not even whispered of in New York even though they were proudly displayed on the Lautrec posters people collected as fast as they could be pasted to walls to announce a new performance. Charles had argued, correctly James admitted, that because this woman was a singular performer with no precedent and likely no able imitator, refusing to see her perform would be like refusing to see the famed Sarah Bernhardt don a man’s attire and play Hamlet, something James fully intended to do while in Paris.
This is a historian’s dream! That we could name check Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, and Sarah Bernhardt all in a historically accurate context (Bernhard really did play Hamlet in Paris in the summer of 1899). One of us loves this achievement — we won’t say who but if you know us at all, you know who he is. Note from said individual: Did you know that Ms. Avril didn’t perform that summer because she left the city to deliver her child, the result of a pregnancy which she had kept hidden from her thronging audiences as long as she could? Betcha didn’t! Our lead character did, though. Whether you’ll read about it in the final book or not is another matter.
Alas, hitting historical proof points, as fun as it is, is not the goal, either. We’re writing a story about two destined lovers whose path to love is fraught with difficulty and doubt. Jane Avril is a footnote to a footnote. Sigh. Which leads to our second conclusion.
Period Dialogue Is Fun, Let’s Keep It That Way
Avoiding the two above extremes of historical fiction — go modern or go arcane — would seem to suggest one might resolve such a conundrum by aiming for a felicitous fortuneteller (aka, a happy medium, hehe, see how fun that is?). In our plans we have swung back and forth. We’re unduly influenced by the snappy dialogue in HBO’s The Gilded Age, of course, but those events were set 15 years before our book and the language had changed. And how do we know the language had changed, and among whom, and how much?
The truth is we don’t, really. The year in which our story commences, 1899, was a real and symbolic turning point in many domains. Literally on the edge of a new century, it was also the middle of a ten-year span that would see the rise of the automobile and airplane, the shift from Wagnerian opera to mass audience music like jazz, and the emergence of the liberated 1920s where even elite families cast off many of their most proper strictures, or at least their youngest members did. Writing for 1899 makes it hard to strike the right balance because we could make a case for people indulging in the ornate speech of the 1860s-to-1880s, which was notoriously florid, or seep into an easier-to-write-but-less-fun-to-read 1910, pre-war American informal fluidity.
Our proposed solution is, to our lights, ingenious: We don’t choose! Instead, we’re borrowing heavily from period fiction. Not fiction about the period, but fiction written in or near the period. We have so much to choose from! Henry James is all over these decades leading up to the New Century; Mark Twain himself coined the term The Gilded Age, after all; and though Edith Wharton wasn’t an acclaimed novelist yet, she would write books that captured this era. And those are just the names you’ve heard of. There are many, many more. We’ve been poring over their words and imitating their dialogue — do pray that we will all be delivered from the dense dialogue of Henry James!
Doing so is partly why we have to cut 5,000 words from our first draft. Because why say, “I thought she said so,” when you can write, “Perhaps I am mistaken in my sense of things, or perhaps it is the case that in the moment in which my senses conveyed what they perceived to my sensibilities, my own mind played some trick upon me; but I do believe that is an accurate report of what she did, indeed, say.”
Okay, maybe we’re not going that overboard. But there are many, many indeeds, we must admit.
All this to say, we are leaning more on the dialogue from authors writing in or near that time to describe how our own characters — who are, after all, fictional characters themselves — might have spoken. And it is fun, fun, fun. If you care to quibble over whether we added a few too many adverbial phrases, you are free to do so. But know that our goal is not verisimilitude but rather fiendish fun. We do hope you will be patient with us, um, indeed.
One last note you will see in these excerpts: We don’t have names for our characters yet. For now, we’re using our own names James and Megan. And one of us has really started to like that and wants to release the final book with those names preserved. The other would like some other, really, any other names. Very soon we will ask you to help us make this decision. But for now, in these excerpts, you’ll be reading James and Megan.
Setting the scenes: James’s scene takes place in Suite 1, Mov. 6 - Allegro Moderato (piqued your interest there, didn’t we!). That’s all we’ll say. Megan’s scene takes place in Suite 2, Mov. 4 - Andante Cantabile, after James’s scene but not immediately so. Enjoy and be kind. And, um, onward indeed!
Suite 1, Mov. 6 - Allegro Moderato, The Sweetheart’s Gambit
The next morning James awoke, his resolve still firm. He summoned the staff and gave them their instructions. He moved through his rooms with a clipped efficiency, directing the valets as they slowly stripped the Rue de Monceau of his presence, piece by piece.
He had not yet spoken to Grand-mère, but of course the staff and perhaps even the very house itself was breathing the news of his departure. The moment would come when she would summon him and inquire, perhaps even make demands, but for now, it seemed, she held her peace as he methodically disturbed his own.
In the late morning, a footman climbed the stairs to the etage where his rooms were, appearing at his door just as he was finishing his inventory of a newly packed trunk. The footman maintained the unreadable expression one in his profession should as he announced, “Mademoiselle de Montreuil is in the petit salon, Monsieur. She is accompanied by her aunt, Madame de Valois.”
James paused, adding one last silk waistcoat to the trunk. In a moment, James understood how Grand-mère would play her part of this match. He had thrust, her silence had been her parry. Now her counter-attack had arrived.
Suite 2, Mov. 4 - Andante Cantabile, The Inland Harbor
Her father’s study was a carefully constructed fortress, the air flavored with the slight metallic tang of a multitude of cyanotype blueprints spread across the deeply grained oak desk. To her eyes, it was all as majestic as he; she loved to enter it when it was full of the energy he naturally exuded when constructing the future. For in this space, while he was yet among his family in their home, he was also far away, removed to a vision of their future that was, in truth, his present.
The clouds of earlier had mostly cleared but the sun’s last edge was dipping below the curve of the earth, casting its last orange and red hues through the West-facing windows, painting the wisps of cloud visible over the water through the North-facing bay window. The orange glow warmed the odds and ends of his refuge, tobacco tins, a spyglass, and the ship models he studied in between reading factory plans and mansion blueprints. Amid this glow, Gordon Dunbar was hunched over a drawing of a brick and granite turret, his spectacles perched on the very tip of his nose. He looked every bit the man who had forged an empire out of fire and glass – robustly broad-shouldered, with hands that looked as though they were accustomed to hauling iron rather than annotating architectural plans, much less signing contracts. When Megan entered, he didn’t look up immediately, his finger tracing a line on the blue-papered design with a reverence one might expect to be reserved more appropriately for scripture.
We hope you enjoy these and we look forward to hearing your reactions and gathering your feedback. Soon we’ll ask for help with the names, so start collecting your arguments for or against using our first names for our lead characters.