What does David Burnett want us to know about him?
Can
you tell us about The Handfasting?
Katherine and
Steven meet in the summer of 1967. Katherine has just graduated from high
school, and they are both spending the summer traveling around the UK. They
fall in love and are handfasted – a Celtic engagement ceremony – in the old Bellerose
Abbey church.
Steven is going on
to Italy to study art; perhaps he will go to grad school. Katherine has college
ahead, then med school. They know that they cannot be together, now, but Steven
promises to find her – in ten years when both have completed school. As they
kneel in the abbey Steven reaches toward a rose bush that is growing in the
ruins and caresses one of the yellow flowers. “Whenever you see a yellow rose,”
he tells her, “remember that I love you.”
In the next ten years, Katherine finishes college,
completes med school, and becomes a doctor. For a decade, she has waited,
hoped, and prayed that Steven would keep his promise. On her birthday she finds
a vase of yellow roses when she reaches home. They meet for dinner, fall in
love again, and give themselves six months – until Valentine’s Day as it turns
out – to be certain that they still want to marry.
Stephen, though, is not Katherine's only suitor. Bill
Wilson has known her since they were in high school. He has long planned to wed
her, and when Steven appears Bill realizes that he must finally stake his
claim. His methods leave a lot to be desired, the conflict turns violent, and
Katherine must choose which future that she wants.
Happy Ever After or Happy For
Now? Why?
It’s hard to say. In The
Handfasting, “happy ever after” is in doubt from the beginning. Katherine
and Steven pledge their love to each other even though they know they will be
apart for a long time. Steven promises to find her, but can he? Will he? If he is able to find her, will their love
survive the separation? Or subsequent events? Will they still be in love o Valentine’s
Day? Bad things do happen. People change. Circumstances change. Even if a book
has a happy ending, it may only be “happy for now.” Perhaps this is why we need
sequels.
How
much of yourself is hidden in the characters in your books?
I appear in my
books in a variety of ways.
Occasionally,
events in my books are based on my experiences. In The Handfasting, for example, when Katherine and Steven walk
through town, going to the abbey to be handfasted, their route mirrored the one
I took one evening through the town of Melrose, Scotland. Like them, I was
going to the abbey. While they counted on finding the abbey shrouded in
darkness so that they would not be seen, I was hoping to find it illuminated,
so that I could take photographs. Katherine and Steven would have been pleased
the night that I visited!
Sometimes,
characters in my books are modeled on people I know. My wife insisted, for a
while that a character in my first book, The
Reunion, was modeled on her. She was half-right. In The Handfasting, Mrs., Howard, the matriarch of Hamilton, Virginia,
an older woman who takes pleasure in destroying young women’s reputations, was
based in part on one of my mother’s friends. We have all known people like Bill
Wilson: self-absorbed, self- righteous, only out for number one.
Typically, the
principle male character, in my books has qualities that I have or that I would
like to have. In The Handfasting, for
example, Steven reacts to events in much the way I believe I would react in
similar situations.
Describe yourself in five
words…
Writer,
photographer, traveler, teacher, baker
(In your humble opinion) best and worst book to movie adaptations…
Best: The first
four Harry Potter movies.-They followed the books almost perfectly and made the
text come alive.
Worst: Hunger Games – If I had not read the
book, I would have had no idea what was happening in the movie.
Do you have specific
techniques you use to develop the plot and stay on track?
I use a general
outline based on one suggested by Allan Watt in his book, The Ninety Day Novel.
I begin with an inciting incident that motivates the
remainder of the story. In The
Handfasting, that incident takes place in the ruins of the abbey, when
Katherine and Steven are handfasted, engaged to be married. As they pledge
their love to each other, they realize that they will be apart for the next
decade, and Steven promises to find Katherine when they both have finished
school. A very different story would have developed if, for example, instead of
returning to their hotel, they had next gone in search of a priest.
Following the inciting incident, the story consists of alternating
moves by the hero and a protagonist. The hero makes a decision; experiences
some success or happiness, the protagonist responds, and conflict ensues.
Ultimately, the hero makes a decision from which he cannot retreat. A showdown
occurs, and a resolution of some type is achieved.
If you were a character in
your book you would be…
Steven, of course.
As one reviewer noted: “Dr.
Steven Richardson….hmmm I am not sure how to put this but in my head he is hot
hot hot and I want him to have a British accent so very bad even though I am
sure he doesn’t since he was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. When he
originally reaches out to Katherine with the yellow roses, and then gives her
the necklace as a birthday present, I fell for him myself.”
Steven is the type
of person I would like to imagine that I am. He is smart. He has a PhD from
Oxford and has written several books. He has a glamorous job, curator at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is a good
person. He loves Katherine in spite of everything that happens to her and in
spite of the way that she treats him. He has good sense. You know that he would
like to beat Bill Wilson to a pulp, but he chooses more acceptable ways to deal
with him.
Time for favourite: song,
color, book, TV series, movie, food, drink…
Color: Blue - I
wear blue shirts and suits, drive a blue car, and carry a blue duffle bag. Our
cat has blue eyes, and her name is Bonnie Blue.
TV series: Castle,
NCIS, Criminal Minds, Black List (See a pattern?) Downton Abbey
Food: Shrimp –
boiled, fried, grilled, sautéed, broiled, gumbo, baked…
Drink: Starbucks
Misto (honestly)
Song: You Were Mine by the Dixie Chicks
Book: There are so
many good books. Among my recent favorites are He Belongs to Me by Theresa Rizzo, When You Went Away by Michael Baron, and Rose Garden by Susannah Kearsley
How (or when) do you
decide that you are finished writing a story?
The story ends
when the conflict has a satisfactory resolution. Note that satisfactory endings
are not always happy endings. Last fall, in a post on Story Addict, I
differentiated between the two (fb.me/1lYgfifuC). A happy ending occurs when the central character
obtains what he wants. A satisfactory ending occurs when he obtains what he
needs. In the post,
In the post, I
cite the motion picture, The Titanic.
In the story, Rose wants to run away
with Jack. What she really needs is
freedom – freedom from her family, her fiancé, from the constraints that
society had placed on her, and it seems as if Jack offers her a way to obtain
that freedom. Jack dies as the ship sinks, but Rose is free. The ending is not
happy, but it is satisfactory.
What are you working on
right now?
To Love Again is the tentative title of my next novel. Drew and Amy
have both lost spouses. Both are in their mid-fifties, and find themselves
alone for the first time in three decades. Drew’s wife, Di, died of cancer.
Amy’s husband, Jack, died in an airplane crash the day Amy filed for a divorce.
They meet as they
return from vacations and, over time, they fall in love. However, they come
from very different backgrounds. Neither all of their friends nor all of their
children support the developing relationship. Drew is still deeply in love with
Di, and Amy is consumed with bitterness toward Jack. As the relationship
progresses, actions of their friends and acquaintances, their families, and
their former spouses converge, some pushing them apart, others bringing them
together. Drew and Amy are forced to decide whether they really want to love
again, or whether, as Drew says at one point, “I had my chance for love and I
made the best of it. I will have to be happy with my memories.”
The good guy, the bad boy
and the right guy…could they be one and the same?
Too often, we
perceive people as one-dimensional: the good guy cannot be the bad boy. Almost
everyone, however, has the capacity both good and evil. We seldom find a saint
and we seldom find a devil. So, yes, the bad boy may be the good guy, and he
may be the right guy, too.
The old adage “Write about
what you know”
Well, you can’t
write what you don’t know!
I can, of course,
write about people, places, and events that I have never known or experienced.
Research can provide the factual information you need. Research, though, cannot
give me an understanding of the feelings, the motivations, and the goals of my
characters. These must be experienced – they must be known - if they are to be
written convincingly. I must have known love to write a love story. I must have
experienced joy, hatred, or fear if I am to write characters who experience
joy, hatred, or fear.
It is the
character’s emotions that must have been experienced, not the character’s life.
It is not necessary, for one’s spouse to have died in order to write about the
death of a character’s spouse. What is necessary is to have experienced a
significant loss. The writer may have lost a spouse to divorce. The writer may
have lost a parent, a child, a home, a dream. Unless the writer knows loss, he
has no idea where to begin to portray his character’s feeling.
