from
http://southernlitreview.com/authors/meet-robin-oliveira-author-of-my-name-is-mary-sutter.htm
You’ve mentioned the lead character came to you in a vision.
That prompted you to discover information about 17 female nurses who
worked as physicians during the Civil War. Mary Sutter is one of these
women, but throughout the book, both male and female characters are
equally well-drawn. How did you go about creating these fictional
characters with such detail? What tools did you use – e.g., character
sketches, profiles, etc.?
Characters evolve as I write. I use none of the oft-recommended tools
to develop characters. Whenever I do, I find that the characters are no
longer interesting to me because they are already static in my mind. I
want to discover them, as the reader might discover them, or as another
character might encounter them in the book. As the characters respond to
events erupting around them, I begin to understand who they are, even
though initially they are frequently one-dimensional. Through subsequent
drafts, the challenge becomes to develop them by asking what else the
character wants other than the thing he first revealed to you.
I also keep in mind that subplots have the role of magnifying theme.
This is the less intuitive guide to developing what any given character
wants and therefore who they will eventually become. Characters in
subplots are contrasts or mirrors of the main character’s desire and are
therefore arranged along a spectrum related to that desire. In
My Name is Mary Sutter,
all the female characters are arrayed on a spectrum in regards to the
love/knowledge theme. The male characters are delineated in their
response to Mary, to the women in their lives, and to the war and its
demands on their medical knowledge.
While writing, I remain open to whoever might walk onstage, always
hoping for the wonderful surprise, while keeping in mind the developing
theme and the structural requirements of the story.
Your research is incredibly thorough, and it leaves readers
with increased knowledge about life during that era. With so many
historical details to track, how did you keep all the information
organized? Did you use a timeline? Colored note cards? Post-its arranged
in various blocks or binders? A specific software program? We’ve heard a
wide variety of authors’ tricks, and we’re curious to know yours.
My system involves a plethora of overstuffed folders in various
filing systems, an overstuffed email inbox, and a bookshelf overflowing
with reference books. This simple, rather haphazard system works for me
because as soon as I organize anything, I can never find it again. I
rely a great deal on my memory. Once I have fed the research into my
imagination, it surfaces when necessary. Mine is not a system to
emulate, but it is the one that works for me.
Some authors outline a plot and follow that outline when
crafting a novel. Did you approach this story that way, or did events
and people begin to take on a direction and life of their own? (You’ve
mentioned hearing Mary Sutter’s voice).
For me, an outline has proved useful only to evaluate progress and diagnose problems. I did outline
My Name is Mary Sutter on the very last draft because Mary’s emotional arc didn’t feel right. For help, I turned to Jon Franklin’s
Writing for Story.
He won the Pulitzer Prize twice for newspaper features. His book
elucidates epic story structure in a way I had never before encountered.
It is based on the familiar character in conflict, action in
development, and resolution paradigm, but he adds the idea of
interlinked conflict, which helped me to discover wherein the current
structure the problem lay.
I think the important factor to remember is that Franklin already
knew the beginning, middle and end of his stories. He was writing
features for a newspaper in which he was shaping a known story. As
fiction writers, we often don’t know what’s coming; that’s part of the
fun. My method for
My Name is Mary Sutter was to have a vague
idea of an ending (based on desire: would Mary get or not get the
thing/person that she wanted?), and then forge ahead to see what
developed. I discovered new, wonderful story elements that, had I
attempted to stick to some predetermined outline, might not have
surfaced.
Merely as an exercise, I have tried to outline my new book in an
attempt to save myself some time. I don’t know how helpful this exercise
will prove in the long run. What it has helped me figure out is whether
or not I have enough story for a novel (I think I do), but whether the
outline will bear any resemblance to the final story is in question. I
suspect I will file the outline somewhere in an overstuffed folder and
only consult it, or more likely re-outline the book, if I find the
emotional arc of the final draft faulty.
There are a fair number of novels and stories set during the
Civil War. Were you concerned that the theme was a bit overexposed? What
was the greatest challenge you faced in giving the topic a unique spin?
When I told a friend about my book, he turned to me and said, “Not another #@$%ing Civil War novel?” But I was confident that
MNIMS
was about a forgotten aspect of the war: its medical challenges and the
subsequent development of medicine in America as a result. Much had
been written about the subject in non-fiction, but not in fiction. I
felt the story
had to be told, because the history of it
encompassed vast displays of personal courage in the face of widespread
despair. Nurses and doctors sacrificed themselves in a way we can hardly
imagine now, just a hundred fifty-five years later. That particular
history carried great power, and I had faith in that power. The greatest
challenge was not caring what anyone else thought. I simply wrote the
book and decided that if I had wasted years writing a book that no one
else would care about, then c’est la vie. The story had to be told.
One of the heaviest themes of the book is the pull of family
obligations – particularly for women – contrasting their desire to
follow their own path, as Mary opts to disappoint her own mother and
avoid returning home to help with the birth of her twin sister’s baby.
As a debut novelist, have you experienced that common “guilt” women feel
when we pursue our careers? How do you balance it all?
I wrote the book while I raised my children, and, like all mothers, I
made choices regarding the best use of my time. My choice to pursue
writing and attend graduate school while my children were students
themselves resulted in my not attending their PTA meetings, serving on
school committees, or pursuing other communal activities regarding my
children’s scholastic experience. Given the values of the area in which I
live, this was a socially ostracizing choice for me and perhaps for my
children. But I was also lucky. Because my husband was able to support
me in my endeavor, I did not have to steal family time from the evenings
or work while the children slept. I worked while they were in school.
But there were moments I regret. I had to be away on my daughter’s
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays because they fell during
the residency period of my graduate program. I have carried guilt about
that ever since, and probably will to my grave, no matter how much she
says she forgives me. But it is difficult to say how much any of this
affected them, positively or negatively. My daughter just graduated from
college and my son is entering his junior year. They are proud of me.
In many ways my pursuit of a difficult path that resulted in success
modeled for them something I could not have achieved had I set aside my
own desires to fulfill some ideal picture of attendant motherhood.
How did you decide on the third-person omniscient viewpoint,
and what were the challenges and advantages of writing from this
perspective?
I made the choice as I did the research into the medical and
political conditions under which the entire divided country was
laboring. Mary’s desire to become a doctor required that the reader
understand the complicated environment in which her desire was to play
out. This was not merely a story of one women’s fight against gender
bias, it was a story of the evolution of modern medicine and nursing,
the political and martial intransigence that prolonged the war, and the
family saga representative of many family sagas of that era. To present
that story demanded omniscience. To have kept to third person limited
would have meant a less overarching picture of the conditions of the
war.
The challenge involved finding a way to smoothly transit from one
point of view to the other and to gain control and personality of the
narrator. In order to carry the reader from one person’s POV into
another’s, to smoothly summarize events, and to allow commentary in the
form of aphorisms, the move between the general and the particular was
made sentence by sentence, from the narrator’s all-knowing aspect until
the reader was comfortably transported inside a particular character’s
point of view. For instance, in the first paragraph in chapter six:
Six weeks later, on a warm afternoon on June the fifth, 1861, a
petite, dark-haired woman, often mistaken from afar for a child, strode
three diagonal blocks down New York Avenue in Washington City. Crossing
the cobbled street, Dorothea Dix dodged bands of drilling soldier on
Pennsylvania Avenue, then swept up an ill-tended slate walkway to the
tall double entry doors of the president’s house, where roving sentries
let her pass with a nod. Presenting a letter confirming her appointment
with Mr. Lincoln, she took in the tattered rugs and dingy walls that
adorned the entryway of the Mansion and decided that chief among the
needs of the new president was a better housekeeper.
In the first sentence, the narrator states time and place and
describes the new character. In the second, the narrator names her. In
the third, the proper name is reduced to a pronoun, thereby establishing
intimacy. At this point the reader is inside Dorothea Dix’s
consciousness. The reverse of this is performed to move out of her
point of view into another character’s.
To introduce the narrative breathing space to include aphorisms, the narrator pulls back. For example, on page 249:
They were both standing now, shouting to be heard over the baby,
whose cries seemed the repudiation of life itself. Amelia’s face
eschewed sorrow for fury and indignation. The satisfaction of anger.
Later she would regret everything, but latent remorse would not repair
the damage. For all the things we say to our children for their own
good, very little good ever comes of it.
The space is made for the narrator to utter the last sentence, an
aphorism, because she has pulled back from the points of view of each of
the characters and is freely observing. In this instance she remarks
not only on what Amelia feels but what she will feel in the future,
something that third person limited viewpoint would not allow.
This telescoping in and out, sentence by
sentence, allowed my narrator to roam from character to character,
across time and space, to tell a fuller story than more limited points
of view would have told.
FROM
http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/my_name_is_mary_sutter.html
Q. For readers who are familiar with Dorothea Dix or Clara
Barton only through your novel, could you elaborate on their histories
and accomplishments? In what ways is Mary modeled on-or against-these?
Did any other historical figures influence the creation of her
character?
Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton were extraordinary women who achieved a
great deal in a time when very few women had the freedom to pursue their
goals.
Born in 1802 into an abusive, alcoholic family, Dorothea Dix was raised
by her grandmother in Boston for the latter part of her childhood. As a
young woman, Miss Dix taught and wrote. However, in her thirties she
developed ill health, reportedly tuberculosis, and traveled to Europe to
recuperate. There she met Quaker reformers interested in improving the
treatment of the mentally ill. This was radical thinking, for at that
time little understanding existed regarding mental health. When Miss Dix
returned to the United States, she led campaigns for better treatment
of not only the mentally ill, resulting in legislative initiatives in
Massachusetts, Louisiana, Illinois, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania for
the building or expansion of state hospitals for the mentally insane,
as they were then called, but also for the imprisoned. During the war,
she worked as the female superintendent of army nurses, to variable
reviews. Afterward, though ill, she again traveled the world to champion
care of the neglected. Extensive biographies exist enumerating this
woman's indefatigable efforts on behalf of the imprisoned, impoverished,
and afflicted.
Clara Barton was born in 1821, nearly twenty years after Dorothea Dix.
She was an unassuming recording clerk in the U.S. Patent Office when the
war began. Dismayed by the stories of suffering, she requested supplies
and a pass to visit battlefields from General William Hammond. She
first visited Cedar Mountain, and then Fairfax Station after the Second
Battle of Bull Run, or Second Manassas, as Southerners call it. From
there her work expanded until she began to be called the "Angel of the
Battlefield." After the war, she helped find missing soldiers and
identify those Union soldiers who had expired at Andersonville, the
notorious Confederate prison. She also embarked on an exhausting
speaking tour, describing her experiences during the war. When doctors
ordered her to rest, she went to Europe, only to work with the
International Committee of the Red Cross in the Franco-Prussian War.
Upon her return to the United States, she advocated for an American Red
Cross and in 1881 became its first president, later expanding its role
of wartime relief to include national disasters. A complete history can
be found at http://www.redcross.org/museum/history/claraBarton.asp.
I was an avid fan of both these women before I even began the novel,
having read and reread their biographies as a child. My memory of their
courage, independence, and vision may have inspired similar traits in
Mary, but if so, it was unconscious. From the beginning, Mary was
herself.
Q. The descriptions of Mary's medical work are fascinating,
detailed, and often grueling. How did you incorporate your experience as
a nurse into the writing of this novel?
During my career, I worked in ob-gyn, bone marrow transplant, and
intensive care. Though I drew on all these specialties in the writing of
Mary Sutter, I will never forget the emotional impact of walking for
the first time into the room of an intensive-care patient with multiple
lines, tubes, IV drips, and medications. Though I'd been well trained,
it was a daunting, terrifying, and humbling experience to know that the
patient's life depended on my competence. Writing Mary's experience was a
matter of translating my twentieth-century situation with its profusion
of medical supplies, support, technology, and shift relief,to
nineteenth-century battlefields and hospitals lacking any of the same.
However different, all life-and-death situations render the caregiver
intensely focused. It was at this sensory and emotional crossroad that I
was able to write Mary.
On a less extreme level, the medical research I undertook was very
pleasurable, because I already knew the language, instruments, and
pathology. The medical histories in the six-volume
Medical and Surgery History of the War of the Rebellion fascinated
me, as did the French surgery text on amputations I found. What others
might have thought ghoulish, I found engrossing.
Q. While collecting limbs on the battlefield, Blevins thinks
that "despite all the specimens he'd collected over the years, he had
always been able to separate the person from the object" (p. 340). Is
this type of detachment necessary for a doctor or researcher to do his
job well?
It depends. A pathologist working with tissue is far more able to detach
himself than a physician at a bedside. Midwives as well as physicans
and nurses of all specialties daily manage a delicate balance between
the objective and the subjective, knowledge and compassion, attachment
and detachment.
Q. Which character was the most difficult to write and why? What tools did you use to overcome this challenge?
Jenny was the most challenging. She seems to be one person at the
beginning of the novel, then emerges as another. That she possessed a
set of values different from Mary's (and mine) made rounding her out as a
character a task that took quite a bit of thought and revision. I
relied on the principle that while characters are often posed as
opposites, no one is one-sided, and characters' motivations are always
complex.
Q. In a story with many different points of view, you include
President Lincoln's. Why did you include him and why is he important to
the story?
Lincoln inserted himself into the story as soon as he met with Dorothea
Dix. Sometimes characters insist, and Mr. Lincoln insisted. Only near
the end of writing the book did I realize that Lincoln's and Mary's
stories mirrored one other: they were both coming of age in their
respective roles, he as a president fighting to gain control of a
disobedient general and an unwieldy war, and she as a woman fighting to
become someone no one believed she could be. Each, too, had a very
personal grief to overcome. And had Lincoln never given Dorothea Dix the
go-ahead to create a nursing force, Mary's story may never have
happened, or would not have happened in the same way. In my mind, Mary
and Lincoln became inextricably linked.
Q. Mary's mother, Amelia, is a fascinating and nuanced
character. In what ways is she conflicted about motherhood in general
and about Mary specifically? What is her greatest strength as a parent?
Like Mary, Amelia was a woman ahead of her time. As a midwife, she
practiced a profession that, while giving her greater social and
economic freedom than other women experienced, also isolated her. She
could deliver babies, but her own children, as other women perceived it,
were out of control. Amelia knew this gossip was envy, and yet when it
came to her children, she despaired: her dissimilar daughters could not
find common ground; her son, whom she adored, skipped off to war; and
the daughter to whom she was closest, Mary, defied her requests at
almost every turn. Amelia is a woman who exhausted herself for her
children and yet in adulthood they confounded her. I think her greatest
strength is her willingness to self-examine, which allows her to endure
despite her disappointments.
Q. What is your next project? Would you consider writing another historical novel?
I am writing another historical novel, which involves a new era and a
subject about which I know very little, again providing another chance
for prodigious amounts of research. The learning curve on this next one
is very steep, however, and is keeping me up nights.
