Tapping into Your History to Create Great Characters
Last week, I took my first flying lesson. I flew in a Cessna 152, a sweet little plane, and I was introduced to all her parts and abilities. I’ve wanted to fly since I was very young. My mother flew everything from Spitfires to four-engine B-29’s in World War II as a Women’s Airforce Service Pilot. She promised to teach me, but four kids and two full-time jobs got in the way.
My instructor was very good but the information came in a flood. The cockpit felt crowded with the two of us; he put me in the pilot’s seat immediately. It was also hot—I propped open the window with my elbow. A calm but overcast sky. The plane smelled of fuel and all the other scared bodies that occupied that tiny space. There was a yoke (like a steering wheel) instead of the stick my mother would’ve used in her planes this size. So many dials to watch. By the end of the hour lesson, I knew some but not all of them. I have lots of studying to do.
One of the last conversations I had with my mother was about flying. She was nearly 98, her mind going fast, but she remembered the plane stories. We sat in the cramped cubicle of the nursing floor, a curtain pulled around her bed, the window looking out on the next building's brick, and she talked about the afternoon she buzzed my grandmother’s house when she and my dad were dating. The time my dad tried to keep the radio tuned to a jazz station and she couldn’t listen to the control tower. The weekend she got lost over the Hudson Valley and had to land at West Point. The many weeks she ferried bombers up the East Coast from airbases to Montreal.
Stories ran loops in her head, weaving round and around, locations she's lived in and flown from: Sweetwater, Texas; winter in South Dakota; Michigan; Georgia. Past visits, we brought out her WASP scrapbooks from the bottom drawer of her dresser, pointed to the photos, asked her to tell us again. Now I just pressed Voice Memo on my phone to capture her laugh.
In the sky, she especially loved chandelles, their circling climb. She'd worked as a secretary for PAN AM after the war, married my father, got pregnant and had my older sister. Never returned to flying.
"Mom," I asked on that last visit, "why did you give it up?" I’ve asked this many times, always hoping for a different answer. "When you loved it so much."
She looked small in the bed, shorter than in her flying pictures, shrunk by age. Her voice was still strong, no nonsense. Sure of her decision. "I loved you kids more." She began to drift again. There were four of us, only three now, and losing my older sister still hurt her.
I recalled when I was small, and she took us flying, not in planes she flew as a wartime pilot or a commercial pilot after the war, but in regular planes where we bought a ticket and got an assigned seat. If something happened in the cockpit, she always told us, they could call on her services. I laughed at this, thinking of it now, but her eyes were closed. I talked a little louder, offered the family legend of sitting next to her as she muttered instructions to the pilot, from our seats to the cockpit, advice only I could hear. "Put your flaps down," she'd say. Or "coming in too steep!" She categorized each airport for its trickiness in landing and take off. Boston's Logan was one of the worst, she said.
Right over water, I said now, right, Mom? But she was somewhere else, staring blankly out the window at that brick wall.
I was the second kid of the four. By the time my brother was born and my father was fighting to stay in his job, she was saving us all through her paycheck. Exhausted most of the time, borrowing a dollar from my allowance to cover the groceries, she never spoke about either the poverty or the nonstop work. So I didn't understand, as a child, why there was neither money or time for the sky.
My own life put this dream on hold too. So this week, as I took the first lesson, I remembered all she put aside to raise us, to work. What it must take, inside a person, to go through the process of giving up a dream, of that small death? She accepted most of what she had to deal with, in her life, in that facility at the end, in her very reduced state. Yet she once flew a B-29.
Do you have this histories you carry with you, which end up in your writing in some form or another? Memoir obviously traces those lines. Fiction too, but less directly. I didn’t realize, when I started writing my novel about women pilots, that I was retrieving memories of my mom’s life, in an attempt to know her better. I remember during revision I thought of asking her to read the draft then thought better of it—to her, at least from how she dismissed our questions, it wasn’t alive any longer. Perhaps it would be an annoyance to remember, perhaps even a sadness I didn’t want to cause. She was a child of the big wars, trained to not linger on lost hopes.
It wasn’t until the novel went into publication that I saw clearly its purpose in my life, and that clarity came from my publicity coach, Dan Blank, the guru of “human-centered marketing.” Dan asked me in one of our earliest sessions to find the key messages in my story—the meaning or message behind the characters and plot. At first I didn’t have a clue what he meant. I wrote the book because I had a fascination with flying—many of my short stories are about pilots, my first novel carried that thru-line as well, but I never stopped to ask why. I came up with some lame responses to Dan’s question, he urged me to dig deeper, and I began realizing the novel was about my history, my desire to get to know my elusive, charming mother on paper. I didn’t want to write her actual story, because she was a very private person, putting aside her achievements, making the conversation about someone else. Even as a child, she was a mystery to me, and I stayed sensitive as to how much she’d share and when the curtain closed on questions.
In the writing exercise below is an article Dan wrote about his theory of key messages and why they are worth researching.
As I explored more about my pilot characters, who they were, what they longed for, what they’d left behind, I began to see such parallels with my mom’s life. Not in the specifics—my narrators are pilots, yes, but they also do other things she had nothing to do with in her day, like singing in an indie band or work Search & Rescue after a mountain plane crash. But under those specifics ran the thread of similar character, the woman who busts through the artificial limits of her time and becomes something different than her peers. The hero, in fact, that all of us could become.
That became one of my key messages—women are heroes of their own lives, and they end up saving themselves by saving others.
My mother was a very early riser, as I am. When I visited after college, we’d often wake early before the weight of the day descended. I slept in a room off the kitchen in their last house, and I often heard her up around 5:30 a.m. She fell asleep early at night so mornings were about cleaning up any detritus from the evening meal, having her first cup of coffee, and making her endless scribbled lists on the backs of used envelopes. When I was a guest at home, many of those lists held things to talk with me about: questions about my first job, my new boyfriend, my life in California, where she’d never traveled.
If the exchange was mellow, if we had time before she felt she was on duty again, I could ask her about the war, about flying. About the planes she knew. The brutal routine of each day of those two years in the WASPs. I took notes for the novel, then in its early stages. But she remained a mystery, even then, usually tolerating only a little of my digging, becoming brisk and practical and moving on fast. A trait I’ve noticed with other pilots, some alertness to surroundings that is necessary in the air.
Before my first lesson, I found her student pilot handbook, copyright 1943. I read it like a favorite novel, each evening letting some of the information be absorbed so I wouldn’t sound completely ignorant with the instructor. Among those who fly, I’m learning, the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots rank up there with Amelia Earhart in legacy and contribution. The WASPs were finally honored with veteran status in November 1977 by President Carter, although this decision was opposed by the American Legion and veterans’ groups. Mom got a shiny medal in a velvet-lined case and limited benefits. Even though Hap Arnold, the general who backed the WASPs during the war, said they flew just as well as any man.
Do we all dig into our history to find material for our writing? Dan’s questions about key messages were the startle, the wakeup call, I required to see the connection between my ten years with this story and why I spent those years.
My key message, “Women are the heroes of their own lives and others’,” certainly applied to those female pilots in the war, even if they were not recognized as such for more than 30 years.
Dan also had me explore the subtext behind each key message. For women heroes, I came up with:
The heroine's journey might mean losing everything to find what you really need and want and love.
the downside of being a hero—and one of its fallacies—is the belief that we are better heroes when we handle everything ourselves, stay strong alone.
In the end, we can realize how we grow faster and become stronger when we risk opening ourselves to love. We overcome the fear of being vulnerable with others, as we grow into a truer awareness of heroism, willing to show weaknesses and fears.
My mom wasn’t without her flaws, of course, but I always saw her as a very loving person, devoted to her kids and her husband of many decades. So when I wrote these, I was not thinking about my mother at first. But now I see her, and so many other heroic women I know, in each statement. She did have a sense of being alone, not showing weakness. She did lose so much along the way. But she also had a good, satisfying life. She demonstrated, to me, the personal evolution of heroism in everyday life.
After she died, as this book neared publication, I explored more of her history as a WASP. I learned that only 1800 some women were accepted into the program and just over 1000 ended up graduating. There were 25,000 applicants. Mom had to apply twice; she was turned down the first try. She was already a commercial pilot with hundreds of flying hours but the competition was fierce.
“I loved the thrill of those chandelles,” she told an interviewer from the Library of Congress for a documentation on the WASPs. I imagined her combining the 180 degree turn with a climb high into the blue. Once she landed dead stick at LaGuardia after her plane’s engine caught fire. She was a squadron leader. A hero.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Read Dan’s explanation of key messages, why they are a potential opening to realizing the connections between your history and your writing.
Then, review my newsletter from May which I wrote on how your personal narrative and the book’s narrative intersect, to learn more about how to determine your key messages.
Finally, brainstorm on paper about the meaning and learning behind the facts and people on your literary stage. I spun my mother’s experiences into fiction, her history as a pilot taking root in me and making me want to write my three women narrators, even without my being aware of it. And now that I am, much more fully, I can develop those characters in a new, more realized way.
Here are two questions I’ve found helpful in this interior research:
What has your history done for you?
What is your book’s message to the world about what means the most to you? How can you develop that even further?