Calling Dr. Freud...

...or Novel Writing for Fun and Self-Analysis

by Donis Casey



Over the course of my novel-writing career, it has occurred to me to wonder about the psychology of those of us who create whole worlds on paper and populate them with characters who do exactly what we want them to do. Are we indulging in self-psychoanalysis without being totally aware of it? I’ve often pointed out that what readers say to me about my books tells me more about them than it does about the books. So I’d better admit that what I write says a lot about what’s going on in this unfathomable (to me) little brain of mine.

Things change in the course of a life, and what did the trick for you when you were younger may not fill the bill after a while, and time may come for a change. The one constant in my life has been the love of storytelling. I started writing short stories when I was very small. The first story I remember writing was about a girl who turned into a cat. It had pictures and everything. I was an English major in college, and have always been a prolific reader, but I always felt I had to be practical and concentrate on having a successful career, be self-sufficient, make a living. 
I surely did not want to end up like my mother, who drove herself crazy trying to be the epitome of a perfect 1950s wife and mother. So for the bulk of my life, my fiction writing was just for me.  I have a trunk full of short stories dating from the early 1960s, but  before I wrote my first mystery novel, all my published works consisted of professional articles, including a book on U.S. Government tax publications. I’m sure you remember. It was riveting.

I was always fairly successful at my various career endeavors, but I found none of them particularly fulfilling. It took me half a century to realize that maybe I really didn’t want to be a captain of industry or a leader of men. So the day came when I asked myself, Donis, what has always given you joy in your life?  And I had to admit that I’ve always been happiest when I was telling a story.

So I took a leap. I sold my business and went home to write. And interestingly, the book I decided to put my heart into was entirely different than anything I had ever written before. All the earlier books and stories I had written had to do with cool people, usually unmarried, childless professionals, often scientists, always intellectuals, mostly messed up and angst ridden.

But this time I wrote a historical mystery series set in rural Oklahoma at the turn of the 20th century, featuring a farm wife with a very large family: Alafair Tucker, who couldn’t care less about cool. How I conjured up this character I do not know, for she could not be less like me.  And yet she obviously is me to some extent, since she lives in my head.   

Am I wish-fulfilling? I don’t have the slightest desire to romanticize her lifestyle. It was tough.  Alafair lives the life I never did, or never could. I couldn’t abide it.  However, it seems I imbue her with all the virtues and strengths I do not have.  She knows what she knows and takes action.  Then once she has, she doesn’t second-guess herself.  I agonize over every decision and sometimes take no action at all.  She’s kind and tolerant of human weakness.  She takes care of everyone.  She’s patient with the follies of others.  Me: not so much. She’s a moderately well-adjusted mother of children, who doesn’t worry about her own shortcomings nor her place in the world, instead of what I am, which we won’t go into.

I never set out to deliver a message or make a statement when I write.  I just want to tell a ripping yarn. However, every time I finish an Alafair Tucker novel I do find myself wondering what Dr. Freud would say about the story.  Alafair is always much more successful at confronting her fears than I am. And she is never afraid to fail. She sticks herself out there.

For the first time in my fiction writing life, I created a character who isn’t hip or svelte or rich or independent or even particularly young. Or male. She goes against all conventional wisdom. Yet I had immediate success with Alafair’s first novel, The Old Buzzard Had it Coming.  Why it couldn’t have happened when I was young and thin and beautiful I don’t know, but we come to our authentic place in our own time, I guess.

Maybe I want to spend time with Alafair because she reminds me of some of the women in my past whom I loved, but didn’t fully appreciate at the time. She is funny, reflective, wise to ways of the world and the ways of kids, and a bit sad because of the losses in her life, like my own mother was.  She’s the center of her family, loving and giving to a fault, adored by her children, and a legendary cook, like my late mother-in-law.  With the best of motives, she’s all up in your business and can drive you crazy, too, like a relative of mine who shall remain nameless, lest she recognize herself (though she won’t. They never do.)

I may have created Alafair out of pieces of women I love, but she’s much more than the sum of her parts.  The great British mystery novelist Graham Greene said, “The moment comes when a character says or does something that you hadn't thought of.  At that moment, he’s alive and you leave it to him.”  I first put Alafair on the page, but then she stood up and walked away, and now I just follow where she leads. And what that tells me about myself I do not know.
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Donis Casey is the author of six Alafair Tucker Mysteries, including the recently released The Wrong Hill to Die On.  Donis has twice won the Arizona Book Award and has been a finalist for the Willa Award and the Oklahoma Book Award. Her first novel, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, was named an Oklahoma Centennial Book. She lives in Tempe, Arizona. Readers can enjoy the first chapter of each book on her web site at www.doniscasey.com.

The Stars Align... A Book Is Born

By Donis Casey, guest blogger


Did you ever wonder how an author comes up with story ideas? Sometimes the stars align...

I’m sitting in Pastimes Cafe in Enid, Oklahoma, with my husband Don and his sister Dolores.

It is October of 2006, and I’m on a book tour for Hornswoggled, the second novel in my Alafair Tucker historical mystery series. Enid is my husband’s home town, and I have been able to combine an event at the Garfield County Library with a visit to the relatives. Pastimes Cafe, one of Dolores’s favorites, is located in a refurbished old brick industrial building from the 1920s, and the walls are decorated with reproductions of historic photos of the town.

After a nice meal, the waitress brings the check, and Don and Dolores begin their time-honored fight over who is going to pay for our grilled cheeses. Dolores is the eldest of that brood of seven children, and Don is the youngest. In the decades that Don and I have been married, Dolores has never allowed her mother’s baby to drive all the way home for a visit just to pay for her lunch. Over the last several years, though, Don has decided that it is incumbent upon him to do the manly thing and pick up the check for his widowed sister.

I keep my mouth shut. During this particular check-wrestling episode, just about the time it begins to look like two Social Security recipients are going to end up rolling around in a tangle on the floor, I employ a technique I learned long ago. I detach from reality and enter a pleasant altered state until negotiations are completed.

I’m facing the wall, upon which is a large framed historic photograph of the Enid town square, taken in the middle of the 1910s. Still in my very special happy state, I’m drawn into the photo, and find myself standing on the sidewalk in the fall of 1915, looking down West Randolph Street. All of the shops along the street are covered with striped awnings, which provide a cooling shade for shoppers during pre-air-conditioned Oklahoma summers. An electrified trolley is paused forever in its tracks at the bottom of the picture. A young man in a straw boater stands on the corner, waiting to cross the street, as a woman with her arms full of packages emerges from Klein’s Department Store. Rather like a movie in which the opening scene dissolves from a static to a moving picture, the young woman begins to walk, and I realize that it’s Martha Tucker, Alafair’s eldest daughter. And right behind her comes Alafair herself, with her youngest, Grace, in her arms.

What is Alafair doing in Enid, I wonder? She and her husband and their ten children live on a farm outside of Boynton, Oklahoma, which is some 150 miles southeast of Enid. Perhaps she, too, is visiting relatives, and Martha and Grace have come with her. It’s early autumn, though, a bad time for a farmer’s wife to go gallivanting around. Something important must have brought her to town.

It could only be an imminent death in the family. Apparently a relative of Alafair’s lives here - her sister Ruth Ann, of course, since in my experience, people’s sisters live in Enid. People’s widowed sisters, so it must be her sister’s husband Lester who is dying. Yes, I believe Alafair is visiting her wealthy sister and her husband, who live in the huge 1905 Victorian mansion that Don and I walked by over on Elm Street that morning.

He must be an important businessman in town, this brother-in-law - a founding father, who made the Cherokee Strip Land Run in 1893. He must have quite a history, and some powerful enemies, like Buck Collins, who would love to do him harm even as he lay dying. And even rich and important and ruthless men love their wives and children, and might do shocking things to protect them.

There’s a murder here, I can smell it, and some deeply buried family secrets.

Don’s persistence has prevailed. He will pay the check, and Dolores will leave the tip. Another family ritual has been honored, and I have the germ of a new book.

It’s January of 2009, and I’m holding in my hand the hardcover first edition of The Sky Took Him. It’s a good thing that Alafair and her daughters happened to go to Enid. If they hadn’t, no one might have discovered what really happened to Ruth Ann’s son-in-law Kenneth, or why Martha won’t marry the man she loves, or why Lester has hated Buck Collins for more than twenty years.

Visit Donis's website at www.doniscasey.com for more information about the author and her books.