Where My Novel Idea Comes From…the Country of My Heart and Mind
I’ve never been a believer in the idea that the muse simply visits the writer with the gift of inspiration. I generally think my creative work emerges from a combination of a question I’ve been pondering plus bits and pieces of my experience.
(6 Habits Writers Can Learn From Athletes.)
Imagine my surprise, then, when, one night in early August of 2020, just as I was getting into bed, two sentences came into my head: “This is not her story. She stole it from the young woman who did not realize until the end that it was hers.”
I was working on a very different novel at the time, a novel to which these two sentences had no connection. I went to sleep without thinking much of it.
But when I woke up in the morning, the sentences were still there, a rare, remembered bit of creative output that had survived a jostle with my dreams and lasted a whole night’s sleep. And with those sentences had come characters—the story thief and the young woman. The story thief was clear to me instantly: She was an older woman who attended church and lived in straitened circumstances in the heart of Athens. The young woman appeared right away, too, as someone lost in life and searching for something, easily fascinated and prone to enthusiasm.
I stopped my work on the other novel and dove into this idea that usurped my imagination and eventually became my third novel, Last Days in Plaka. It would seem that some sort of muse had indeed visited me out of the blue, defying my own principle that to earn a story idea, I had to think it through consciously over a certain period of time.
Still, I know Last Days in Plaka didn’t emerge truly out of whole cloth. It was the summer of 2020, and nobody could travel anywhere, and we were all wearing masks all the time and feeling quite anxious about most things. Very much on my mind were two facts: that more than a year had passed since I had last been able to see my family in Greece, and that I was losing time in general, with every pandemic day that I spent stuck at home. Cast in that context, it doesn’t seem that strange at all for me to suddenly get the idea for a novel set in Athens, in which one of the main characters is contemplating how to spend the end of her life.
More than a contemplation of last days, though, the novel is an exercise in nostalgia—written as I pined for the Athens I was missing and pined for the time that spooled out behind me day by day, seemingly unused. In fact, I think every novel—at least every one of my novels—is an exercise in nostalgia. Whether I’m writing about the Greek city of Patras, or Antarctica, or 1910 London, or Athens, on some fundamental level, I’m writing to recapture a place I want desperately to inhabit.
Check out Henriette Lazaridis’ Last Days in Plaka here:
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I say “re” capture, even for a place like Antarctica where I had never been when I wrote Terra Nova, and I mean it. Because first, I think, I imagine a certain place, a certain story. And then I realize that the very fact that I’ve imagined it means it’s not present in my real life, and so it’s lost to me. And then, I write–and that writing is the attempt to regain the place I’ve lost.
Greece is always present in my writing, even when the focus of my story is Antarctica or, for my work in progress, New Mexico and Massachusetts. Greece is at the heart of my creativity because I am Greek. My first encounters with stories of any kind were with the stories from the Odyssey my father told me at bedtime, or the myths my mother told as if she were speaking of our relatives. And the first language in which I told my own stories was Greek, since I grew up in a Greek-speaking home, the only child of Greek expats. Only when I was old enough to play outside on my own with the kids in the neighborhood (so, three years old, maybe?) did I add English, which my parents spoke fluently but had resisted at home.
I often write with a Greek cadence—something I have learned to undo unless it’s useful to the style I want to create in a novel. I frequently use Greek without even realizing I’m doing it, to help me think of a word, a phrase, an expression. Greek is an excellent resource—when I need a word in English and then think of it in Greek and parse its etymology in that language before coming back to English with a new word idea. I use Greek, you might say, as a thesaurus (itself a Greek word meaning treasure!) for my English.
There’s been considerable research on how bilingualism affects the brain and the executive function center in particular. It’s said that the constant activity of choosing between languages trains the bilingual person’s brain to be adept in organization and prioritization. All I know is that my brain knows when to snap from English to Greek and back and I never have to think about it.
As soon as I set foot in Greece, I’m thinking and speaking Greek. As soon as I return, it’s back to English. But no matter where I am, if I’m looking at a map of Greece, I’ll mutter to myself in Greek. If I’ve been thinking of my Greek relatives, I’ll do that muttering in Greek. The voice in which we talk to ourselves out loud? Mine speaks two languages, depending on the situation.
All these Greek-speaking and Greek-thinking behaviors were essential in the writing of Last Days in Plaka. I wrote the novel, among other reasons, to transport myself to the Athens I was pining for. I reveled in the ability to describe Greek behaviors and customs, to introduce the reader—through my omniscient narrator—to the foibles of my characters in a way that felt to me truly Greek. I made this question of Greek authenticity fundamental to the novel’s story, as young Greek American, Anna tries and tries to find a realness in Greece that she can connect to and understand.
Though I was writing the novel in English, with every sentence, I was translating myself into Greece. To use the etymology—in this case, Latin—I was carrying myself across. Which is appropriate, for translation is a kind of travel. All novel-writing is, really. It’s how you travel to the place you miss, the place you long for so much that it becomes an ailment. Nostalgia means the sickness of missing home. And writing novels is the cure for it.
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