Author
Q & A
 Q: How did you go about changing
the story from romance to women’s fiction? (Heather
Heavey)
TW: I did a lot of craft work; I
wanted to avoid any more missteps if I could. One of
my biggest aids was Donald Maass’s Writing the
Breakout Novel, for the great thinking questions
he poses. It was through these exercises and others,
and simmering with the story for several months, that
I concocted some new story twists.
I also submerged myself in women’s fiction—a genre
I knew little about. I read books like Marsha Moyer’s The
Second Coming of Lucy Hatch and Barbara Samuel’s No
Place Like Home. I also read books like Sue Monk
Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, Anita Shreve’s Where
or When, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time
Traveler’s Wife. Each had romantic elements, but
also a more expansive story involving the female protagonist
and her family. Some of the novels ended happily, others
not so happily, but there was a salient strength in
each female protagonist’s character and her arc. I
liked that, I just wasn’t sure how to develop Maeve’s
story to get there. I finally realized that the solution
in Maeve’s case was to better explore her past with
Moira and change the dynamics of her family life; so
I altered history, made everything grittier.
I decided to write the story—at least the majority
of it—in first-person point of view. This distanced
me from the old draft, which had been written in third,
and also helped me get into Maeve’s head a bit more.
Maeve’s character became oddly elusive to me. When
the story had been a romance, I’d submitted it into
a contest—The Heart of Denver Romance Writers contest
called The Molly—and was named a finalist
for producing an Unsinkable Heroine. But something
happened when I started to write the story as women’s
fiction. I think in trying to make Maeve’s character
more serious, I made her lifeless; she came across
as a little depressed, even self-pitying—not that she
didn’t have reason, but she’d lost her unsinkable-heroine edge.
I didn’t find it again until I had her hack off her
hair and bleach it white. Transforming Maeve into a
warrior, someone who rebelled against her grief, made
all the difference in resurrecting her spirit.
I removed Noel from the first part of the story entirely.
It was just too easy to slip into “romance mode” when
he was around—sexy, half-Brit that he is—and I needed
to concentrate on establishing Maeve’s story and her
central conflicts. What I learned is that in women’s
fiction, the female is both the hero and heroine of
her story. It was critical not to lose sight of that.
In the end, I don’t think any character remained the
same. It’s hard to pinpoint why everyone changed so
drastically. Maybe it’s because when you’re writing
romance, you’re writing escapist fiction. It can be
dark, but ultimately it’s uplifting, romantic and idealistic.
It’s Cinderella and the Prince. When you’re writing
women’s fiction, you write without the rose-colored
glasses and crystal slippers. It can still be romantic
and contain a love story, but there may or may not
be a happily ever after; the emotional connections
between people and their behaviors with one another
should bleed authenticity—at least, that’s what I was
aiming for.
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