Liz Doran, author of Beechwood: I do love the sound of the clickety clack of my fingers upon the keys . . .
I’ve heard it said that we should write the book we want to read. We can also write the book you want to experience. I like a good supernatural thriller. I also like the idea of moving to a new place and renovating it.
I’ve based Beechwood, the title of my newest novel, on one of the grand houses outside the town in which I grew up. It’s one of the tourist attractions near my home town with well-kept grounds. While the original house no longer exists, the historical hunting lodge from the eighteenth century does. It’s close to a lake and surrounded by fields and forest and so I decided it would be the perfect house for my fictional character to buy.
I was visiting my father’s grave a few years ago and noticed that one of the previous owners, who had lived in Beechwood up until the 1970s at least, was buried at the foot of my father’s grave. That was what sparked off the idea. I think there was a little poem on his headstone as he apparently had written a book of poetry.
Seeing that planted the seed and sometimes you just start writing and watch it grow. Unless you’re a plotter and sit and meticulously plot your book before putting a word to paper.
My Beechwood
This particular house has an interesting history. The Lord of Rochford, who built the house in the eighteenth century, locked up his young wife in Gaulstone House, which as I mentioned is long gone. However, since the hunting lodge is still there, I used it as my Beechwood.
A lot of writing involved cutting out the things that don’t work. Kill your darlings as Stephen King advises. Sometimes our darlings are characters, whereas at other times they are lines, paragraphs, or even chapters.
Once I had the seed, I had to create a believable scenario. How did my character have the means to buy the house? Why was it on the market and where did she come from? Originally, I created a much more complicated backstory, which I had to subtly weave into the narrative, but it didn’t sit right with me and that was one of the first darlings I had to kill. I also loved the original title I created for the book, The Jealous Wall, but someone advised I change that and so I did.
Beechwood, the fictional name I gave to the house, was built by the Earl of Rochford in the mid eighteenth century. He also built a folly separating his house from that of his brother’s and everybody knows that folly by The Jealous Wall. It seemed obvious as I wrote the story and referred back to shadows of the past, jealousy and intrigue continued to play a role in my fictional story. I was weaving in considerations about past lives, ghosts, impressions, imagination, and the past coming back to haunt a place in which extreme evil or strong emotions resided.
Initially, I had my character find an old diary, presumably written by Mary, the wife who the Earl locked up. In addition to the contemporary part, I had written the imaginary diary, presumably set in the eighteenth century.
After a couple of years (yes, it took me that long), when I finally had the first draft polished as much as possible, I sent if off to a developmental editor I’ve worked with before. I also sent it to a few friends.
Date with an Agent
It was at this point that my Irish friend, who also lives in Germany, and who frequently sends me information about Irish competitions etc sent me the info about Date with an Agent. I literally sent it in at the last possible moment, probably ten minutes to midnight. Thank goodness for modern technology. Imagine my delight when my work was chosen. Well, it’s difficult to judge an entire book on the first few pages and although I didn’t have a face to face thirty-minute interview the agent, at least I knew she’d read it and left some comments. She mentioned I could resubmit it when it was finished.
After that, I changed my working title and decided to scrap the diary part as it was becoming too complicated.
That’s another darling I didn’t kill but in the age of cut and paste, I stored the historical part in another document.
Surprisingly, I thoroughly enjoyed writing the diary part so maybe my friend was right after all. I enjoyed slipping back to the eighteenth century and I plan to finish that shorter book one of these days, after I finish the next two novels I’m currently working on.
In order to write, you have to be interested in people and their stories. You’re an observer and you are also an actor. An introverted actor and director too. Moreover, you can do it all without ever appearing on stage.
I had created several characters and a sort of whodunit situation. Who was good, who was shady. Whom could my character trust? Was the house she’d bought haunted? Was there such a thing as a haunted house?
There had to be some twists and turns, a mystery, a touch of romance, a sense of satisfaction and frustration. Something to keep the reader guessing and turning pages.
There is no right or wrong about how to approach a novel, but it’s certainly a lot easier to write a book now. Imagine writing it all out in longhand, which some writers still do, or even on a typewriter, although I do love the sound of the clickety clack of my fingers upon the keys. My secretarial course came in very handy over the years.
Excuse me while I check in with some of my characters in my next book. I have to see what they advise. We’re about to hold a conference in an imaginary place, this time in Germany but there is an Irish medieval monk in the group so I haven’t entirely departed from The Emerald Isle yet.
(c) Liz Doran
About Beechwood by Liz Doran:
When Claire Delaney packs up her life in the US, moves back to her homeland in the heart of Ireland and buys an old manor house, she enters a world partly familiar and oddly strange. Peculiar happenings in the house begin to disturb her, reminding her of a sensitivity she tried to suppress. Is this house haunted?
Who can she trust? Seamus, the handsome man she’s hired to carry out renovations, Bertie, the old man who used to work in Beechwood as a young lad, Maud, the local historian? When Maud suggests having the house energetically cleared, the medium says she has more to fear from the living than the dead.
Torn between fear of staying there and determination not to be frightened away, she gets herself a four-legged companion and tries to ignore her misgivings. After all, old houses have their oddities and electrical outages can partly be explained. But why does she look identical to the woman who was locked up in that same house almost three centuries ago? Are their fates intertwined? Can she banish the ghosts of the past, find her place and a new love?
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