Yay, today author Cynthia Ruchti is hanging out at Tag(g)lines. I met Cynthia last year at the ACFW Conference and had the opportunity to gush in person to her about her book They Almost Always Come Home.
Cynthia’s latest book, When the Morning Glory Blooms, just released and I’m itching to read it. She has such a wonderful writing voice!
And her post today is so very relevant, whether you’re a writer or not…about how learning the stories of those around us changes everything…
What’s Behind it All?
Gruff exterior. Hollow eyes. Communicates poorly. Perpetually grumpy. What’s the story behind that character?
As a creator of imaginary characters for novels and composite but very real characters for non-fiction, I’m learning about myself and about humanity as I write.
I wonder if my Sociology professor in college would have held his students’ attention better if he’d turned us all into novelists rather than droning about stats and handing out obtuse essay tests.
Carefully observing the characters who people our own life stories tells us there has to be more under the surface—a reason she cringes when someone stands too close, a background to his rebellion against every form of authority, meaning behind her insatiable appetite for dangerous relationships…
In my recent release—When the Morning Glory Blooms—I needed a dad figure radically different from my own. My father was emotionally present. I needed to create a character who was inexplicably emotionally absent. My father found countless ways to show how much he loved his kids. This character needed to search but seem to never find a way. Yet, he had to be a good man at his core.
I started the book, fleshing out the character of Ornell, not knowing his whole story. In my heart, I knew there had to be a reason for his gruff exterior, his hollowness, his inability to communicate with more than grunts and clipped demands that his daughter realize time was ticking. He’d give her two more months before she was on her own.
Maybe only another writer will understand this, but I forced myself to reserve judgment about him until the rest of his story came to light. When the layers unfolded, my heart broke for this precious man. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and tell him everything was going to be okay. I wanted to tell him how proud I was for how strong he’d been, and for the new ways he was blasting out of his comfort zone to do the right thing.
In the beginning, I didn’t know his whole story. Discovering it changed my attitude toward him, this imaginary character.
What would happen if I’d apply that concept to the sour-faced check-out clerk at Walgreen’s? Or the teacher who demands impossible things from a student I care about? Or the woman sitting next to me in church who clings to her screaming baby as if it’s a security blanket rather than taking that child to the well-lit, fully-staffed, environmentally friendly church nursery?
What if I assumed a many-layered story pressed from the inside against what I see on the outside? How would that alter my approach to the people around me? Would it eventually lead to a moment when they would trust me enough to give me a glimpse into their background and change us both?
What about you, reader? Has your approach to someone around you changed since you learned the rest of his or her story?
*****
Cynthia Ruchti tells stories of Hope-that-glows-in-the-dark through her novels and novellas, speaking for women’s events and retreats, writers’ events and retreats, nonfiction books and devotionals, drawing from 33 years of on-air radio ministry. In 2013, she will have a total of six books on the shelves, with more to come in 2014. She and her plot-tweaking husband live in the heart of Wisconsin, not far from their three children and five grandchildren. Her recent release—When the Morning Glory Blooms—earned a top rating of 4.5 Stars from RT Reviews plus a Top Pick. Publishers Weekly said this about the book: “Times may change, but condemnation and judgment are constants. Yet each woman dares to hope in the power of grace, and to believe in the One who redeems all things.”
More about When the Morning Glory Blooms: Becky rocks a baby that rocked her world. Sixty years earlier, with her fiancé Drew in the middle of the Korean Conflict, Ivy throws herself into her work at a nursing home to keep her sanity and provide for the child Drew doesn’t know is coming. Ivy cares for Anna, an elderly patient who taxes Ivy’s listening ear until the day she suspects Anna’s tall tales are not the ramblings of dementia. They’re fragments of Anna’s disjointed memories of a remarkable life. Finding a faint thread of hope she can’t resist tugging, Ivy records Anna’s memoir, scribbling furiously after hours to keep up with the woman’s emotion-packed, grace-hemmed stories. Is Ivy’s answer buried in Anna’s past? Becky, Ivy, Anna–three women fight a tangled vine of deception in search of the blossoming simplicity of truth.