DOMESTICATION
Like many writers, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. My first story was published in the local newspaper when I was in 2nd grade. It was a horror story about a harp in a forest. My teacher arranged the publication. In early grade school, I aborted my first attempt at writing a novel. My first success came with a friend. We created a pair of fantasy characters and would write until our characters were experiencing great peril. Then we’d hand the notebook back to the other writer to somehow save the day and subsequently land the characters in more trouble. It was great fun. I wrote my first solo book while I was in high school.
I noticed a recurring joke amongst writers that they were ready to toss in the towel and raise sheep. Then my friend bought a farm and started raising sheep. The contrast between the gore and horror stories from the farm and the general public’s belief of a sheep farm representing a peaceful, bucolic ideal captured me. Spending time on the farm, I kept having these moments where I would say that I’ve got to write a sheep horror. Like one time my favorite guardian dog trotted past, his tail a proud flag, and a wooly, bleeding sheep leg in his mouth! (It’s not supposed to be like that!!) This kind of juxtaposition is irresistible story fodder for me.
Puppy’s job is to protect sheep! He ripped a leg off! I’m all tentatively telling the farmers that I just saw their dog pass with a sheep leg in his mouth, and the farmers are all SIGH our fault for leaving the body in there for days. Of course, the dog’s going to see it as meat, but we shouldn’t let him get a taste for those sheep. SIGH! And, again, my mind is blown with how incredibly blasé they are about all of it. I needed to write that book!
Writing this book was smooth like butter. Freakishly so. Something I needed to revise a fair amount, though, regarded Janie’s trauma reactions. People adapt to fear and danger. Psychologically, Janie is starting this novel with a brain that has already adapted. In one source text—I think it was The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker—the woman in the case study was saying that she was perfectly safe now and could talk. In reality, her gun-wielding, angry husband was just on the other side of a flimsy bedroom door. The woman’s concept of what it meant to be safe had adjusted to her situation.
I wanted Janie to think and act in ways natural to her (and unnatural to people without similar trauma), but in revisions, I needed to add more overt explanations for her various trauma responses so that readers with less personal experience in these areas could follow her choices and see the repetitive way she reassured herself in order to endure.
Keep your personal goals and motivations in the forefront of all your decision making. Random internet advice may have more to do with others’ goals and motivations than yours, making them irrelevant to you.
