Once Upon a Time, There Was a Tingle . . .

Where do writers get their ideas? Perhaps, says one novelist, it's the other way around. By Jennifer Donnelly ’85

Even though I haven’t written many books yet, people are starting to ask me where I get my ideas. I’m always tempted to say, “Oh, I get them at Target. Unless there’s a special at Wal-Mart. Then I get them there.”

The truth is, I don’t get them at all—they get me.

I will see something, or read something, or visit a place. Somebody will put something in my hands—a book, an old photo. Maybe I’ll hear a snatch of conversation, or smell something—roses or coal smoke or cinnamon—and suddenly it’s there: a small, strange tingle of recognition that this thing, this feeling, this idea, this story, is meant for me.

I become fascinated. Captivated. Compelled. Obsessed. I go to bed and wake up again thinking about the story. I want to be with it, and I want to pull to myself anything and everything—a crumbling diary, shreds of fabric, yellowed postcards, an old balsam pillow—that make it more real.

Donnelly

The tingle of a new story makes me feel stronger, taller, smarter, more alive. I have tons of energy and optimism and feel happy and excited. It’s a feeling I wish I could summon on demand, though I know it doesn’t listen to demands. It comes only when it’s good and ready. I think it’s a lot like the feeling of falling in love.

The tingle for A Northern Light, my most recent novel for young adults, started a few years ago, when my mother and I were in a bookshop. “Did you ever read this?” my mom asked me, holding Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. I said I hadn’t and she said I must. The book is a fictionalized account of a murder that occurred on Big Moose Lake, in the Adirondack Mountains. Dreiser’s book affected me deeply and I began to read all I could about the real case, in which a young man named Chester Gillette murdered a woman he’d made pregnant—a 19-year-old farm girl named Grace Brown.

Gillette was apprehended and convicted for the murder. Instrumental to that conviction were letters Grace Brown herself had written to him. In them, she pleads with Chester to come and take her away before her condition becomes apparent. The letters are full of fear and desperation, but they also show this young woman’s intelligence and wit.

Grace’s words were the tingle. I couldn’t stop hearing her voice, couldn’t stop grieving for a life so callously snuffed out. Mattie Gokey, the heroine of A Northern Light, was born in part because I wanted to change the past. I wanted to know that someone had been kind to Grace on her last day. That someone had smiled at her and exchanged a few pleasant words.

Some writers lead their characters, others follow them. I tend to just stand back and observe them, getting to know them bit by bit as they go about their daily lives. I didn’t know all of Mattie’s story as I began writing A Northern Light. I knew she loved words and books and had a dream of becoming a writer herself. I also knew she loved her home and family and felt a strong sense of duty toward them. I could see that she would be torn between dreams and duty, and that Grace’s letters would ultimately sway her in one direction, but just like the reader, I had to uncover her story—and her heart—bit by bit. I had to live her life along with her, day by day, week by week, not knowing what decision she would finally make until she herself made it.

Falling in love—with a person, or a place, or a story—changes your life. Mattie and Grace changed mine. I felt sad when I finished the book and they let me go. Lonely and pointless, too. Characters whose stories you’ve told become like old flames. Once the narrative between the two of you is over, the feelings are never as intense again. Oh, you see each other and smile, maybe chat and pass the time of day, but it’s not the same.

Just the other day, though, I was cleaning out a filing cabinet to make room for the Xeroxes and photos I’d accumulated while researching A Northern Light, and I came across a yellowed newspaper clipping that I’d stuffed in there awhile ago. It was just a small article, a few lines on people and events of a long time ago. But I felt something funny as I read it. Something that made my ears prick up and my hands tremble and my heart beat a little faster.

I think it was a tingle.

Jennifer Donnelly ’85 is working on a sequel to her 2002 debut novel, The Tea Rose, and is writing a second novel for young adults.