Write and Read What You Know – But Wish You Didn’t by Colleen L. Donnelly

Write and Read What You Know – But Wish You Didn’t

by guest author Colleen L Donnelly

 

I’ve claimed for years that if you run up against a dilemma and need an answer—read the Bible and watch Seinfeld. Whatever is bothering you will have been covered in one or the other. And after you’ve discovered and acted upon the answer you sought…yes or no to a particular proposal, do or don’t to exacting revenge, will or won’t keep a rendezvous, go or stay when going is warranted…and grit continues to grind in your soul, then it’s time to flesh the residue out on paper. Write it down…or find someone else who did.

For those who feel the inclination to write, scratch out every heartrending, unreasonable, furious elation which surfaces…and burn it. Or stuff the list under your mattress for your kids to gape at long after you’ve forgotten it was there. You might reconsider burning it. Or publish it, because some ancestor likely will when they go through your things someday. But publish it in the form of a novel, and let fictitious characters that your children and neighbors won’t recognize resolve what was unresolvable in your soul.

That worked for me, and for the like-suffering non-writers who devoured my books. My and their tangled webs began to clear after a series of novels which dealt with an adulterer amidst other rather prudish characters. Exhausted, and with souls bared, there at the bottom of the barrel lay the betrayed and a betrayer, their judgment hammered out by the characters in my books.

Using these stories to undo the undoable, my readers and I demanded a chance for the woman in my book who was accused of having an affair to be heard before her husband banned her from the home. We gasped when a music professor was murdered, presumably by his wife, because of suspected infidelity. We applauded for the young and emotionally abused housewife whose life changed with a single compliment from another man. And we tried to drag the young authoress away from her engagement to a solid man, when her heart belonged to another. Lastly we didn’t know whether to love or hate the embittered wife who always knew, but couldn’t prove, she wasn’t the love of her husband’s life.    

When you can’t open your mouth and say, “Ahhhhh,” and a doctor peer down your throat and exclaim, “Oh, there’s that nasty snag in your soul…hold on while I extract it,” then you need to go write or read a book. Characters are far more successful at unclogging what’s mired than we are, and they can do it in the privacy of your home where no one will ever gasp or know it was you.

Find Colleen’s books on Amazon:

Sonata Contineo   ~ Mine to Tell   ~ Asked For   ~ Love on a Train   ~ The Lady’s Arrangement  ~

Out of Splinters and Ashes    

 Tell us about your most recent book, Out of Splinters and Ashes.

My most recent publication, “Out of Splinters and Ashes” is a finalist for the Rone Award in historical fiction for its time period. This book centers around a supposed love affair between an American soldier/runner and a young German authoress just before WWII began. The book itself opens years later with the American soldier’s granddaughter and the German authoress’s grandson encountering and clashing with each other in their individual searches for the enemy their grandparent had been accused of loving. Both families have reputations to save, accusations to resolve, and dysfunctions to mend.

Cate is a runner. She prefers to help her fiancé run his New York senate race, but she finds herself running instead to fix what’s broken between her grandparents before he finds out—her grandmother has moved out of the family home, and her grandfather is accused of a pre-WWII relationship with a woman in Germany.

Dietrich is a German journalist with a spotless reputation. He prefers facts, but he finds himself lost in a world of fiction instead to prove his novelist grandmother couldn’t possibly have been the lover of a US runner in Berlin’s 1936 Olympics—especially when that runner’s granddaughter is Cate, a stubborn obstacle he should but can’t ignore.

Cate runs hard to cover up what Dietrich uncovers, until he shows her how it could have been—and how it could be again—that one can indeed love an enemy.

Tell us about your experience with the publishing process.

Colleen’s writing companion

Wannabe writers are told they will write five books before they finally create one good enough for traditional publishing. True to that saying, book numbers one through four of mine were rejected by traditional publishers, though number four was good enough I self-published it. Book number five, a Nanowrimo novel, was accepted immediately by The Wild Rose Press, resulting in a traditional contract. I have been publishing historical fiction with them ever since.

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And finally, an excerpt from Out of Splinters and Ashes…

Grandma was impossible to stop. She charged around me, into the room, flipping on a light as she did. “You can go now,” she barked at the soldier still holding the door. “This won’t take long.”

He nodded at Grandpa, then shut us in, us and the mirror.

I saw Amabile’s story all over again as Grandpa spotted the mirror, the deep-down flicker I’d noticed before, but brighter now. Grandma and I disappeared as time took him backwards, his face transforming from old and haggard to young and alive—then to terrified, and lastly to nothing, except guilt. Grandma didn’t raise the mirror as I expected her to, and shake it in his face. She let it hang in front of her, between them, the charred frame and lone lily all he could see.

I stared at the trembling finger that stretched and touched the blackened wood, scars this man probably deserved exposed at the cuff of his sleeve.

“I believe this is yours.” Grandma’s voice was low. I’d never seen them this close together before, never seen them face each other. But I’d seen the mirror between them forever without knowing it was there.