Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

The Lightbulb Moment Remembered

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I’ve mentioned before how a major turning point in the process of writing Land of Hills and Valleys (which stretched out over many years, as this post from all the way back in 2011 testifies) was the decision to switch from writing it in third-person to first-person—specifically, in a narrative style inspired by Mary Stewart’s classic romantic suspense novels. However, after the passing of a few years, exactly when and how I got the idea had become hazy in my memory. But one night recently I was looking through my old journals for some notes for an unfinished story, and I stumbled across the very entry where I recorded having that idea (from July 2017):

Read Mary Stewart’s “Wildfire at Midnight” over the last two days, and though I don’t think it’s one of her best, it gave me an unexpected lightbulb moment today: I decided if I do rewrite [Land of Hills and Valleys] one of these days, I’m going to do it in Lena’s first-person POV. I looked at my outline and it actually works. I just need to trim a few scenes involving minor characters where she isn’t present, and have her present at all the big climactic scenes. Which really makes better sense, as she’s the protagonist after all.

As matter-of-fact as that. I find it a bit funny that the idea was actually inspired by reading one of my least favorite Stewarts—that part I hadn’t remembered. Of course I still had plenty of actual work to do on the book ahead of me at this point, but this was definitely the epiphany that got me onto the right track!

image: “Peaceful Morning on the Range” by C.M. Dudash

From the Archives: The Interrupted Party

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There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium’s capital had gathered then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men.
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell;
But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

~ Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto III, verse XXI

I don’t know how old I was when I first read that poem, but I know that the whole “Eve of Waterloo” passage has had a strong hold on my imagination ever since. When I was a teenager it was a major inspiration for scenes in a Civil War epic that never actually ended up getting written (with Culpeper and Brandy Station standing in for Brussels and Waterloo). Something about its image of gaiety interrupted by the threat of danger, romance threatened with impending doom, evokes a sense of drama and poignancy that’s hard to summarize. (Do read the whole passage; it’s well worth it.) And eventually, this passage also helped me to recognize a plot device—perhaps something that could even be called a trope—that I’d absently noted recurring across the works of one particular film director: what I’ve come to call the Interrupted Party.

Classic-movie enthusiasts probably know this: if there is a dinner, dance or party in a John Ford film, chances are one of two things will happen: (A) a serenade, or (B) an interruption, in the form of a battle, bad news, or an unexpected arrival. Wee Willie Winkie, The Searchers, Wagon Master, Drums Along the Mohawk: one interruption apiece. They Were Expendable: one serenade and one interruption. Fort Apache: one serenade and two interruptions (I think that might be the record). Rio Grande: two serenades and two incidents that feel like interruptions, even though they technically take place after the party’s over and everyone’s gone home. The Grapes of Wrath has an attempted interruption; How Green Was My Valley a couple of quasi-interruptions (an unexpected guest arriving at one party, an argument among the guests at another). If a punch thrown at a wedding reception counts as an interruption, The Quiet Man has one too.

At about this point, I started getting the feeling that somebody thought this was a good idea.

If you think about it a little more you realize this is a recurring device across films and stories in general; Ford films just seemed to refine it into a kind of art. For a famous non-Ford example, take the Twelve Oaks barbecue in Gone With the Wind, which ends with the men pouring out of the house to join the army at news of the Civil War’s beginning. Or the serenity of Lady Ludlow’s garden party in Cranford shattered by the news that THE RAILROAD IS COMING. B-Western scriptwriters caught onto it too: off the top of my head, I can think of at least twenty B-Westerns where a celebration of some kind is interrupted by a hold-up, bank robbery, cattle-rustling, horse-theft, fistfight, or some other knavery. B-Western screenwriting is plot scraped down to its barest framework, free of additional layers like character development, motivation or emotion (or at least only utilizes them in a superficial degree). But you can still build excitement and humor off that framework, which is what the best examples of the genre do well. And the writers knew the value of an interrupted party.

So I started considering: what are the benefits to a story? I came up with a couple ideas of my own. First, a celebration of some kind gathers all or most of your story’s cast together in one place. Whatever the interruption is, everyone is there to learn of it, react to it, maybe discuss it; you can choose anyone you like to take part in the reaction or discussion. If it’s an important event, it’s a catalyst for everybody.

Second—and I think this is more important—it creates a dramatic mood shift. It emphasizes the significance, and possibly the wrongness, of whatever is interrupting. It’s a bit like what P.D. James observed in Talking About Detective Fiction (I am paraphrasing dramatically here), that one body in a country library automatically makes the crime more shocking than a dozen crimes in a big-city alleyway—because it’s incongruous, it’s out of place. Isn’t it more of a shock to have a battle or bad news put an abrupt end to gaiety than to have it come when everyone is already sobered or on edge with expecting it?

I wonder in which medium it’s easier to create the necessary atmosphere of gaiety, and then pull off that mood shift—fiction or film? I honestly think it can be done in either, though it may be a little more obvious and require less effort in film. But let’s not forget that Byron produced that breathtaking original example with simply words on paper.

It was a minor epiphany to realize that I’d actually been using this device myself without even trying—the unpublished novel I was working on at the time I made these observations had a perfect example of an Interrupted Party right smack in the middle of it. Land of Hills and Valleys also features an absolutely classic Interrupted Party as the climax to Part I, which, if my memory serves me right, dates back to the original draft of the story around thirteen years ago. And to bring things full circle, I actually used lines from “The Eve of Waterloo” as the chapter epigraph, something I’d been longing to do for years. I’m still tickled by the way they fit every time I look at the page.

What are your favorite examples of an interrupted party in fiction or film? If you’re a writer, have you written this kind of scene yourself?

This is a slightly revised version of a post originally from 2015.

Three Characters in Search of a Christmas Tree

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Way back in the murky mists of time—that is to say, in my 2009 NaNoWriMo draft of what eventually became Land of Hills and Valleys—there were some unfinished Christmas scenes, including one where several characters went to cut down a Christmas tree. Since it didn’t advance the story at all, I didn’t include it in the rewritten version of the manuscript. This month, I thought it might be fun to dig out that unused scene and polish it up enough to share as an “outtake.” It wasn’t exactly good enough for that (I must say, it’s reassuring to see how much my writing has improved in twelve years), but I ended up taking the idea and a few lines from the original scene and wrote a couple of pages based off it.

It’s fairly different from the fragment in the old draft—Tony was originally in the scene too, and I decided to leave out some dialogue which I’d repurposed for a different scene in the finished novel. Chronologically, this would come around the beginning of Chapter 12 in Land of Hills and Valleys, and there are no spoilers for the novel in it. As far as story goes, it’s pure and total fluff, but I thought you might enjoy it:

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As Christmas drew closer I found myself harboring a nonsensical but potent longing: I wanted a Christmas tree. It didn’t make any sense, since I’d been invited to celebrate with the Stevensons. I was the only person in the house; there wouldn’t be anyone else to open gifts beside it on Christmas morning—no family to gather around it. But I wanted one all the same. I kept remembering how the Drapers’ big staid brick house, never very homelike at most times, seemed lit up by the big glowing tree in their parlor every December, and how it lent an extra touch of life and brightness to the faces and voices of the friends and relatives who gathered however briefly about it. Then I would look around the weather-beaten little ranch house and find it a bit bare and lonely on the short winter afternoons, marooned amid a white sea of great sweeping snowdrifts. A tree of any kind would make it seem more like a home.

I couldn’t go and cut one down by myself, but I still couldn’t bring myself to ask any of my ranch hands, even—or perhaps especially?—Ray. I was sure I’d see a smile or the twinkle of an eye that was entirely obliging but indulgent—I couldn’t bear to have anyone else see my silly little dream for exactly what it was.

I stalled self-consciously until we were into the week before Christmas, and then finally decided to ask Lane. I knew that even if he thought I was silly he would try not to show it, and would probably end up convincing himself that it made perfect sense. [Read more…]