Truth in Fiction -- On Writing

Mark Twain
(photo from americaslibrary.gov)

In this day and age of 'truthiness' (used satirically way back in 2005 by Stephen Colbert) and 'fake news' (used by *rump for any statement of fact with which he disagrees,) I write fiction. "What's the difference between truth and fiction?" you might well ask. 

From The American Heritage Dictionary:

     "truth (trooth) n. 1. Conformity to fact or actuality. [Middle English trewth, loyalty, from Old
           English treowth. see deru-  in Appendix I]
           Appendix I  deru- also dreu-. To be firm, solid, steadfast.
                  Derivatives include tree, trust, betroth, endure, and druid."

     "fic·tion (ˈfik-shən) n. 1a. An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent
         actuality but has been invented. 3a. A literary work whose content is produced by
         the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact. [Middle English ficcioun, from
         Old French fiction, from Latin fictio. . . ."

Now you know the difference, but what's truth got to do with writing fiction? Mark Twain said it perfectly -- "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."

Which brings us to another word:
     "veri·si·mil·i·tude  (ver-ə-sə-ˈmi-lə-ˌtüd , -ˌtyüd) n. 1. The quality of appearing to be true or real.

And verisimilitude is what fiction must have "The quality of appearing to be true...." even if it's set hundreds of years in the future. Or the past. Whether it's populated by zombies or typical teenagers.

Fictional settings must put the reader into the place. The writer must give the reader the sights, smells, sounds, and feel of the place. And sometimes the taste. Whether we consciously think about it or not, our senses tell us where we are in the world and a writer can play to those senses.

The writer need not use graphic sensory descriptions. The scent of impending rain. The air need not be laden with the smell of roses or the feedlot (unless, of course, roses or manure play a role in the story.) The sound of summer insects welcoming the night. The writer doesn't have to specify which insects. Light dappling the still waters. Specific colors are not necessary. The hot wind driving him across the prairie. It could be burning his skin or drying his sweat. The salt water filling my mouth. From whatever water source.

Unless specifics are necessary to the story, the writer can and should leave them to the readers' imagination. Give the reader room to bring their own experiences to the story. Let them participate.

If the setting is a real place, use specific, real descriptions. The reader will be reminded of the place if he's been there or he will recognize it, should he ever find himself there.

Keep in mind, describing reality can be a trap that the writer unwittingly sets for himself. Descriptions of reality must be absolutely accurate.

I was listening to music from the Disney film Pocahontas. The phrase "blue corn moon" threw me out of the song's narrative. The story is set in what is now Virginia. Blue corn grows in Mexico and the American Southwest. Blue corn in Virginia is wrong.

My husband pointed out "It's Disney! Deer don't make friends with rabbits, either." Well, there is that. We can all point to exceptions, Disney being a successful one when it comes to unreality.

Characters should be treated with the same lack of specificity. Unless a physical characteristic is necessary to the plot, writers shouldn't get too specific. Characters' thought processes, speech patterns, and behaviors are more important than whether or not she has blonde hair or he has a six-pack.

The use of our senses comes into describing our characters, too. Smelling of tobacco and alcohol, Geoff loomed over her. Her teeth chattering, she cringed away from him. We all know these characters. Readers will fill in whatever they need to be satisfied about what these characters look like.

And, as with real places, real people who might show up in our fiction, must be treated scrupulously. If Thomas Jefferson or Henry VIII appear, their hair must not be described as black or blond. Too many readers know they had red hair. Teddy Roosevelt wore glasses. Shirley Temple had a dimple.

We don't have to mention these things, but it's important to get the things we do mention about real people, right.

We, as writers, don't want to remind our readers that these stories are fiction. We want them to believe in the story and the characters enough to stick around and see how it comes out. Maybe they'll even seek out other things we've written.

So, unlike politicians, we fiction writers gotta keep it real. Or at least real enough.

The Ophelia Cut -- a review

The Ophelia Cut is number 14 in John Lescroart’s series of murder mysteries featuring attorney Dismas Hardy, homicide detective Abe Glitsky, bartender Moses McGuire, and their various and sundry families, friends, partners, underlings, and bosses. Not to mention each book’s featured villain and multiple side-bar bad guys.

To prepare to write this review I read some other reviews. And that reminds me NEVER read a review by anyone with the word “critic” in their title.

Huffington Post’s Jackie K. Cooper, identified as a film critic spends a good deal of his review saying how much Lescroart’s readers look forward to his next novel, especially the Dismas Hardy ones. Then he pans it. Saying the first four-fifths of the book are great but the ending is “something completely unsuspected. Unfortunately it is also completely unsatisfactory.” Insert your favorite expletive here.

The ending is unexpected. (I would not have chosen to use the word ‘unsuspected.’ Perhaps it was Mr. Cooper’s auto-correct acting out.) And though I would not say it is "satisfactory," it is the right ending.

What I love about Lescroart’s novels is the continuing lives of his characters. I started his books with the first of his Dismas Hardy stories, Dead Irish, published in 1989. I didn’t read it then because I’d not heard of John Lescroart until a retired police detective recommended I read him. That was almost three years ago while I was writing my own novel Murder on Ceres (available at http://bit.ly/murderonceres.)

In Dead Irish we first meet Hardy, a has-been, tending bar for his Vietnam War buddy Moses McGuire, and drinking in San Francisco. Hardy had lost his baby boy, his wife, and his career as a lawyer. The book introduces us to Hardy’s best friend from when he was a member of San Francisco’s finest before getting his law degree. Abe Glitsky is the half-Black half-Jewish cop, big enough and serious enough to intimidate the scariest bad guy. And there’s Lou the Greek’s, a dive across from the Hall of Justice open from six a.m. to two a.m. serving alcohol and food to the legal community from cops to judges, clients to social workers, and everybody over, around, and in between. If I ever get to San Fran I want to visit City Lights Bookstore and Lou the Greek’s.

In The Ophelia Cut Hardy is described as “sixty years old.” This makes me happy. He’s almost as old as I am. We both remember the late sixties and early seventies.

It’s some thirty years since the Dead Irish story, twelve books follow these characters’ ongoing lives. I feel like I’ve known them a long time. There are marriages, births, deaths. Each book is complete in itself, beginning and ending a case, but the characters go on.

In The Ophelia Cut, Moses McGuire’s daughter is brutalized by a man who ends up dead and Mose is arrested. But did he do it? The dead man was a truly bad man with any number of associates who would be happy to have him dead. No matter. It falls to Hardy to defend Mose in court.

And we come to the ending that the film critic didn’t like. Let me just say I cried. Not at the shocking part. At that part I was shocked. It was later that I wept.

I am not in the habit of crying over murder mysteries. A visit to the Oklahoma City National Memorial, yes. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, yes. The movie Old Yeller, yes.

But murder mysteries? I don’t remember ever doing it before. Generally speaking the characters and stories are too distant from me as a reader. I do not know them intimately.

Harry Bosch’s daughter grew up, but Harry doesn’t change. I never knew Miss Marple as a young woman. Even Commissario Brunetti does not change, although in Donna Leon’s novels justice is sometimes ill served (which I find appalling but that possibility is real enough to keep me reading her next one.) These characters are not real people to me. Dismas Hardy and the people around him are.

The Ophelia Cut is John Lescroart’s best so far. My only regret is that I can read Lescroart’s books faster than he can write them and there is only one more, The Keeper – so far. 

Writing Real Characters

image from aspenpeak-magazine.com

  Your whole life is gathering material for a really good story. And that story should be filled with realistic characters and events and settings. Yes! Even Fantasy.

  After all, your readers have to be able to connect with characters in fantasy, too. That character may be a big hairy guy with an ammo belt slung across his chest. And maybe he doesn’t speak, just grunts and growls and roars. But I can tell you, that Wookie reminds me of someone’s brother or father or a guy I went out with once.

  For me, dialogue describes my character more than the color of their hair or how tall they are. Unless, of course, the color of their hair plays a significant role in my story. For instance in Murder on Ceres Rafe has red hair and green eyes. They are important to the story. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out. http://bit.ly/murderonceres.

  Where do I get the dialogue? It’s in the air, all around us, all the time. Even when we sleep, we dream dialogue. All we have to do is listen.

  My grandmother, being ever so conscientious about not taking the Lord’s name in vain, would occasionally exclaim, “Lawsy, lawsy.” As opposed to Lordy, Lordy. My grandfather, however, was not so religiously scrupulous. He was a good and kind man, but it was not unusual for him to emphasize a statement by preceding it with “eye-God.” Phonetically – he was saying “by God” not referring to God’s eye. If I use either of these exclamations in my story, you’ll recognize the character whether or not I describe them physically.

  I love to eat out. Don’t get to do it often, but when I do, I listen. I gather material. At a café in Santa Maria, California, on my way down Highway 101, I got to eavesdrop on a group of local farmers having coffee. Their conversation was not unlike the farmers having coffee in Guthrie, Oklahoma. Will it rain? Taxes are too high. A neighbor has done something that’s negatively affecting their creek, their fence-line, or their line of sight. The accent is different. Idioms are different. Even the rhythms are different. These things may be too esoteric to give a reader the information they need to locate the speaker geographically, but the farmer’s concerns are the same, and the reader will recognize them no matter the idioms or accent or rhythms. They are real characters.

  There was a man who came into the office where I used to work. He would say “She went to town. So she did.” Or, “it rained so hard, it was a toad-strangler. So it was.” He invariably ended whatever statement he made with “So he/she/it did/was/verb-of-choice.” Another distinctive voice.

  If you use a particular speech pattern consistently for a particular character, the reader will recognize that character whenever they speak, so they will.

  And not just words, repetitive noises can be identifying. Post-nasal drip sufferers and their sniffing and snorting. Smokers and their throat clearing. People who eat too much fiber and their – well, you know. Pencil tappers and toe tappers, paper shufflers and rattlers. People who pant and puff and suck their teeth. Eye-rollers, shruggers, nodders. Yes, sometimes we do need to listen with our eyes to catch all the wonderful sounds and actions to use in and around our dialogue.

  So my advice to character builders everywhere (and I don’t mean sports coaches) is to listen, appreciate, and use all the dialogue – verbal and nonverbal – that comes your way. Now, go to a local café and have a cup of coffee and a piece of pie for me. And eavesdrop.

Writing Emotion

Comedy/Tragedy from etsy.com

The question is how best to represent emotion in literature. I have been charged with insufficiently communicating my characters’ emotions. My writing teacher and, even more so, my fellow writing students read bits and pieces of my work and invariably ask “but how does he feel?”

Here is a bit from Murder on Ceres. Rafe and Joe have just returned from witnessing a crash that killed all on board.

Joe stopped pacing. “Man, you lose power and you got nothin’. No floating, no sailing, no gliding. Without atmosphere, there’s no nothin’.”

Rafe closed his eyes, but that was no good. He could still see those flashes of light. He stood and went to the door. “We couldn’t see anything. But they’re gone. I have no doubt. They’re all gone.”

At the end of the scene each reacts to the horrifying incident in his own way. 

Joe calls his ex-wife.

“Brenda? Hi, baby. You sleepin’? Yeah, yeah I know it’s late. I just thought, you know, maybe I could come by…” He bowed his head. “Yeah, of course. You’re right. No. No. I understand. Is Joey okay?” He stood and stretched, arching his back. “That’s good. Yeah, that’s good. No. I haven’t forgotten. I’ll pick him up Wednesday morning.” Joe let his hands drop to his sides.

A quick ten-count later, Joe keyed his mobile again. “Hi, Linnie. Yeah, I’m good. How are you?” Joe leaned back in his chair. “So, you free after work? Yeah. I’d like that. Meet you at your place in about an hour.”

Rafe deals with it differently.

“There is always light in the darkness. Manny Turrentine.” Rafe quoted to no one in particular A little longer and he’d be finished here. He’d go home and the whole place would be lit up like full sun, canaries singing, and his wife pregnant. He would wrap himself in her and this day would be far away.

Minutes passed as Rafe made his account of what he’d witnessed. More minutes than words should take. More minutes than the crash took that killed all on board.

To me, both men are displaying emotion. Not by ranting and raving and chewing the scenery, but by rigid self-control. They distance themselves from the death, each seeking reassurance by reconnecting with their own real, familiar lives. 

            I would like to write emotion. My characters are not shallow people, at least not in my head. They do have emotions. I admire what I consider 'restrained emotion.' That's what I want to write.  Perhaps not quite so restrained as Cormack McCarthy. 
My daughter, who knows me and my work, says I should take care not to be too subtle. She says I should read Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." That I'm more like him than I care to admit. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver -- a review

My daughter has been trying to get me to read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible for a while now. I’ve been trying to get her to read John Irving’s A Widow for One Year. Since I’m writing a review on Kingsolver’s book and Grace isn’t writing one on Irving’s, I guess you know who won this one.

Actually, I think I’ve won, because now I’ve read them both. And I’d give them each five stars. That means I think they’re worth reading more than once, which is the rarest of endorsements from me.

I am disinclined to read any book titled anything to do with a bible. And, having said that, I will add that books written in the first person are not generally my cup of tea. If you’ve read many of my reviews, you know all too often I begin them by saying this is not the kind of thing I read, but ….

And here we go again.

Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible is written in first person from five women’s points of view -- a mother in her mid-thirties and her four daughters from ages fifteen down to five. The Price women accompanied their Baptist missionary husband/father from Bethlehem, Georgia, to the Congo during the 1960’s, a time of political upheaval in both places.

Nathan Price’s point of view is not recorded here. He is just another of the natural disasters that this family must face and survive. That said, this is a book that gives us strong female characters, each different and identifiable one from the other. And, I think, each is a realistic portrayal of women, not a homogeneous ‘they’ but a ‘she’ and a ‘she’ and a ‘she’ five times. Even the youngest sees things as she would see things, not as her sisters or her mother do.

In this book tension is sustained and heightened not by chase scenes and explosions and things that jump out at you, but by impending death and the fear of death. Death doesn’t stalk these five women and the people of the Congo like a jungle cat. It hangs in the humid air and lies curled beneath an elephant ear leaf. It shadows children in raggedy clothes and floats down the Congo River. It festers in the hearts of men – Americans and Belgians and Congolese – far away from the Price family. And in the ambitions and jealousies and fears of men in their village and in their own house.

The women come through this period in their lives, each in her own way. Though not always in a way that we might admire or seek to emulate, they each demonstrate that greatest of human strengths, they endure. 

C is for Character Development

C is for Character Development

 

If you want to write and write well, no matter the genre, whether memoir, thriller, or a grant proposal, you need skills. I recommend working with a good writing teacher. You can check out my teacher at www.williambernhardt.com. Bill always says, "show don't tell."

 

The following exerpt is from my, as yet, unpublished murder mystery, Murder on Ceres. The story starts out on a colony in low orbit around Ceres, the largest body in the Main Asteroid Belt. The protagonist is a police detective named Rafe. This scene introduces his mother Rose. Lucy is a friend of his wife Terren. Terren is distraught over the death of a very close friend. Charles is Rafe's father.

Door chimes startled Lucy awake. She glanced at the screen and saw Terren’s mother-in-law in the pop-up. Rose Sirocco’s eyes gazed inquiringly up at the door cam. Green eyes like Rafe’s. Two of the few people she knew with green eyes. She liked having someone look up to her, or at least seem to look up to her. Even a much older person. To be fair, at 162 centimeters, they were exactly the same height. Short by Cererian standards.

Her reader slipped to the floor as she got up to answer the door.

“Mrs. Sirocco.”

“Hello, dear. Didn’t Rafe tell you I was coming to sit with Terren?” Rose Sirocco looked her up and down. Probably noting her rumpled appearance.

Lucy finger-combed her straight brown hair. “Yes, ma’am. He did. I must’ve dozed off.” She picked up the fallen reader. “Three chapters deep in the latest Turner thriller. Guess it’s not that thrilling.”

“Oh, keep at it, dear.” Rose set a bright pink bag emblazoned with a crisp letter “S” on the floor. “Though not quite as thrilling as his last book. Still, it’s worth reading.” She put her blue beret and handbag, each also marked with an “S” on the entry table next to Rafe’s chess board.

She centered the white queen on the correct square. “Charles is forever accepting things in lieu of money for his legal services. This was from that woman they thought embezzled from the hospital.” An antique from Earth, the chess set was probably very valuable. “I can’t remember for sure. Maybe it was from that man accused of killing his wife and her lover. A nice man, really. Ah well, it was a good gift for Rafe.”

She straightened the mirror over the table. “Don’t you think this looks so much better here than it did in that tiny little place they used to live in?” She plumped her iron gray curls into shape. The hat had not flattened her hair at all. Like her, those curls would not be restrained.

“Don’t you have reading glasses, dear?” Rose turned to the house controls near the door and brought the lights in the living room up to near full-sun, dialed the room temperature down, and switched off the lights in the garden.

 “I think they’re much easier on your eyes.” She pulled food containers out of the pink bag. “Charles thinks mine are too heavy. They make little dents on my nose, but I think the graphics are so much better than the new ones.”

Lucy didn’t offer her opinion. She didn’t find an opportunity to.

 

On Re-reading The Wheel of Time

 

 

I do not have a history as a re-reader of fiction. Nonfiction, certainly. But there the point of re-reading is obvious. To check a date, to confirm a fact, to pursue a deeper understanding. But fiction? I do not feel the need to recheck fictional facts or fictional dates. And, for that matter, if I didn’t understand it the first time through, I only read it because of some obsessive-compulsive need to complete the damned book once I started it and I surely was not going to start it again. There are too many good novels out there and too little time. And I have not historically considered fantasy very high in that endless list of good novels.

But something is different about The Wheel of Time. The first time I read it, I was in such a hurry to find out what happened next that I missed the construction of the plot. I did not consciously appreciate the character development. I was only dimly aware of the author drawing me into an addictive relationship.

The story-line is straight forward. The hero grows to young adulthood in The Two Rivers, a simple agrarian society. An egalitarian culture that respected work and common sense. Where social status was determined by an individual’s contribution to the community. A narrow society that had little contact with the wider world. The hero and his hometown friends are pulled away from their comforting and comprehensible way of life and thrown into the fascinating, exciting, and always dangerous rest of the world.

The fourteen volumes of the series add up to one long chase scene. The author chivvies us along as the characters flee certain death or chase dangerous villains. From battle to battle with no time to rest, until we miss our reasonable bedtimes and delay our real-world duties. Until we get to Tarmon Gai'don, the final battle, and find out if the good guy wins and preserves The Wheel of Time and saves the whole world.

Simple. Typical American, Abe Lincoln story. No high-born hero necessary.

But the plot. It’s only during this re-reading that I appreciate the true superhero of this story. It’s the author, Robert Jordan. Not only did he construct a coherent world, invent characters in numbers of which Cecil B. De Mille would have boasted, and imagine more daring exploits and dire circumstances than I can comprehend (even after having experienced them vicariously during the first read through) but he got me to read fourteen volumes of fantasy.

His characters are introduced in the first book. So many that during my first reading I forgot their names and their faces until they appeared again and again throughout the story. Now as I read, I remember what they will do, who they will prove to be. I see how the author has drawn them in 3D and full-color. It’s no wonder I cared so much about them.

Their own individual stories weave and wind, over, around, and through each other. When I read it before, I would be frustrated when Jordan left whatever character we were following to follow another. And then again, when he would leave that character to follow yet another. And then again and again, until they came together only to move apart again. A dance of stories, sometimes a stately minuet, but more often, a square dance that I would have to follow without a caller to say what the next movement would be.

This time, I do not worry about what will happen next. I watch the intricate steps and recognize the changes in rhythm. I see the story as though it were a dear friend’s face, at once familiar. And still intriguing as the light plays across angles and planes reflecting all manner of thought and emotion.

When asked in the past to name my favorite novel, I would say John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. But I think now I must say The Wheel of Time is my favorite novel, though it be fourteen books long.

Celebrity Writers

Do you know who this is?

 

   He's a celebrity author. He is one of the "world’s bestselling and critically acclaimed thriller writers" according to the publisher Simon and Schuster who's coming out with an anthology of stories from 23 thriller authors next year.

 

   Admittedly my sense of celebrity seems not to fit that of our general society. I have little interest in athletes or entertainers. Though I can admire the feats of a Michael Jordan or a Maggie Smith, I can't say that I would go out of my way to sit next to them at dinner. Though to be at table where they sat next to each other might be interesting.

 

   Celebrity writers, on the other hand, I would go out of my way to sit next to at dinner or at the same table or in the same hall. Wouldn't it be grand to listen to Ken Follett and hear him say in person that he did not sell his first novel nor indeed, his tenth? If he who has written so many good books and been so often published did not sell his first one then there is hope for me. And J.K. Rowling whose Harry Potter series was rejected by umpteen publishing houses before Scholastic picked it up, then my Rafael Sirocco series has a chance.

 

   Okay, for those two celebrities, it's more about me.

 

   Sometimes my admiration is for writers who have lived through and written about history that I'm interested in. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s novels are among the best in American fiction, but for me his celebrity status comes from his own life experiences. He was a World War II prisoner of war held in Dresden, Germany, during the Allies' bombing and subsequent firestorm there. Later, his work with PEN International to focus attention on the plight of writers being persecuted in their own countries.

 

   Maya Angelou is in this same category of celebrity writers because of whom she had known--from famous leaders in our country's civil rights movement to unknowns in that same struggle. I get a thrill every time I drive through Stamps, Arkansas, because I know she lived there as a child.

 

   Then there are some of my favorite authors--John Irving, Robert Jordan, John Lescroart (That's his photo, by the way.) Diane Mott Davidson, Donna Leon, Patrick O'Brien. These are the writers I come back to time and again. Not because they feel like celebrities to me. I'm not even particularly interested in meeting them. It's their characters that I would like to spend time with, talk to, or just admire in person.

 

   I would like to know:

 

   John Wheelwright, best friend to John Irving's Owen Meany, from A Prayer for Owen Meany my favorite novel. It's about growing up. It's about friendship. It's about living with disability and mortality.

 

    Egwene, the country girl who becomes the head of the greatest institution in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time world. She is only one of literally a world of characters with whom I would gladly spend time. Well, all except the truly scary villains and terrifying creatures. Those can stay on the pages of the book.

 

   Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitsky and their families from John Lescroart's San Francisco based crime novels. Beginning with the first of these novels we meet these people and follow them as they build their lives together. Maybe we could all meet at Lou the Greek's for lunch.

 

   Goldie Bear from Diane Mott Davidson's culinary mysteries. We follow Goldie and her best friend (who happens to share the same abusive ex-husband whom they both refer to as 'the jerk') and Goldie's son as they get involved in murder mystery after murder mystery. Goldie does meet and marry a Colorado, sheriff's detective named Schultz. Nice man. Nice country, since that's where I live. Goldie is a caterer so naturally there are recipes included, most of which I've tried in my own kitchen.

 

   Commissario Guido Brunetti from Donna Leon's murder mysteries set in Venice, Italy. This  policeman knows the vicissitudes of the Italian justice system but works to solve crimes and bring the bad guys to some kind of reckoning anyway. He loves and respects his wife. The stories don't always have an ending that satisfies my just-desserts sensibilities, but they feel real and I understand Brunetti's cynicism. Couldn't we have a great discussion about right and wrong?

 

   Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey from Master and Commander and the other books in this series that follow the British navalman through the Napoleonic wars. And let me just say Jack was hot in the books before the movie folk cast Russell Crowe to play him in the movie version. I might even flirt a bit.

Fantasy Series

Cover Art from Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World

I remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard about the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, President Kennedy’s murder in 1963, Senator Kennedy’s murder in 1968, the Edmond Post Office murders in 1986, the Murrah Federal Building Bombing in 1995, and 9/11 in 2001. Having grown up and lived most of my life in the Oklahoma City area, the Edmond Post Office and Murrah Building were parts of my daily life. I passed the post office on my way to work each morning and our credit union was in the Murrah Building. Each of these events shook my world, shifted my world view.

And then one day in September 2007, I was driving north on I-35 with my daughter, then a Freshman at Oklahoma University. The car radio was tuned to KGOU our Public Radio Station. Suddenly my daughter started screaming and beating on the dashboard. When she told me why, it made no sense. Some writer named Robert Jordan died. I had no idea who Robert Jordan was. She explained about his epic fantasy series. His unfinished epic fantasy series, eleven volumes of which she had read and loved and reread in anticipation of the final installment.

Being naturally commitment-averse, I made it a rule never to read serialized novels. Nonfiction in multiple volumes I’ve always been comfortable with. Who can cover the Civil War in a single volume?

Fantasy? Also, not happening. I don’t easily suspend disbelief, so the minute something supernatural comes on the scene, my mind begins to wander and the book languishes beside my bed or under it.

And I never reread works of fiction. There are too many good books out there and I don’t have enough time to read them all as it is.

There were noteworthy exceptions to my policies of no fantasy series and single read-throughs. Tolkien’s Trilogy of the Rings, which I read to please a husband. I still have the books, but not that husband. And Rowling’s seven-book Harry Potter series which I read to please my daughter. Happily I still have both the books and the daughter.

Jordan, however, was not a blip on any radar as far as I was concerned. And as of the day of his death, never would be.

Today I am one-third of the way through Eye of the World, the first in what was to become Jordan’s fourteen-book series The Wheel of Time. The final three volumes were written by Brandon Sanderson. And this will be my third time through the series from beginning to end. Plus rereads of the later volumes in anticipation of each new release.

Why The Wheel of Time? To be honest, I thought I’d never enjoy another fantasy after The Lord of the Rings. I tried a couple and was not impressed.

I believed Tolkien’s world, complete with his Orcs and Ents. Then I came to believe Rowling’s world and Jordan’s, with their Hogwarts and Quiddich and Aes Sedai and Tarmon Gai'don. In each and every one of these books, characters from unremarkable backgrounds lead their people against the forces of darkness and win. Characters I got to know and care about, thrown into intolerable situations, attempting impossible goals, and succeeding.

Some days, my real world feels threatened by darkness on an epic scale and I need to believe there are real people from whatever backgrounds who can and will stand up when we need them.