Keeping Dreams Alive in Fiction
Anyone who knows me, or even reads the brief bio on the back of the book, would assume that my first novel, The Secrets of the Little Greek Taverna, was always intended to be what it is. It would seem obvious that a restaurateur would write about opening a taverna, that a lifelong foodie with a chef partner would write in detail about recipes and menus. It might be assumed that a career waitress and passionate world traveler would write a character that shared those same ideals. It might also seem almost glaringly obvious that a person whose life dream had been to write and publish a novel would write a story about the pursuit and realization of dreams.
(4 Tips for Writing Food in Fiction.)
But in fact, it didn’t start out that way.
My journey as a writer began sometime in 1985, when I was learning to write the alphabet. I remember, even at four years old, feeling relieved I was finally figuring out a way to put my thoughts and ideas into something that could be shared and understood. But this particular journey of writing and publishing my first novel began slightly more recently; on March 25th, 2020, to be exact. It is a memorable date because it was the first day of a nationwide lockdown in New Zealand.
It also didn’t start out with a plan of attack to finally write that novel. In fact, it began with another book entirely, a journal called, Bucket List: 101 things I want to do with my one wild and precious life.
For all of us, lockdown was a time of self-reflection and evaluation. Who we were, what we wanted, and how we wanted to live our lives. For many of us it was about re-evaluating our dreams and pursuits. Looking at our bucket lists and goal charts, our current trajectories, and asking ourselves the very important questions: Do I still want this dream? Have I not completed this dream because I’m afraid? Have I not succeeded because I’m not disciplined enough? Or has this dream, perhaps, changed, altered? Have I changed? What is it that I want in this “one wild and precious” life of mine?
After asking myself these questions there was no escaping that what I had written on Number One of that Bucket List was the same one it had always been. It had been a dream all my life—not always front and center, but always there, always calling. Was it still? Yes, I answered. Do I still love to write? Yes, I answered. So what was stopping me? Time? Fear? The hustle and bustle of everyday work and errands? Sure. But now, in lockdown? Well, nothing.
Publish a novel
The words stared up at me on the page, like a challenge.
And this is how I found myself signed up to Camp NaNoWriMo, a challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I’d considered the idea of writing a travel memoir—had a title, all those long notes and emails and blogs in front of me, some of my best writing in 20 years. And yet, it was impossible to consider writing a nonfiction in this strange time in the world.
I decided to try again with my passion of fiction, taking the work I’d done preparing for my travel memoir and instead creating the lead character who shared my passion for travel, a waitress and who ends up in one of my favorite places: Naxos, Greece. In some ways, creating Jory was a love letter to 20 years of travel.
I had the character of Marjory ‘Jory’ St. James, my intrepid traveler, and the woman, Cressida Thermopolis, whose guest house she finds herself in. But other than that, I didn’t have much of a writing plan. What I did have was a word count—if I didn’t write something and upload my word count to NaNoWriMo each day, I wouldn’t complete my goal. I thought there was a charming, delightful story somewhere here, something that I could try to publish, so I began to write. And write and write and write.
Until one night, about 20,000 words in, I got complete and utter writer’s block.
I was an hour into my designated writing time and lost as to where to go in the story when I started wandering through my house. To say I “stumbled” upon a cookbook is not really an accurate rendition of the story. When you have a one-bedroom cottage that houses, at last count, 472 cookbooks (chef partner), you rather stumble upon them every three seconds. But on this particular night, I did happen upon this cookbook collection and stumble onto the Greek cookbook shelf in a way that I hadn’t before noticed, despite walking this section of my little house about a hundred plus times a day.
A cookbook. A recipe, I thought. That could definitely fill out a couple hundred words at least.
I sat down to write just enough to get my word count that night with an enticing Greek recipe when suddenly Cressida, the guest house owner, became a magical baker! The Secrets of the Little Greek Taverna now had a title, a plot, a dream, and a vision.
As I began to write the story of Cressida and her gift of cooking her emotions into her food, I was also discovering she was a person whose life dream was at a crossroad, who was questioning whether she should, and could, pursue her dream of opening her Taverna, despite the tragedy of losing her husband.
Check out Erin Palmisano’s The Secrets of the Little Greek Taverna here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
Did she still want that dream? Had her dream changed? Things happen in life, dreams do change. Sometimes we no longer want things that we once did. And other times, something else is holding us back, and we DO still want to pursue that dream. This I knew. It was, after all, how I had started writing this novel.
As Cressida’s dream began to unfold, my own dream to be a writer began to unfold as well. Despite the fact that my novel was shaping up to have many aspects of magical realism, the story within, of actually opening the Taverna, was incredibly pragmatic, and a process I knew well from opening my own restaurants.
The process goes as such: It seems too big, too grand, too much at the beginning. You feel like you’re never going to get there. You wonder how this empty space is going to become something. How is an idea going to become a reality? It seems too overwhelming.
But every day I would write 1,500 words that would take Cressida, with the help of Jory and Mago, through the step-by-step process of creating something from nothing, a vision in an empty space, a dream into a reality.
I don’t know when I knew that my own dream was being mirrored. Like opening the Taverna, writing a novel begins feeling too big, and you think it impossible to imagine how that empty space, those empty pages, would become a story, a novel. But step by step, moment by moment, and word by word, it happens. And that is where the magic lies.
One thing I have learned on this journey of writing and publishing my first novel and in it, finding my voice, my genre, my passion, is that sometimes as a writer, we are not intentional. We are conduits of something bigger than us, perhaps that lives in our subconscious or in the world around that we are trying to cope with. That’s my greatest love of writing, stumbling upon these moments, ideas, and characters that seem to have a home through me and therefore simultaneously making my dreams come true.
With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!
When I was writing this story I was living my own dream. The moment this story took off it was a tingling in my fingers when I typed, just like when Cressida needed to bake. Magic.
Cressida’s dream came true with the help of her friends when they opened the Little Greek Taverna. My dream came true the day The Secrets of the Little Greek Taverna was published.
Dreams are not things that we look at complacently, or passively. They inspire us to be better, to live happily, joyfully. To be bold, to take risks, to be scared. To question, evaluate, re-evaluate. Dreams can be big or small, everyday dreams or life dreams. Dreams can change, dreams can dwindle, dreams can pass, dreams can come true. But dreams can never die. We never stop dreaming, for to dream is to live. And the courage to dream is what makes us who we are.
Never stop dreaming.
X Erin