{"id":10724,"date":"2023-11-15T08:26:59","date_gmt":"2023-11-15T13:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10724"},"modified":"2023-11-15T08:26:59","modified_gmt":"2023-11-15T13:26:59","slug":"ask-an-author-melissa-pritchard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10724","title":{"rendered":"Ask an Author: Melissa Pritchard"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In an interview a few years back, award-winning author Melissa Pritchard<\/a> talked about how she had finally gotten over her hesitation to write about herself and how to put her own experiences\u2014though in exaggerated or embellished form\u2014in her works, in order to achieve a literary effect. It sounds like a brave development, to expose your true self in that way, but also risky in the hands of a less expert author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I write a story with a female protagonist, I take care not to model her too much on me, because when I do, I tend to make her \u201ctoo perfect\u201d\u2014always saying the right thing, living up to expectations (as I would like to do myself; if only). Characters need flaws just like those real people have. It takes experience for an author to come up with characters that are both deeply felt and independently real. Some not-very-good books seem to be less an exploration of character and more an exercise in wish fulfillment, with the author as hero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naturally, the sum of all an author\u2019s experiences are present in the imagination like a smorgasbord to pick a little from here and a big serving of there, and the resulting story reflects those fractured bits of reality. But that\u2019s very different from writing a story in which the central character is a (much smarter, slimmer, younger) stand-in for one\u2019s self.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My series of four short stories about young Japanese American newspaper reporter Brianna Yamato are set in Sweetwater, Texas. The Sweetwater in these stories, to the extent it reflects the real town, is a simulacrum of what it was sixty years ago, when I would visit my aunt and uncle who lived there. Brianna is so different from me, in age and cultural background that I can safely write those stories in first person. My \u201cI\u2019s\u201d won\u2019t get crossed. And she\u2019s feisty. She stands up to the Texas Old Boys Club in a way I never would have! Definitely not me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pritchard says that when she\u2019s starting a new story, she tries first, second (tough), and third person voices to see which best speaks to her. She relies \u201con an internal ripple of intuition that manifests physically as a kind of charge in my solar plexus.\u201d When it\u2019s right, it feels right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She describes how in a story of mothers and daughters\u2014potentially fraught territory there\u2014a conventional approach just wasn\u2019t working. It wasn\u2019t getting her \u201cto the emotionally dangerous point I needed to get to.\u201d This story, \u201cRevelations of Child Love,\u201d was eventually told as a series of sixteen confessions and she needed that right voice and form to \u201ccarry the charge and danger the story needed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes, she says, it takes a couple of drafts to find the danger point. When she\u2019s not sure what danger point she\u2019s aiming for, she asks herself what secret she\u2019s keeping from herself. That\u2019s where she\u2019s trying (as a writer) to go and not succeeding. She advises her students to look for those secrets too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such probing can be hard and difficult work, and I wouldn\u2019t say I\u2019m especially successful at it. For me, it takes time. In this context, though, I\u2019ve been thinking about a short story I recently finished that took an unexpected turn at the end. I thought it was a kind of horror-story adventure, but realized later it was about trust. How for one character, trust is established, and for the other, it\u2019s destroyed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melissa Pritchard has taught at Arizona State University and currently lives in Columbus, Georgia. She\u2019s won a great many awards as the author of four short story collections, including The Odditorium<\/em><\/a> (love the title!) and five novels. Her new novel, Flight of the Wild Swan<\/em>, will be published next March.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an interview a few years back, award-winning author Melissa Pritchard talked about how she had finally gotten over her hesitation to write about herself and how to put her own experiences\u2014though in exaggerated or embellished form\u2014in her works, in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Do you start to have doubts when a story seems to be about the author, not the character? Picking a voice. ","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,61,40,174,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-character","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2MY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10724"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10726,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10724\/revisions\/10726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}