Brunonia Barry- Reading Lace: When Dreams Become Reality
Lately, I have been hearing about so many novels that were inspired by their authors’ dreams that I’m starting to wonder if this is a common occurrence. Dreams are certainly one way that many of us can tap into our creativity. Although our dream symbols are often more meaningful than our waking images, we don’t ask them to make sense. We just let go and experience them.
My first novel, The Lace Reader, was inspired by a dream. But the night I first had the dream, it had a more urgent meaning and saved me from a trip to the emergency room.
My husband and I had just moved to Massachusetts. We were renovating an old Victorian house we had purchased, trying to increase the size of the kitchen by knocking down some walls, a job that was supposed to be completed by the time we moved in but had fallen behind schedule.
Since knocking down walls is a messy job at best, I didn’t unpack very much. One of the things I did unpack was a small piece of handmade lace, a talisman of sorts that my grandmother had given to me years before. When I went to sleep that night, I dreamed that I was holding up that piece of lace and looking through it at one of the walls that would be coming down. I wanted to see through the wall and thereby discover what our finished kitchen would look like. Only in the logic of dreams would this be possible.
Instead of seeing granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances, what I saw through the lace was a field of horses. Not only did this make no sense, but, for me, it was a very alarming dream. I have a severe allergy to horses, not just the kind of allergy that causes a few sniffles, but one that keeps me away from such fun events as parades and requires me to carry an Epipen in my purse. I woke up and felt so agitated by the dream that I couldn’t get back to sleep.
The next morning, my dream took on new meaning. Just as the demolition of the walls was about to start, the contractor turned to me and said, ‘I hate this old horsehair plaster! It gets into the air, and you can never get it out.’
We stopped the demolition and never did renovate the kitchen. But the incident inspired the short story that turned into The Lace Reader. When we moved to another old house, this time in Salem, the rest of the novel came to me.
When I started to write, my story was about May Whitney, a woman who runs a shelter island for abused women and children off the coast of Salem. Initially, I tried to write from May’s point of view, but Towner Whitney, the character who was eventually to become my protagonist, kept taking it over. Towner was an angry young girl, angry in particular at her mother, May. I had no idea at the time what Towner was so angry about, but every time I would try to write as May, Towner would come into the story and tell me why May didn’t deserve her own book. There was some event that Towner was angry about. As I went forward, I found that it was not about what May had done but what she had failed to do. Towner’s point of view became so interesting to me that I allowed her to take over the story.
As it turned out, Towner Whitney was more than just an unreliable narrator. In the first paragraph of Chapter One, she tells you never to believe her, that she lies all the time. She also tells you that she is crazy. While my interpretation as author was different (Towner was truthful within the limits of her own understanding, and, to me, she seemed quite sane), she was nevertheless a very challenging character to write. Her sense of reality was flawed, and she had huge gaps in memory from the electroshock therapy she received as a teenager.
Normally, when one writes an unreliable narrator, the reader realises the outcome of the story just before the main character does. That’s the general rule. But in this case, Towner was telling the story in retrospect, revealing the truth as it was revealed to her. When Towner spoke, it was in the present tense. If she was duplicitous in any way (and I don’t believe that she was), it was simply that she wanted the reader to understand her story the same way she had come to understand it, by experiencing it as it happened.
Essentially, The Lace Reader is a book about perception, and the reader’s perception is as important as Towner’s.
Understanding the character of Towner was a bit like solving a brain-teaser puzzle. Even as a writer, I didn’t know the whole story. On the day that Towner chose to reveal the ending, it was as if I had just discovered a well-guarded family secret. I didn’t believe it, but it resonated on a level I couldn’t ignore. No matter how I tried to engineer the story, in the end, it was Towner’s character who revealed the truth.
Since this was my first novel, I didn’t speak freely about the process for a while. The idea of the character revealing the story was so foreign to me that I was afraid readers might find me as unbalanced as Towner, and I wasn’t ready to go there. After all, she wasn’t speaking aloud to me. I wasn’t hearing voices.
Now that I have met and spoken to so many other writers about their writing processes, I find that my experience is not all that uncommon. For many of us, the creative process is like the dream that first inspired my story. We just have to learn to let go of our urge to control things and to listen to what our characters are telling us.
From www.thebookladysblog.com
