“No tears in the writer; no tears in the reader.”
Robert Frost
Summer Solstice 2025
Killing your characters is never easy. You’ve spent so much time with them, they’ve become close friends. They are a cryptic companion throughout most of your waking hours, at times demanding to be heard. You know their backstory, their innermost thoughts, their idiosyncrasies, how they dress, what gives them pleasure, what they regret. In fact, you know them as well as you know yourself. So, when the storyline demands they leave the page, it hurts. Recently I found myself procrastinating writing a death scene — it was just too painful. I thought about it for days, then decided I’d write about what the man was thinking just before his sudden heart attack — that moment when he was full of life, full of purpose, and on his way to do something responsible and good. Then I killed him.
I’ve described the novel I am working on in previous posts — a multi-generational family saga set in a mansion on the shore of Lake Mendota near Madison, Wisconsin. Research for the novel, which opens in Norway in 1867 and then moves to Madison from 1921 to 2003, continues to be tremendous fun. This past month I spent hours hunched over a microfilm reader at the State Historical Society looking through the local newspaper during the Vietnam war period. Even more illuminating was the student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, a far more radical publication than the Wisconsin State Journal. One of my characters is a first-year student at UW-Madison in 1969, so I was looking for the zeitgeist of the era. Thinking about her life sent me down a rabbit hole of memories because I was a student in Dublin at the same time, and about the same age as my protagonist. Amazingly, I came across the diary I kept in 1969. What an experience — to look back at oneself after 56 years.
This is one of the pleasures of writing. It takes me not just to imagined places, but real ones too. The next chapter in the novel will be set in 1982 which is four years after I came to Madison. Not only do I have my diary from that year, but also some of the letters I wrote to my parents in Ireland. I don’t have an outline for the chapter yet, just some thoughts about which members of the family are living in the mansion. I wonder what’s going to happen to them? This is going to be fun!
Robert Frost
Summer Solstice 2025
Killing your characters is never easy. You’ve spent so much time with them, they’ve become close friends. They are a cryptic companion throughout most of your waking hours, at times demanding to be heard. You know their backstory, their innermost thoughts, their idiosyncrasies, how they dress, what gives them pleasure, what they regret. In fact, you know them as well as you know yourself. So, when the storyline demands they leave the page, it hurts. Recently I found myself procrastinating writing a death scene — it was just too painful. I thought about it for days, then decided I’d write about what the man was thinking just before his sudden heart attack — that moment when he was full of life, full of purpose, and on his way to do something responsible and good. Then I killed him.
I’ve described the novel I am working on in previous posts — a multi-generational family saga set in a mansion on the shore of Lake Mendota near Madison, Wisconsin. Research for the novel, which opens in Norway in 1867 and then moves to Madison from 1921 to 2003, continues to be tremendous fun. This past month I spent hours hunched over a microfilm reader at the State Historical Society looking through the local newspaper during the Vietnam war period. Even more illuminating was the student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, a far more radical publication than the Wisconsin State Journal. One of my characters is a first-year student at UW-Madison in 1969, so I was looking for the zeitgeist of the era. Thinking about her life sent me down a rabbit hole of memories because I was a student in Dublin at the same time, and about the same age as my protagonist. Amazingly, I came across the diary I kept in 1969. What an experience — to look back at oneself after 56 years.
This is one of the pleasures of writing. It takes me not just to imagined places, but real ones too. The next chapter in the novel will be set in 1982 which is four years after I came to Madison. Not only do I have my diary from that year, but also some of the letters I wrote to my parents in Ireland. I don’t have an outline for the chapter yet, just some thoughts about which members of the family are living in the mansion. I wonder what’s going to happen to them? This is going to be fun!
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