Literary thanks

Hope everyone celebrating United States Thanksgiving is having a wonderful holiday and everyone else is having a great weekend. After a lovely Thanksgiving dinner with my family (and four dogs and four cats), I’ve been writing, reading (finished Lauren Willig’s The Mischief of the Mistletoe, a fabulous holiday treat), and doing some holiday decorating. Thinking about what one is thankful for, this seemed a good weekend to post about things I’m thankful for, from a literary perspective:

A mom who introduced me Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Sayers, and a host of other writers, as well as the magic of creating worlds and characters.

A dad who listened to my stories and encouraged my creativity

My editor, my agent, and all the people who get my book through production (particularly as I just received the gorgeous ARCs for Vienna Waltz).

All the people who read my books and especially the ones who write, email, and comment online. That interaction and feedback is so important for keeping a writer going in a solitary profession.

Greg and jim, without whom my website and my ability to have much of that interaction would not be possible.

Booksellers who take the time to hand sell books (yes, Cate, I am talking about you).

My writer friends who brainstorm, commiserate, and celebrate, both in person and online.

The History Hoydens, a fabulous group of historical novelists to hang out with online.

Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Sayers, Tom Stoppard, Dorothy Dunnett, Len Deighton, the Baroness Orczy and a host of other writers that have and do inspire my own writing and are just plain brilliant to read.

Stephen Sondheim (also a brilliant musician, but in this case I’m thinking of his brilliance with words; who saw his birthday celebration on PBS Wednesday?).

What are you thankful for from a literary perspective? Have you had time to read this weekend?

This week’s Fraser Correspondence addition is Mélanie writing to Raoul about David’s suggestion that Charles leave the diplomatic corps and stand for Parliament.

 

Heart Tug Moments

Last week I did a post-Valentine’s blog on History Hoydens that I thought I’d repeat here for those who missed it. I like to do a romantic moments blog around Valentine’s Day. This year I thought I’d focus on moments where a happy ending for the couple in question seems an impossibility. Sometimes they are the ending to a story. Sometimes they are the bleak moment before a triumphant ending. Either way, they can be intensely romantic, despite or perhaps because of the edge of sorrow.

My examples are mostly historical and come from novels, films, and a Broadway musical.

Venetia by Georgette Heyer. Damerel sending Venetia away for her own good. I feel a heart tug every time I read about him throwing her up into the saddle for the last time. Much as I want to shake Damerel, there’s something that always gets me about a guy trying to be noble.

Atonement by Ian McEwan. Cecilia running after Robbie and embracing him before the police take him away. The fact that she stands by him against the seeming evidence, against her family, against the pressures of class prejudice stunned me the first time I read the book and stunned me the film version as well.

The Silicon Mage by Barbara Hambly. Antryg saying farewell to Joanna before sending her off to her own world, both of them fully expecting him to die. There’s a lovely restraint to the scene which makes the words all the more powerful.

The Empire Strikes Back by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, based on a story by George Lucas. Princess Leia saying farewell to Han Solo before he’s frozen in carbonite (“I love you.”/”I know.”). I was talking about this scene to a friend over dinner on Valentine’s Day. The moment my thirteen-year-old self fell in love with Han Solo/Harrison Ford. I still remember sitting with my parents in a restaurant afterwards and saying “It’s so unfair we have to wait so long to find out what happens next.”

“Send in the Clowns”, A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim, book by Hugh Wheeler. Desirée’s song captures the poignancy of the moment when love seems lost, wry irony with a wealth of pain underneath.

Casablanca by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, based on a play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. Rick putting Ilsa on the plane. I can’t think of another scene that is at once so poignant and so satisfyingly right.

Shakespeare in Love by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman. Will and Viola saying goodbye. I find this scene much more painful than the end of Casablanca. And yet there’s the power of the fact that you can already see Will beginning to think about writing again and you see Viola’s will to go on.

The Temptation of the Night Jasmine by Lauren Willig. Robert sending Charlotte away for her own good. Like the scene in Venetia, this one brings a lump to my throat. But unlike Damerel, who simply thinks he’s too tainted to make Venetia happy, Robert is caught in a dangerous web he really can’t tell Charlotte about. Fortunately for both of them, the intrepid Charlotte unravels things on her own.

Any examples of your own to add? What makes this type of scene work or not work for you? Writers, do you find these scenes harder or easier to write than happy love scenes?

This week’s Fraser Correspondence addition is David’s reply to Simon’s letter of a couple of weeks ago about his visit to his family in the north of England.

 

More Notes from OSF – Equivocation

My fellow History Hoyden Lauren Willig had a great post last week on authors are characters in fiction. It’s fascinating topic and very timely for me, as one of the plays my friend Penny and I just saw at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland was the world premiere production of a fabulous new play called Equivocation by Bill Cain.

Equivocation begins with James I’s minister, Robert Cecil, demanding that Shakespeare write a play about the Guy Fawkes plot, adding almost apologetically “The King wants witches.” Shakespeare, called Shagspeare or Shag, is torn, seeing the impossibility and dangers of writing the play, seeing the risks of refusing. The members of the Globe Theater company are torn as well, but in the end agree he should take the commission. Then Shag begins to investigate the Gunpowder Plot and to question is the official version of events is really the truth.

In addition to the actor who plays Shag, four actors play members of the Globe company and also play Cecil, James I, the conspirators, and other characters. The one other actor plays Shag’s daughter Judith, with whom he has a fraught relationship owing to the death of her twin brother and the fact that, in his words, “We both know I wish she was the one who had died.”

Equivocation is a brilliant play on a number of levels. It’s exciting storytelling as Shag attempts to unravel the truth behind the Gunpowder Plot. There are fascinating philosophical layers about power, forgiveness, the nature of truth, the nature of theater. Much of the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, but there are also moments that make you gasp at the tension, and the end had me in tears. One thing that struck me in terms of Lauren’s blog is that the portrait of Shakespeare really seems like the man who might have written Shakespeare’s plays. I felt the same about the Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love (with it’s brilliant script by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman). What’s more, both characters thought and talked like writers

The actor characters in Shakespeare in Love and Equivocation also ring true. There’s a wonderful scene early on in Equivocation where they’re rehearsing King Lear and complaining it doesn’t make any sense (everyone’s mad or pretending to be mad and no one’s listening to anyone else). Richard Burbage says “if we got through his comedies-don’t-have-to-be-funny period, we can get through whatever this is.” :-).

A sampling of some other favorite lines:

Robert Cecil: “What’s the word for a person who waits till the last minute? A…”
Shag: “Writer?”

Judith: “Lear’s about an old man who causes the death of his three daughters and, when it’s over, everyone feels sorry for him.”

Shag: “He [Cecil] insulted me. He said my work would last fifty years.”

Shag [to one of the young actors]: “Anyone who has the looks, energy, needs approval as much as you do and doesn’t care about anyone but himself–can be a great actor. A rare combination, but you have it.”

Do you have favorite plays or books or movies that depict writers and/or actors? What makes them work?

This week’s Fraser Correspondence addition is a letter from Mélanie to Charles on his birthday in 1814.

 

Marriage in Trouble Plots

I recently returned to reading Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, which I had started last summer and then put aside (I sometimes hit moments when I’m writing when I just can’t read anything). I was drawn back immediately by the richness of the writing and the sharp emotional details. I was also struck by comparing and contrasting the book with the recent film, which I also liked. The major events are the same, but the emotional arc is quite different (though Kitty Fane does grow and change in both). It’s rather as though someone were to film Secrets of a Lady with the same basic plot but have the story end with Charles and Mel realizing they’d never really known or loved each other but staying together for practicality.

The other the thing The Painted Veil got me to thinking about is one of my favorite literary tropes–marriage in trouble plots. They’ve always fascinated me, long before I started writing about Charles and Mélanie. That’s why, when I cite influences and inspirations for the Charles & Mélanie series, in addition to the more obvious ones like The Scarlet Pimpernel, Scaramouche, Dorothy Dunnett, and Dorothy Sayers, I mention Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, and Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson books.

Reading The Painted Veil, I was pondering the fascination of this plotline. The intimacy of marriage ups the stakes in the conflict between two people. Percy’s devastation at Marguerite’s seeming lack of trustworthiness is all the great because she has just become his wife. Betrayal, I think, is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. How much worse is it when that betrayal comes from a spouse? Years of living together also gives characters a knowledge of each other that recent lovers wouldn’t have. In The Real Thing, the hero has a wonderful speech about knowing one’s spouse, in a way that goes far beyond carnal. That knowledge can be used for good or will. George and Martha know just how to push each other’s buttons. So, for that matter, do Maggie and Brick.

Particularly in an historical setting, marriage makes it difficult for two people to walk away from each other, no matter how poisoned their relationship has grown. There’s a fascinating tension in two people pretending to be a couple to the outside world, while being estranged when they’re alone. Think of Percy and Marguerite keeping up appearances to the beau monde yet unable to communicate in private, Maggie and Brick maintaining the charade of their marriage (or at least Maggie trying to) in front of his family. Kitty and Walter Fane sharing a bungalow in a cholera-infested town, seen by most as a devoted couple who’ve risked infection so as not to be separated.

Unlike most of the other couples mentioned in this post, Kitty and Walter actually know each other very little (hence much of the tragedy). But even they share a history. With any married couple, there’s a past to explore–how they came to be married and why, what they both expected, how that expectation compares to the current reality. And history is something I love to explore as a writer, whether it’s historical events or the personal history shared by two people.

Do you like marriage in trouble stories? Why or why not? Any favorite examples to suggest? What do you think makes them work?

The Fraser Correspondence takes a new turn this week. To go along with some research I’m doing for a possible project, I’ve gone back to 1814, when Charles and Mel have just arrived at the glittering Congress of Vienna. This week’s letter is from Charles to David.

 

The Many Sides of Betrayal

Betrayal has such a black-and-white sound, doesn’t it? But like most things, it isn’t anything of the sort. Betrayal of a country, an ideal, a lover, a spouse, a friend. It’s often impossible to be loyal to all. Which loyalty comes first?

Raoul says this to Mélanie in their scene in the library late in Secrets of a Lady. I found myself mulling over these words recently while driving home from a trip to Whole Foods (I do a lot of my best writing thinking in the car). So many of my books deal with betrayal in one form or another. It’s at the heart of four of my mom’s and my Anthea Malcolm Regencies (Frivolous Pretence, A Touch of Scandal, An Improper Proposal, A Sensible Match) and of all four of my linked historical romances, starting with Dark Angel with a wrote with my mom as Anna Grant and continuing with Shadows of the Heart, Shores of Desire, and Rightfully His. It’s the core issue of Charles & Mélanie series. I can’t imagine writing a book about Charles and Mel that didn’t deal with some facet of betrayal.

In a 2003 ARR interview, Rachel Potter asked me about the fact that many of my books have personal betrayal as a theme. It was something I hadn’t really thought about at the time. Thinking it over, I replied, “Personal betrayal goes to the core of what hurts most, what creates the bleakest dark moment, the deepest hurdle to overcome. That’s the stuff of good drama. Trust, I think, is essential to love, so a betrayal of trust is one of the most difficult challenges a love affair can face. Betrayal raises all sorts of interesting moral and ethical questions. ”

I’m particularly intrigued by the moral and ethical dilemmas of characters caught between competing loyalties, as Raoul describes. That’s what I love about Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson books (which, pretty obviously, were one of the inspirations for the Charles & Mélanie books). There’s a wonderful scene in the television adaptation of Game, Set & Match (which I wish would be released on DVD) where a number of the characters (most involved in intelligence work in one way or another) are a dinner party and the talk turns to betrayal. They are discussing it in the personal, romantic sense, but the political overtones are there as well. It’s a fabulous scene, rich in subtext.

Themes of betrayal and competing loyalties go hand and hand with stories about spies. Characters in spy stories are always caught in ethical dilemmas, torn between competing loyalties (every episode of MI-5/Spooks seems to contain an ethical dilemma). Tom Stoppard’s wonderful play about spies, Hapgood, is all about betrayal. But so is another of his favorite plays of mine, The Real Thing, which is about marriage, with nary a spy in sight.

The pull between loyalty to a loved one and loyalty to a cause is summed up in Richard Lovelace’s I could not love thee, dear, so much, Lov’d I not honor more, which Mélanie quotes to Charles toward the end of Secrets. It’s a deceptively simple quote, which can seem trite (Mel in fact, is accusing Charles of dismissing her betrayal too lightly when she brings it up). And yet it says a lot about the tension between love and loyalty or between two competing loyalties. Of course, how one defines “honor,” (a word Charles is inclined to invoke and Mel is inclined to disparage) has a lot to do with which loyalty one puts first. As Raoul is pointing out to Mélanie, there’s often no easy, clean, “honorable” answer.

Do you like stories about betrayal? Why or why not? Any favorites to recommend? Do you find yourself noticing common themes within a writer’s work? Writers, are you aware of themes you return to again and again, or are you sometimes startled when someone points them out to you (as I was when Rachel interview me)?

This week’s Fraser Correspondence addition goes back to the exchange of letters between Mélanie and Raoul about loneliness and deception. It seemed appropriate to the topic.

 

Literary Deal-Makers

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about “Literary Deal-Breakers”–plot elements or types of characters or settings that make one not try a book, not matter how well-recommended, or put a book down unfinished. On a more positive note, I though I’d talk about “Literary Deal-Makers”–types of stories or characters or settings that will cause one to actively seek out a book.

I know there are certain story elements that appeal to me across genres. I’ve always loved stories about married couples whether in mysteries, romances, classics, historical fiction, or plays. The Scarlet Pimpernel, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Spiral Path, The Real Thing, Laurie King’s Mary Russell series, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Busman’s Honeymoon, Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson books, An Ideal Husband. Modern setting or historical, happy ending, tragic ending, or something in between. If I hear a book or play or movie described as an examination of a marriage, I’m likely to seek it out.

I also like stories about ex-spouses or lovers reuniting. The Philadelphia Story. Persuasion. Much Ado About Nothing. Bath Tange. Raiders of the Lost Ark.

And I’ve always had a weakness for spy stories. Whether it’s the moral ambiguity of John Le Carré or Len Deighton, an espionage-laced historical romance like Mary Jo Putney’s Petals on the Wind, a play filled with double-crosses like Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood, or a television series like Spooks/MI-5, if I hear “spies” or “espionage,” my attention is caught.

It’s not surprising that these interests mesh in the Charles & Mélanie books. They also continue to influence the type of books (and movies, plays, and tv shows) I seek out.

What about you? What type of plot premise or character or setting makes you seek out a book? Do your “deal-makers” work across genres and eras?

Be sure to check out the Fraser Correspondence. I’ve just posted a letter from Simon Tanner to his actress friend Cecily Summers, which catches up on what happens with Manon after Cecily helps her escape the Tavistock Theatre early in Beneath a Silent Moon.