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.
