Sara Kuhl

As writers, we often develop deep relationships with our characters. We talk to them while we’re in the shower. At night, we dream of them. Our characters live side-by-side with us for long stretches. So when it comes time to push their narrative to a place that forces us to make a choice that could hurt them, we may opt to give them a sprained leg when what’s really necessary is an amputation.

I’ve danced around causing my own beloved characters pain. In an early draft of a story about a boy who drowns, I refused to allow the parents to feel the anguish of that loss. I wanted to tie up their lives in neat little packages and allow them to go on their way.

I know. The impulse makes no sense. After ripping out their hearts, I wanted everything to be OK. How could I as a writer drown a child and then not allow the parents feel the deep and utter pain of that death? I wanted them to have a sprained leg instead of an amputation.

Back to the manuscript I went, taking the father and the mother to those dark places that can be challenging not only to explore but also to translate to the page. It is in those moments of harshness and despair that we writers often touch our readers deeply by allowing them to join in universal experience of our character. My story still isn’t right for many reasons, but in writing a scene about the father’s reaction to his son’s death, I wept. So maybe, just maybe, I am getting a little closer.

I like to think I’m not alone in this desire to protect my characters. I believe Willa Cather suffered from this same affliction. I have no concrete evidence to support my claim. She didn’t write of this issue in the recently released volume of her letters. (The Selected Letters of Willa Cather is worth the time for any writer. Her discussion of craft will have you thinking differently about your own process and characters.) As I thought about my own plight in terms of being an overprotective writer, I began to realized that one only need look at Cather’s prairie trilogy — O Pioneers!, Song of the Lark, My Ántonia — for an example of a highly accomplished and acclaimed author who also protected her characters, yet grew and changed as she matured as a writer.

These now classic stories of life on the Nebraska prairie were published between 1913 and 1918. The trilogy wasn’t her first foray into publishing. She already had a volume of poetry, a collection of short stories and first novel to her credit when the prairie novels were released. Cather struggled with those early publications and found little that she liked in the work and did not discover her voice until she wrote O Pioneers! Her voice only emerged after some serious pushing from her mentor, Sarah Orne Jewett. Orne Jewett told Cather, “Write it as it is, don’t try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way—you will have to make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new, don’t let that frighten you. Don’t try to write the kind of short story that this or that magazine wants—write the truth, and let them take it or leave it.”

Willa Cather followed her mentor’s advice and a century’s worth of readers are grateful. (Note to self, listen to your mentors.)

Cather begins her examination of life on the frontier in O Pioneers! Alexandria, Cather’s strong and capable protagonist, is anointed as the head of the family by her father as he lay dying. In that episode, Alexandria’s brothers are stunned that a woman would be given charge over them. Remember, this book was published seven years prior to the ratification of the nineteenth amendment, which granted women the right to vote. The stalwart father fades into the early pages of novel and life simply forges on for his offspring. I believe this is a case of Cather providing a sprain when something more dramatic may have been more appropriate.

Some may argue that Cather is brutal in her treatment of Alexandria’s brother, Emil, and his lover, Marie, with a murder scene in the orchard. However, even that episode is told from a distance, away from the pain of the death of two young and vibrant souls. The reader only hears the details of their deaths from Alexandria’s friend and confidant, the mystical Norwegian Ivar.

It isn’t until her final book of the trilogy, My Ántonia, that Cather gives insight into the harsh realities of immigrant life on the unforgiving flats of Nebraska. Of the three novels, My Ántonia, is the most acclaimed. The writing is beautiful and sparse. Cather honed her use of episodic writing to such an art that most readers never realize they are not reading a traditional narrative. And she creates characters with depth and emotional anguish that surpass any of her previous writing. Compared to the quiet death of Alexandria’s father, Cather retells a story she first heard when she arrived in Nebraska at the age of nine. Ántonia’s beloved, soft and kind father commits suicide in the family’s barn one night after dinner. The story of the actual death is retold through the eyes of a hired man. Again, Cather places distance between the reader and the violence. But that suicide alerts the reader that Ántonia’s future will be different from the easier life of Alexandria and Cather carries through giving Ántonia a challenging, but rewarding path.

I’d like to think that Cather deeply pondered the fate of her characters. I know she spent time talking with them each day and living with them while she wrote. She loved Thea from The Song of the Lark so much that the novel is overwritten despite efforts to winnow it down. I picture Cather asking herself questions like, “What is the worst thing that can happen to my character and will the action be believable to the reader?” Then, I see her talking it out with her characters, debating the outcomes, and finally delving into her stories, and pulling out the sharp amputation saw when necessary.

Now, I look toward Cather’s example anytime I return to the page. I think of the joy and the suffering of my characters, for without the full emotional experiences aren’t our stories just one-dimensional pablum? In my story of the boy who drowns, I take the father to the place where his son is lost. I put the father in the water. I allow him the experience of trying to relive the those last moments, to feel the pull of the Wisconsin River’s violent current and I let him make the choice to let the current take him or pull himself back to the shore to face life with a child gone.

Sara Kuhl is a fiction writer who is working on her MFA at Converse College. Through the wise guidance of a writing mentor, she only recently found her soul sister in Willa Cather. Kuhl, a northerner by birth, feels fortunate to be privy to a cabal of strong Southern writers at Converse. When not attempting to push her characters to emotional extremes, she is the director of university marketing and media relations at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.