Volume 2, Issue 1 – February 1999
Patricia McLinn: the Lure of the West
Patricia McLinn believes that books happen when characters try to change the set course of their lives. To a certain extent, the same may be said about her transition from newspaper writer and editor to romance novelist. Of course, spending weeks chipping away at multiple layers of wallpaper and paint did play a big role in her personal change.
Crescent Blues talked to McLinn about the transitions in her life, her love for the American west and the novels that are making her a writer to watch.
Crescent Blues: Although you’re an Illinois native living in northern Virginia, most of your novels are set in the West. What makes Wyoming such an attractive setting for romance?
Patricia McLinn: Writing about Wyoming came as a surprise to me. My first five books were set in areas I knew from personal experience or long-standing family connections — southern Wisconsin; Gloucester, Mass., Chicago, Washington, D.C.
Then, a free airline ticket and a whim took me to Sheridan, Wyo, I’d never felt any particular affinity with the west before that — my interest in history centered on the Colonial and Revolutionary War eras. But for reasons I still can’t fully explain, Wyoming and Montana grabbed my imagination on that trip.
I had a story idea about a woman choosing a ranch in Wyoming as the stage for trying to make over herself and her life, and that became my first romance set in Wyoming, Not a Family Man. Since then I’ve been back four times and set four more Special Editions — along with the upcoming Children of the Far Hills series — and my first historical in that area.
The West — and Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains in particular — has become almost a recurring character for me. One of the lures of Wyoming as a setting is the “Big Sky” (borrowing neighboring Montana’s motto). There is a sense there of being exposed to the sky, and scoured by the wind that reveals a character’s skeleton.
I’ve noticed a tendency in my western books to have one of the lead characters be an outsider or newcomer and the other being a native. I like letting these people see this spectacular setting through each other’s eyes, and in doing so seeing each other more clearly.
How much do you find yourself influenced by the classic western archetypes, such as the cowboy loner? How much do you find yourself “playing against” these types?
The short answer is I don’t really know. Certainly the archetypes are rattling around in my subconscious from Shane and High Noon to Bonanza and The Big Valley. But I’ve also become friends with a number of Wyoming residents and have spent some time on several ranches (as well as doing a whole lot of nonfiction reading about the area’s past and present), and no one could miss the individuality of the people there.
One thing I have noticed about many people I’ve met out there is a tendency to be comfortable with who and what they are. If they match any archetype it’s because the archetype fit them, not because they conformed themselves to an archetype!
To be true to that region, even if a character touches elements of an archetype, he or she must be an individual.
What is your strategy for getting the accent and patterns of speech right?
A background in journalism has helped train my ear for rhythms and expressions — I just wish my memory was better. [Grins] In addition to trips to the area, reading and research phone calls, I have a “ranching consultant” — a friend I talk to regularly and frequently ask about phrases and wording.
What qualities appeal to you most in a hero or heroine?
I like to deal with heroes and heroines who have great strengths such as self-reliance, honesty, reliability, loyalty, etc., that can lead to blind-spots or can be taken too far. I can’t think of any of my characters who have made 180-degree changes in core characteristics during a book. Instead, they generally edge closer to a balanced position by book’s end.
Specific qualities? That’s harder — self-deprecating humor, perhaps. A measure of common sense. A strong personal code of ethics/morality. Another quality almost all my heroes and heroines share is a failure to see themselves as clearly (or think of themselves as highly) as others do.
Has there ever been a supporting character you wish you could’ve developed more?
Absolutely. I have stories in mind for quite a few secondary characters. I’d like to do the story of Boone’s sister from the Bardville, Wyo., series; Paul’s sister from A Prelude to a Wedding, Cahill’s brother Kiernan from A New World, as well as Eleanor’s cousin from that book.
How does reader input affect the development of a series or its characters?
First, without reader interest, there would be no series. [Grins.] Reader interest certainly helped turn my “Wedding Duet” — A Prelude to a Wedding and Wedding Party — into a “Wedding Trilogy” with the addition of Grady’s Wedding. And I’ve had readers ask for the stories of several characters who have appeared in other books. I’d love to follow up on those suggestions, but the editors have the final say.
How long does it usually take between the time you submit a completed manuscript and the time the printed book hits the bookstore shelves?
About a year.
Are you ever tempted to “do over” a character from a book you’ve been reading in order to “do it right?”
Most often, characters start talking in my head as themselves right from the start. I discover more and more of their secrets in the writing process, but each character has an individuality from that first moment. I don’t think I could take someone else’s character and try to make that character over. The only experience I’ve had at all like that was with a movie, which struck me as not having the right story for the character. I started writing something with the intention of giving that character the right story for him — and then discovered neither the character or the story was exactly as I’d envisioned.
What’s your method for composing a novel? Do you follow any of the standard plotting and characterization strategies?
Once, after I described to a writing class how I write, the teacher looked at her students and said, “Don’t even consider doing it that way.” As you might guess from that, I do not follow any standard plotting or characterization strategies. No charts, no bios, no outlines, no color-coded
notecards.
As I mentioned before, most of my books started with the characters talking in my head. It’s rather like eavesdropping on people in a restaurant. (Everybody does eavesdrop in restaurants, don’t they?) Then, like getting to know new friends, I find out bits and pieces about the characters, some here, some there, rarely in chronological order.
So, I write whatever I know, whichever scene is clear in my head, whatever dialogue comes rolling out. After jumping around like this for an unpredictable amount of time, I have a mass of scenes, snippets and ideas strung together. I have to step back and look for the beginning, middle and end.
At this point I almost always consult a book called Making a Good Script Great by Linda Seger, which, for me, is the clearest delineation of dramatic structure. I check my strung-together mass against that structure, sharpening the turning points and checking that the characters change in a believable, interesting arc.
How can a writer determine what is the best writing strategy for him or her?
The best writing strategy is the one that works at that moment. There’s no guarantee it will work for the next book or even the next scene — at least for me. Some writers seem to find a method that works for them and are able to rely on it. For me, each individual set of characters, each individual story requires an individual approach. I’ve tried to be more methodical about my writing — for example, starting at the beginning [grins] — and it stopped me dead. It dawned on me that writing my way was greatly preferable to not writing at all.
Your bio mentions that you’ve been a journalist and an editor. What were some of the newspapers and other periodicals?
After graduating from Northwestern, I was a sportswriter for the Rockford Morning Star and Rockford Register Republic in Rockford, Ill. I was so green when I started there that I didn’t know what time to leave my first day of work! Some of the people I worked with there remain among my dearest friends.
But after living all my life in Northern Illinois, a winter with back-to-back blizzards had me applying to papers south of the Mason-Dixon line. I received a tremendous education at The Charlotte Observer (N.C.), with another crew of talented, terrific people. I took a job there as a copy editor in the sports department and was assistant sports editor when I left to come to The Washington Post. I now work part-time as an editor in the Post operation of the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.
How did your experiences as a journalist and an editor shape the way you write fiction?
As an editor you’re often juggling several stories, forced to pick up one and drop another by a question or a phone call or art requirements or deadlines or a thousand other reasons. I suspect that is part of the explanation for why I write the way I do.
I also tend to work on several projects at once, trading off on them to stay fresh. I’m sure my journalistic experience of keeping several trains of thought on track simultaneously has helped there, too. In addition, I feel certain that being an editor of other writing has both made me a better technical writer and a more stringent self-editor — not a perfect self-editor by any means, but better.
How did Patricia McLaughlin, journalist, become Patricia McLinn, novelist? What prompted the name change?
The dream of writing novels came first. In fact, my undergraduate major was “English composition.” You might have noticed there are not a lot of job want ads looking for English composition majors. So journalism was a bow to practicality.
After establishing my journalism career, the urge to write resurfaced. I took a pseudonym at the publishers request. However, I’ve found it provides an advantage, because it indicates whether someone is approaching my writing persona or my newspaper persona.
When you decided the time had come to write your first novel, why did you choose to write a romance?
The question makes it sound as if I had a master plan, and I can’t make that claim.
What really happened was I had bought a then 40-year-old house with three and sometimes four layers of wallpaper with paint over each layer on every wall in the house. As I was laboriously chipping wallpaper off plaster walls bit by bit, a story idea started bugging me.
It kept growing as I wrote until it became book length. It sprawled across several genres and I made about every beginner mistake possible in writing it as well as submitting it. But two of the three professionals who responded suggested I try romance. I had read very little romance growing up, so I dove into reading them.
In six weeks, I covered about 20 years of romance writing in roughly chronological order. By the time I’d reached writers such as Jennifer Green and Kathleen Eagle, I knew I wanted to write romance. Any time I’d get stuck writing, I had to go back to chipping the wallpaper, and let me tell you, old wallpaper dust can sure rouse the muse!
What do you find most appealing about the genre?
“Most” should only be one, since it’s a superlative (there’s the editor in me coming out [grins]), but I need at least two. I find the focus on characters’ emotional lives extremely appealing. Emotions are both universal and infinitely variable — boy, if that’s not fodder for a writer, I don’t know what is.
I also find the hopefulness of the romance genre appealing. By that I don’t mean a “happily ever after” ending, but the idea that romance characters, troubled as they might be, are not likely to sit in a corner and wring their hands while moaning “Woe is me.” They are much more likely to work on their problems, to strive, to grow.
Those are the kind of people and the kind of characters I want to spend my time on. If you’ll allow some paraphrasing here… I heard the esteemed actress Jessica Tandy say in an interview once that she wanted to make the kind of movies that would leave viewers feeling glad to be a member of the human race. The romance genre can give readers that feeling.
What do you find the most difficult aspect about writing in this area?
That’s a very interesting question, because it’s made me realize I don’t have a good answer. The difficulties I have are more struggling with the process, which I don’t think would change with another genre. Hmmm… that one’s going to roll around in my head for a while.
Would you like to branch out into other genres?
In addition to romance? Yes. But if you mean in place of romance, no. Romance, as a genre focused on human relationships has incredible potential for fascinating stories.
Widow Woman is your first published historical. What inspired you to make the shift from contemporary romances to a historical?
I’ve been fascinated by history all my life, so writing a historical was always a goal. The surprise to me was that instead of my historical ideas being set in the Colonial or Revolutionary War era, which I’ve studied for years, stories from the American West have grabbed my imagination, requiring research from scratch.
Can we expect more historicals in the future?
I certainly hope so. I have quite a few more ideas, including one with my editor at Harlequin Historicals right now. Maybe if everyone clapped their hands, The Virtuous Jezebel would get to live, just like Tinkerbell.
Can you tell us something about The Children of the Far Hills, the series premiering in late 1999? Where is the series set?
The series is set on a fictional Wyoming cattle ranch that sweeps from the sides of the Big Horn Mountains east. Far Hills Ranch was established in the early 1880s by a ruthless man name Charles Susland.
In building his ranching empire, Susland cast aside an Indian wife and their children in order to marry a wealthy white woman who he hoped would give him sons to create a dynasty. When his dying Indian wife begged him to save the last of their children, Susland turned his back, and earned Leaping Star’s curse on him and Far Hills.
Over the generations, as money failed to cushion the Suslands from disease, madness and tragedy, the legend of the curse has grown. But the legend also says the curse can be lifted… with the help of true love. Except, time is running out….
Now, the remaining descendants of Charles Susland represent the last chance to lift the three elements of the curse under the legend — being alone, being homeless and being lost. But to do that, and to lift the curse, they must find a love true enough to right Charles Susland’s wrongs.
The series opens with Charles’ great-great-granddaughter Kendra Jenner and Daniel Delligatti. They touched each other’s hearts when they though they might die, and in the process created a son, but is that enough to build a life on? Book two centers on Kendra’s cousin and another Susland descendant, Col. John “Grif” Griffin Jr. Once the best of friends, Grif and Ellyn Sinclair need forgiveness to reconcile — and courage to explore the emotions they’ve hidden from each other and themselves for so long.
The third element of the curse falls to Far Hills Ranch foreman Luke Chandler and newcomer Rebecca Dahlgren. They are opposites in every way but two — their mutual attraction and the separate secrets from the past that threaten their future.
This too will be something of a departure, dealing with legends and righting “old wrongs.” Are western legends an area you’d like to explore further?
I do like the idea of having the past echo in the present. Not only the individual characters’ pasts, but their families’ pasts and the region’s past. The past is the flow of water carving out the riverbed of the present. We can change the course of the river, but it takes a concerted effort or a natural upheaval or both.
That’s when books usually happen — when characters are trying to change the course of their lives that the past had set out for them. As for legends, whether I’ve heard them or they come out of my head, they certainly are a wonderful springboard for that ever-changing leap of “what if.”
Jean Marie Ward
In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including “Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, is scheduled to be released by Samhain Publishing in late 2006..