NANCY MEANS WRIGHT

Discover Plot and Character Through the Journey Quest

NANCY MEANS WRIGHT has published sixteen books, including five mystery novels, most recently, Midnight Fires: A Mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft (2010) and its sequel, The Nightmare (2011). Her children’s mysteries received both an Agatha Award and Agatha nomination for Best Children’s/YA Novel. Short stories have appeared in American Literary Review, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Level Best Books anthologies, and elsewhere. Longtime teacher and a Bread Loaf Scholar for a first novel, Nancy lives in Middlebury, Vermont, with her spouse and two Maine coon cats.

 

 

I’ve been fascinated by mythology ever since I studied Greek and Roman myths in ninth grade and then read Homer’s Odyssey. In college I rediscovered these myths in art and literature, and in the archetypal images of the psychiatrist Jung. Later I came across the philosopher Nietzsche, who claimed that in our sleep and dreams “we pass through the whole thought of earlier humanity.” I was amazed to think that my fears, doubts, and desires had already been experienced by my forebears in their quest for fulfillment. To know that in my dreams I’d been dipping into some Great Unconscious!

But it wasn’t until years later, when I completed my first mystery novel, that I fully understood this quest. I had gone through a traumatic divorce and left my Vermont family and friends to teach in a small liberal arts college in New York’s mid–Hudson Valley. I felt like a pariah, dropped into a kind of limbo. I wanted to write—but I had to have a day job. The novel I’d started before the divorce sat in an unpacked box. I didn’t know where I was going with it anyway—why continue? I could write only short poems that ended (as T. S. Eliot wrote) “not with a bang but a whimper.”

Then, for my birthday, a friend gave me a copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. I read, and reread, the chapter titled “The Hero’s Adventure.” In it, Campbell wrote: “Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.”

Was it possible? I went on to study this journey quest, in which the reluctant hero or heroine finally accepts the call, despite the hardships involved, and sets out on a series of adventures beyond the safe, known world—often in search of something missing or lost. The journey is both physical and interior: a search for answers inside the self. As the seeker journeys into this mysterious “underworld,” he or she meets with trials, tests, temptations to overcome and monsters to subdue. There are moments of doubt and despair. Yet with luck, the hero will encounter an altruistic person, male or female—perhaps a romantic counterpart—to help achieve the goal. (I did soon after, as it happened, but that’s another story.)

The seeker ultimately prevails, and returns “home” with a renewed understanding of self, the world, and of his or her place within it. The hero has been thinking one way, and now must discover a new way “of being or becoming.” Campbell cites the trials of seekers as diverse as Buddha, Odysseus, King Arthur, Jesus, Jonah and his whale, Martin Luther King, Jr., and protagonists in novels by Thomas Mann and James Joyce, even in Star Wars.

Intrigued, I thought: Why not apply this archetypal journey quest to my abortive mystery? Before my divorce, I’d read about a pair of farmer-brothers who distrusted banks; one night they were assaulted and left for dead. The police found the assailants after they’d thrown the stolen cash about in bars and diners—and the money reeked of barn. I felt I had to write a mystery—though, at that point, I’d published only mainstream fiction. I changed the brothers to a wife and husband and opened the novel with the break-in. I introduced a feisty dairy farmer neighbor, who, as amateur sleuth, determines to find the villains. Then came the divorce, and I abandoned the novel on page 26.

Now I couldn’t wait to work on it again. This time my primary concern was not the story line, but my farmer Ruth. I would let the plot unfold through the passions, strengths, and flaws of her character. Though initially reluctant to take time from her never-ending barn work, Ruth is pulled into the story through anger at the husband who left her, the injustice of the attack on her neighbors, and concern for the loss of Vermont’s farms. As time goes on, she is severely tested: her barn on fire, a family zealot who undermines her sleuthing, the bullying and disappearance of her young son, the mounting pressures to sell farmland to eager developers. A former love comes to her aid, and together they overcome the evils and return to “normalcy.” But the trauma has altered their thinking: “Those are pearls that were their eyes,” as Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest.

With the journey quest in my head, I didn’t need to outline—I let the novel develop organically, like Ruth’s farm, and named it Mad Season. St. Martin’s Press published five Ruth Willmarth novels in all, ending the series with Ruth’s cows quarantined for mad cow disease (not all adventures end happily). I continued my quests in two middle-grade mysteries. Now I have embarked on a series in the persona of fiery Mary Wollstonecraft, who in 1792 wrote the groundbreaking A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, for which many called her “a hyena in petticoats.” Her life was a continual quest for women’s rights, social justice, and recognition as a serious writer. Yet it was filled with adversity : the childbirth death of a beloved friend; abandonment during the French Revolution by a lover whose child she bore; two suicide attempts; and then death at age thirty-eight, just after she’d found fulfillment with writer William Godwin and given birth to the future Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.

Mary Wollstonecraft was possessed of such a brilliant, inquiring (yet conflicted) mind, so intolerant of injustice and sham, that I felt she would make an extraordinary sleuth. Combining true history with mystery, of course, has been a challenge—in a sense, two journey quests in one. But to date I’ve completed two books in the series, and, in the process, the writing has transformed my own thinking. As I hope it might alter yours.

EXERCISE

Create a mysterious journey quest of your own. Think of it as departure, initiation (misadventure), return, and transformation. As you go, consider the thoughts and questions below.

 

 

DEPARTURE: Where is “home” at the start of your novel? Describe it lovingly and keep it in mind throughout the novel. What is your protagonist’s personal quest? To find a killer, or is it more than that? To recover a job, health, a former love, an estranged family member, faith, or self-confidence? Something, that is, to draw the seeker into the quest, so that the journey is physical and mental (spiritual). What does this person desire most of all? (Each scene should renew this question.) Will your novel open with these dramatic quest-ions to pull in the reader?

Perhaps, too, the object is tangible, one that might bring about more deaths (think of Arthur’s holy grail). Let the seeker use an object, or prop in the search, a talisman of sorts, a good luck charm. And don’t forget the secrets the sleuth holds and must unravel during the journey. Finally, how long should this opening be? If the book is to be some three hundred pages, the opening might be only ten or twenty pages at the most.

 

INITIATION: Now the tension starts to rise, along with the obstacles thrown in the seeker’s path. What trials will the seeker encounter? What adversaries will the seeker encounter during the quest, and who are they? Perhaps the killer? Others with motives and secrets of their own? A pain-in-the-butt relative, boss, or colleague who torments the seeker and tries to sabotage the quest? Might the protagonist, too, become a suspect? Will someone try to maim or kill the seeker? Harm that person’s loved ones? Will the seeker be plagued by self-doubts to the point of almost giving up?

This might be the time to introduce a helpmate, perhaps a romantic one who has been present all the time but whom the seeker has just come to appreciate. The helpmate can support the seeker through the black moments, and be sure to lace those moments with torments, pitfalls, plot twists. Give each scene a forward motion, a raison d’être, a hook ending. Some writers think of a novel as a series of acts (as I do, from my theater past). Let the seeker’s “underworld” expand in each of three or four acts, come to climax each time, with a reversal, and then remission (rather than intermission); then climb again until the final dramatic climax, what I call “the obligatory theatrics.”

 

RETURN AND TRANSFORMATION: Now the tunnel leads upward toward the light. Let the denouement scene, the unraveling of plot, be quick, no more than a dozen pages, with perhaps a final twist to delight and surprise the reader. The seeker must have a moment of enlightenment, an epiphany of sorts: So that’s how it happened! That’s who it was! If only I could have seen.... The epiphany concerns not only the killer revealed, but a change in the sleuth’s consciousness. In what way? Naïve at first, he or she has now seen the dark side of the world, and perhaps internally as well? Could the seeker, too, have killed (come close to killing)?

Finally, remember to show all this, with a minimum of telling. Above all, the seeker should come home a different person. Even home will not be the same. To quote Longfellow, “Things are not what they seem.”