Once Upon a Time: Discovering Our Forever After Story

by Debbie Macomber

  • Preserving interesting cultural traditions. If, during your research, you find out that your family hailed from Scotland, say, it offers a whole new layer of interest to your heritage. Bring on that kilt!

  • Helping you reconnect with family, far and wide. Enthusiasts cite this as one of the most enriching reasons to do genealogy. Many have connected with long-lost relatives who share the same interest in history.

  • Allowing you to explore your spiritual heritage. Church records are a treasure trove of information. Finding artifacts like old family Bibles can bring you closer to knowing the spiritual legacy of your family.

  • Giving you a personal connection to history. Memorizing dates and places in school never sparked a love of history like finding an ancestor who fought in the Civil War or settled in Jamestown Colony.

  • Uncovering important medical information. There have been cases of people who were able to trace a genetic anomaly from nothing more than sleuthing through their genealogy.

  • Connecting to new places and new communities. You may find yourself tromping around old graveyards or small-town libraries, but travel takes on a whole new excitement when it is a history treasure hunt as well.

  • Demonstrating the value you put on family. As your children see you putting an emphasis on ancestors and family history, they come to understand their place and their responsibility in being part of a legacy.

  • Helping you connect with famous personages from history. This is the fun part. As you dig around, you’re likely to find a number of ancestors worthy of special mention (along with a few you will avoid mentioning at all).

  Four

  THERE ONCE WAS A MAN . . .

  For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

  —PSALM 139:13–14

  What makes a book you will never forget? Is it a rollicking story line? Sometimes, but what do you think made us fall in love with To Kill a Mockingbird? It wasn’t the story line, though that was excellent. It was the character of Atticus Finch. What about Gone with the Wind? Yes, it’s a great Civil War novel, but it was Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler we could never forget.

  People often ask me where I get my ideas for the stories I write. Because my gift is storytelling, this aspect of being an author comes naturally to me. Story ideas are all around us; life itself presents us with plenty of material each and every day. It’s a matter of being open to the stories happening around us and then fashioning them into a narrative with believable and compelling characters. It’s not as much about ideas as it is about characters for me. And I think most writers find that the people around them provide the basis for the fictional characters they create. I certainly do. It can be a matter of taking a trait from one person, a physical characteristic from another, a way of speaking from someone else, and then combining all those distinguishing traits into one person. Ultimately, believable characters come from the writer’s observations about the people and situations surrounding him or her.

  CHARACTERS—FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE

  I chose Psalm 139:13–14 as the verse to open this chapter because it gives us insight into how God created characters—and by characters, I’m not talking about fictional characters; I’m talking about us. He knit us together (don’t you love that?) in our mothers’ wombs. He created our inmost beings—it’s the ultimate backstory. We are fearfully and wonderfully made.

  That’s as humbling as it is profound. God took my grandfather’s brown eyes, my great-grandmother’s thin brown hair, bits and pieces of ancestors I never knew, and created me.

  I am never closer to my own Creator than as I create my story world and craft characters for my books. In my fiction, I am mimicking what He did in creation. I am awed by the work He did. As I came to the end of my Cedar Cove series, I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer number of characters, trying to keep everyone separate in my mind and all their stories and connections with the other characters straight. Yet look at the vast number of people God created. I’m speechless. No two of His “characters” are the same. We’ve always heard that and always believed it, but with many of the mysteries of DNA being decoded it has become even more astounding how each person is completely different. And not only is every “character” God creates unique, but He keeps track of each one, even as far as knowing the exact number of hairs on his or her head (Luke 12:7).

  We are all main characters in a rich and complex story of our own.

  And each character is fearfully and wonderfully made. Complex. Multifaceted. Unique.

  Just as we explore characters in writing, I want us to consider the characters in our own stories. Later on, in chapter 10, we are going to look at secondary characters, but in this chapter we’re talking about the main characters, mostly the protagonist. In your story, that protagonist is you.

  THE UNLIKELY HERO

  The small, plain Scottish woman with home-cropped hair and bushy eyebrows, wearing a dress that was long out of style (had it ever been in style in the first place?), walked out on the Clyde Auditorium stage for the television show Britain’s Got Talent. No one knew it at the time, but she’d spent much of her life as a caregiver for her widowed mum, who’d died just two years before. She hadn’t been able to sing since her mother died, but because her mum always wanted her to try out for the show, the painfully shy Susan Boyle swallowed her fear and auditioned.

  As she stood alone in the center of the stage, looking for all the world like someone’s maiden aunt, the judges smirked and asked a couple of condescending questions. She replied clumsily and self-consciously. The cameras panned to the audience. Three thousand eyes rolled; some people whispered to neighbors, others laughed outright.

  Susan Boyle was no stranger to ridicule. At birth she had been deprived of oxygen, which left her with lifelong learning difficulties. Kids teased her in school. Frizzy hair, slow learner, no sense of style, shy—it was all rich fodder for bullies.

  One of the judges, Simon Cowell, asked what she was planning to sing. She answered with the title—“I Dreamed a Dream,” the much-loved lament from the musical Les Misérables. The camera panned to the audience and there were outright guffaws. But when she sang the first line, mouths dropped open. By the third line the audience was on its feet, en masse, clapping wildly. Her voice was flawless. Even now it’s hard to watch the performance without having tears stream down my face. The YouTube video of the event has been viewed almost one hundred million times. And if you’re like me, you’ve watched it more than once, simply because it’s breathtaking to watch the story of Susan Boyle and her talent unfold before the world.

  Perhaps one of the reasons we love this story is because there’s a bit of Susan Boyle in all of us. We may look small and inconsequential to the world, but we know that God has planted something big inside of us. In one way or another, we are all unlikely heroes.

  CHARACTERS WHO COME ALIVE

  Have you ever read a book in which you simply couldn’t identify with the protagonist? Sometimes writers offer us an antihero, the nonheroic hero, but that main character must still retain some redeeming qualities or he or she won’t resonate with the reader—and all too soon we set the book aside, never to reach for it again. Usually when we come across a character we don’t like it’s because the author didn’t dig deep enough. We often call it a cardboard character. The outline is there, but the character is stiff and flat.

  As a writer, my challenge is to create characters that become as real to my readers as their own neighbors. I give the characters dreams and challenges and then reveal how they react and grow when confronted with the challenges that bring them to the point where they can reach for their dreams. A good example of this is Lydia, the main character of The Shop on Blossom Street. Despite being a two-time cancer survivor with limited resources, she boldly opens a yarn store. It’s her affirmation of life, her stand to de
clare that cancer will not rule her existence. It’s an against-all-odds challenge for her, and that yarn store becomes the refuge—the gathering place—for the other characters whose stories are woven into the book. I can’t tell you the number of readers who’ve written to me to ask me about Lydia. Her cancer survival story inspired some who told me they read the book while spending a long afternoon sitting at their oncologist’s with an IV of chemo drugs dripping into their veins.

  Some people have asked me if I have trouble writing from the male viewpoint. I’ve raised two sons and been married more years than I want to count. Living with men gives one a certain insight into the way a man thinks . . . or doesn’t think. Seriously, it comes down to observation and honesty—which is true of all characters a writer creates.

  Talking about characters who come alive, longtime editor Penelope J. Stokes wrote:

  In all my years of editing, one experience stands out as the landmark example of a living, breathing character. I was working with B.J. Hoff on her Emerald Ballad series, dealing with the character of Finola—a beautiful young woman who, because of a traumatic event in her past, had not spoken since she was a child. “There’s something wrong with Finola’s character,” B.J. told me one day on the telephone. “Something I don’t understand. Pray that I’ll find out what it is, will you?”

  If that sounds a little odd, wait until you hear the rest of the story. I did pray, as promised. The next morning, I called B.J. and said, “I don’t know if it’s good news or bad, but I think Finola is pregnant.”

  A long silence ensued, and at last B.J. said quietly, “Yes, yes she is. And this baby is going to be the turning point of her spiritual life.”1

  This is how real our characters can become to us. As I’m writing my stories, I carry these people around with me, thinking about what they are doing and how they would react. They become as real to me as the real-life characters in my own story.

  TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR CHARACTERS

  The writer’s challenge—your challenge as you tell your own story—is to make your characters come to life. Sometimes it’s hard to see ourselves as others see us. It’s even harder to see ourselves as God sees us. But as we tell the story and honestly chronicle the events, the characters begin to emerge. I think about Little House in the Big Woods and all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. These books told the story of the Ingalls family’s homesteading adventures in the late nineteenth century. The author intended these to be children’s books, but over the years they have become classics, loved by adults as well as children. Her storytelling is simple and direct, but through her eyes we see all the characters growing, facing and meeting life’s difficulties. They are complex, like Pa, who has little time for anything during the spring, summer, and fall, but come winter, brings his fiddle out while the family dances, sings, and tells stories, warmly tucked in against the frigid weather outside their log cabin. Through telling these stories of the way she views the world and interacts with her family and those around them, the main character, Laura, emerges.

  Digging deep and trying to see ourselves as God sees us will help us flesh out our characters. I use the words “digging deep” as if it were an easy task, but it’s one of the most difficult things writers do. In chapter 6 we’ll talk about motivation, and depth comes partly from understanding what motivates us. In plumbing the depths of my characters, I ask questions. Why did that bother her so much? What is it he fears that raises the stakes? We need to ask the same kinds of questions about ourselves. Why does my stomach knot up every time someone raises his voice? Or, why do I fear this empty nest? Or maybe, why do I have such a hard time relating to a God who calls Himself my loving Father?

  As we write or remember our stories, we need to keep asking the tough questions that will get us below the surface. The nice thing about digging deep is that it often challenges our long-held assumptions and beliefs. One friend recently wrote a novel that was loosely based on her own life. Her sense of worth had been shaped in part by the belief that her father didn’t love her. But as she worked on the fictional father character in her book, she began to see things in her own father’s life that explained, in part, his behavior toward her. The farther she got into the story of this fictional character, the deeper she got into her father’s limitations. Eventually she began to recognize his clumsy attempts at showing his love. Fifty-some years later, it took a fictional character study to help her unlock a deeply troubling mistaken assumption.

  As you explore your story, go deep, into your roots, your childhood, your friends. Don’t skim the surface. It reminds me of the anecdote George Sayer told about leaving his very first meeting with his Oxford tutor, C. S. Lewis:

  As I walked away from New Buildings, I found the man that Lewis had called “Tollers” sitting on one of the stone steps in front of the arcade.

  “How did you get on,” he asked.

  “I think rather well. I think he will be a most interesting tutor to have.”

  “Interesting? Yes, he’s certainly that,” said the man, who I later learned was J. R. R. Tolkien. “You’ll never get to the bottom of him.”2

  That’s what I hope for as I write my own characters and work into the real characters in my own life—that I will never get to the bottom of them. Or, for that matter, the bottom of me.

  Storytelling Prompt

  Introduce a character or two from your childhood, describing them through the eyes of your child-self. Senses provide important character clues, so don’t forget to include visual details, smells, sounds, and other senses.

  Why Listen to Your Life?

  In his book The Sacred Journey, Frederick Buechner tells us why it is important to mine the depths of our lives:

  What I propose to do now is to try listening to my life as a whole, or at least to certain key moments of the first half of my life thus far, for whatever of meaning, of holiness, of God, there may be in it to hear. My assumption is that the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.

  For the reader, I suppose, it is like looking through someone else’s photograph album. What holds you, if nothing else, is the possibility that somewhere among all those shots of people you never knew and places you never saw, you may come across something or someone you recognize. In fact—far more curious things have happened—even in a stranger’s album, there is always the possibility that as the pages flip by, on one of them you may even catch a glimpse of yourself. Even if both of those fail, there is still a third possibility which is perhaps the happiest of them all, and that is that once I have put away my album for good, you may in the privacy of the heart take out the album of your own life and search it for the people and places you have loved and learned from yourself, and for those moments in the past—many of them half forgotten—through which you glimpsed, however dimly and fleetingly, the sacredness of your own journey.3

  Five

  AND HE WENT BY THE NAME OF . . .

  A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold.

  —PROVERBS 22:1 (NIV)

  Names are important, both in storytelling and in life. As I started to write The Inn at Rose Harbor, the first book in my new series, I determined to choose a meaningful name for my main character. She was a young widow. Her husband had died in Afghanistan. She had come to Cedar Cove in search of peace and a fresh start. I also knew that the inn she purchased would be the setting for many different guests who, through the years, would come searching for something significant. I knew this main character, the innkeeper, would be part of my life for a long time to come. She needed the perfect name. I decided on Rose, but not for her first name. Jo Marie Rose. Out of that surname came the name for the bed-and-breakfast—Rose Harbor Inn.

  Rose is a name with great significance for me. My great-grandmother was named Rose, as was my mother. Our oldest daughter is Jody Rose and the granddaughter born on my birthday is Madeleine Rose. And the mother of my husband, Wayne, was Marie. Jo Mari
e Rose was the perfect name, one that I’ll enjoy using for many books to come.

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  It might seem strange to spend so much time naming a fictional character, but names do more than just identify characters. We first sense this in reading about God assigning Adam the task of naming the animals. In Genesis 2:19–20 we’re told, “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.” This is the Garden of Eden we are talking about—no busywork here. Naming had significance.

  In John 10:3 we see that the Good Shepherd calls us by name. “The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to His voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” There’s an intimacy in calling someone by name. Dale Carnegie said, “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”1

  In a book I wrote many years ago I struggled with the hero’s name and ended up changing it four times. He was a man who had been an outsider his entire life. He wasn’t part of the “in” crowd in school. His mother had abandoned him and his father had little time for him, so he knew little of what it meant to be part of a family. He felt as if he skirted what life was supposed to be like. I finally settled on the name Cain. Cain because he was the first man born outside the gates of paradise. He was always on the outside looking in, just like my character.