Facts Will Free Up Your Fiction - by Marlene Baird

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Every author has been asked, “How did you come up with that story?” The favorite of my novels, The Filigree Cross: The Salvation of Larry Broadfellow, came to me while channel surfing. On the TV screen, a televangelist was exhorting listeners to open their wallets so that Heaven would be open to them. Though he said all the right words, he was clearly bored with the message, and distracted by the fit of his coat jacket. Several times he flexed his shoulders and pulled at the collar. It made me wonder at the dressing-down he might get from his PR people when they saw this performance. So I had my next protagonist, Larry Broadfellow, failed televangelist.

Unfortunately, Larry came to me as an orphan. This stumped me. I said to my husband, “I don’t know anything about orphans; I don’t think I’ve ever known one, but my character is an orphan.” My husband, eager to end the dilemma, said, “Well, you’re the writer. Give him parents.” I wandered off knowing that would not work. Larry was completely and utterly alone. I went ahead with the story, still worried about the orphan situation.

At that time I was not a U.S. citizen. I was a green-card-carrying Canadian living in the U.S. These cards were being counterfeited so much that we were all required to get new ones. It only took me four years to accomplish this. At some point in this four-year period, I was sitting in a massive room in downtown Phoenix with several hundred others, waiting for my number to come up, so that, once again, I could have a futile conversation with an immigration agent. I was sitting on an aisle seat, and a gentleman in a wheelchair rolled up and stopped beside me. The gentleman and I began talking. When I said I was a writer he had the usual questions, and the conversation shifted to me. I told him about my orphan problem. He told me he had grown up in an orphanage in Minnesota, a facility that was also a farm. He told me everything I could ever want to know about his younger life.

I used very little of the information in my story since it was a small part of the book, but from that day forward my story almost wrote itself. Larry Broadfellow was now full-blown in my head. I now knew how he became an orphan, all about his childhood, how he was almost adopted, what happened to him when he aged out of the orphanage. None of this was the gentleman’s story; it was all made up. It was knowing I was working with a solid foundation that gave me confidence and freed up my fiction. Larry has stayed with me and become more real to me than any other of my characters. The novel, The Filigree Cross: The Salvation of Larry Broadfellow was a finalist in the Southwest Writers novel competition.

About the author: Marlene Baird is a long-time member of Arizona Authors Association, and a judge for our annual writing contest. She has won the contest for both a novel and an essay. Marlene also enjoys writing short stories, having taken 3rd place in the Lorian Hemingway writing contest in 2008. She lives in Prescott with husband, Bob. Find out more about Marlene at http://marlenebaird.com/ Marlene’s Books: Murder Times Two -The Filigree Cross - Minnie and the Manatees - Claire Walker.