Guest Blogger, Frances Greenslade, Author of SHELTER

Dear Readers,

I am delighted to introduce author Frances Greenslade, whose novel SHELTER (published by Free Press) comes out today in the U.S. Frances is the author of two memoirs and is the winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Non-Fiction. Aside from her busy writing life, she also teaches English in Penticton, BC. I invited Frances to write a little something about her creative process while writing her novel. I was lucky enough to get an advance review copy of her book and I simply loved it. This is what I said in the blurb I wrote for Shelter: Shelter is: “one of those take-your-breath-away kind of tales that someone tells you in childhood and years later, still haunts you. It is an unforgettable novel about love, loss, family and what it means to go home.”

First, before Frances, a little snippet about the book from her publisher: 

The novel opens with a pre-teen Maggie Dillon describing the idyllic marriage between her parents, Irene and Patrick, which she and her sister grew up sheltered in during the first decade of their lives. Set in the 1960s Chilcotin region of British Columbia, Greenslade deftly portrays the dual nature of the Canadian frontier: a simple, serene place to live, yet also a vast and dangerous wilderness. Maggie, a worrywart to the core, narrates how although her parents seemed happy, her childhood was tinged with a constant uneasiness that something would go wrong. She says:  “I worried about leaving Mom at home alone, about the wild way she swung the ax when she was splitting kindling and the way Dad nagged her to be careful […] you think a thing, you open a door. You invite tragedy in. That’s what my worry taught me.”  

Below is Frances’ post about her writing process. Enjoy!

At a recent reading, I met a group of writers who got together this past fall to participate in National Novel Writing Month. It’s a way to force yourself to quit dithering and finish the novel that’s been languishing in the back of your mind for years. The idea is to write 50,000 words, a complete novel, in a month. I like the concept because it reminds me of the way I wrote as a kid, when I made myself a desk from some boards in the attic and, every day, wrote pages and pages of longhand in a sky-blue notebook. But the writers said it was harder than they expected. So they asked me where I begin and what works to keep me going.

With Shelter, I began with two things: a setting and a character. Maggie, the narrator, “visited” me on a road trip I took with my husband-to-be, north to the Chilcotin region of British Columbia. We traveled in his old hatchback Volkswagen Scirocco, which some nights, when his fear of bears overwhelmed him, became our tent. The region cast a spell on me. It felt haunted by stories of people who were looking for a place to escape to, people for whom there was no turning back. Maggie struck me as a girl who valued independence above almost anything else. She listened carefully to her father’s lessons about how to survive in the bush. Because I had lost my own mother, I identified with her need to feel capable. Her voice quickly came to dominate my imagination. I listened to her, and her story began to take shape.

Putting my faith in characters means I’m often surprised by the direction that a novel takes. It’s the greatest pleasure of my writing life, the moment when the characters pull me into their stories, insisting on taking a path that I didn’t plan. In the novel I’m currently writing, a character named Gord, meant to play a minor role as a neighbor that the protagonist doesn’t know whether to trust or not, has elbowed his way into the novel and become much more central to the story. Mornings, I’d sit down to write, full of plans to move along to a different scene, and there was Gord again in his flannel shirt, his boots the size of small boats, and his confession that when he hunts, he sometimes just sits at the edge of the woods and watches birds for hours.

What keeps me going is the tug of the story. I think of it like fishing. I cast, let the line sink deeper, daydream, stare into the water, then reel in and cast again. I don’t wait around for inspiration, though. The physical act of writing inspires me. I write, pay attention to the tug, and follow it. Someone once gave me the useful advice to just start writing wherever you’re interested. That’s the tug. You feel something stir. You want to explore it.

I admit there are times when I’ve followed something that I’ve then had to toss out: eighty pages from the middle of Shelter that meant I then had to re-write the ending as well.  But re-writing is easier when I know my characters. I try to understand their most powerful desires. Those desires guide the direction of the plot.

I don’t mean to sound glib about how to lay down the pages. In a month, I’m lucky to get a chapter written. But I often think about that little girl in the attic and how much joy she felt as she was writing in the sky-blue notebook. It’s the joy I’m going for.

Thank you Frances and thank you readers for taking a moment to learn a little about this amazing writer. If you'd like to learn more about Frances Greenslade, her new novel Shelter and her other books, go to: www.francesgreenslade.com