Writing Home
By Juliet Marillier | March 8, 2023 |
When I think of the word home in relation to writing fiction, certain novels spring immediately to mind. There’s Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, in which home and family are the core that binds all. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in keeping with much high fantasy, has an epic journey away from home and an eventual return, but our protagonist is so changed by his experiences that the old home no longer fits him. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer, is a long-time favourite of mine. Through letters exchanged between various characters, it tells a moving story of life under wartime occupation on the island of Guernsey, and the power of books and reading to unite a community in times of crisis. It is anchored, not only by the idea of Guernsey as both ancestral and newly discovered home, but also by the way its motley crew of characters becomes a kind of family. And what about A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles? Its central character, under lengthy house arrest in a luxury hotel, has the remarkable capacity to create a home and draw in a circle that feels like family. Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, whose framework is that of the Dickens classic David Copperfield, is a powerful story of a young man from a deprived background growing up in an inadequate foster care system, and shows the reader that home may not necessarily be a physical place. Sometimes it may be about friendship, community, or meeting just one person who believes in you. It can be a long journey for the damaged spirit to find that home, a journey every bit as epic as Frodo’s from the Shire to Mount Doom (and back again.)
Many traditional tales are built on journeys – stories of “there and back again.” Often three siblings in turn (ah, that magical number 3) are sent out on a quest of some kind, perhaps grand in scale, perhaps as domestic as fetching water from the well. The behaviour of each brother or sister determines how the quest concludes. Generosity of spirit, or kindness, or selflessness, often sees the youngest or least likely sibling achieve the goal. If magic is involved, the right behaviour may mean it works in your favour – for instance, when you speak you cough up rubies and diamonds rather than frogs and toads. I can’t say I find either appealing! Or the quest may be undertaken solo, as with Jack and the Beanstalk, requiring physical strength, quick wits, and a readiness to heed good advice. These stories don’t always contain a return home, at least not to the home of before. In fairy tales, achieving the quest tends to enrich the protagonist’s circumstances so that the hut becomes a comfortable house, or the house a mansion, or the mansion a castle. What is the message of such stories? Do good and you will become wealthy? Do good and you will become powerful? The message that doing good will make you happy can get a little lost sometimes. But as I’ve said before, those tales change with the passage of time and the consequent changes of social norms. My story Copper, Silver, Gold is based on the fairy tale The Tinder Box, in whose best-known form a royal bride is obtained through violence and deception. There’s neither kindness nor compassion in that old tale, and I found it satisfying to write my own version, in which making the soldier protagonist female opened up all sorts of possibilities. The framework of the fairy tale with its underground treasure and its three monstrous dogs is still there, but mine is a story about the trauma of wartime, the bonds of friendship, and how when everything seems lost, you may still be able to build a new home and family. I did a similar reworking with The Witching Well, loosely based on the Scottish border tale, The Well of the World’s End, a variant of the frog prince idea – mine has a mother driven to extremes by grief, a burdened daughter, and a toad who is not a prince. There’s magic involved, but at heart it’s a story about a home and family shattered by loss and rebuilt by love, compassion and patience. As I pen this post, I realise how often I write about home in one form or another: losing it, finding it, changing it, being changed by it.
Home, in the broader sense, can play a part not only in what we choose to write, but also in how we do it. The same goes for creative art of all kinds. Home can be many things: where we live now; where we lived in the past – perhaps the place of our birth or childhood – or somewhere we spent happy times. A home may be a house, a family, a community, a town/city, or something broader: a region, environment or culture. Our true home is most likely made up of several of those. It is wherever you know you belong. To build that sense of belonging into your work, whether it’s writing, visual art, music, dance or theatre, is to share it, and that is a magic both old and new.
In Druidry, we recognise the spirit of those who came before us, the many generations that contributed to what we are now. From our ancestors come our traditions, our culture, our bonds with the natural world, and the stories that are central to our identity. That heritage is part of home and belonging. Although I have lived in Australia now for longer than anywhere else, I know I’m home when I return to the place of my birth and upbringing, Aotearoa New Zealand with its natural beauty and rich indigenous culture. It’s no wonder forests feature so often in my stories. I feel something similar when I walk through the wild places of the Celtic countries where my ancestry lies, or hear a particular accent or a familiar piece of traditional music. Those are deep connections; it’s as if the ancestors are walking beside me, whispering their tales.
I know how fortunate I am to have such freedom. In today’s world many people have seen their physical homes and families obliterated, their culture suppressed, their lives turned upside down. Yet home survives, deep inside the wounded spirit. It’s a song ringing out in a subway full of displaced people. It’s a hug and a smile in a city street above whose rubble a brave flag flies. It’s a refugee community forming a choir to sing the old songs. It’s a story whispered by firelight.
What is home to you? Does it feed into your creative work, and if so how? Know any great reads in which the concept of home is significant? Feel free to recommend.
Juliet Marillier has written twenty-four novels for adults and young adults and two collections of short fiction. Her works of historical fantasy have been published around the world and have won numerous awards. Juliet’s most recent series was Warrior Bards, of which the third and final book, A Song of Flight, was published in 2021. Her collection of reimagined fairy tales, Mother Thorn and Other Tales of Courage and Kindness, had its trade release in 2022. Mother Thorn is illustrated by Kathleen Jennings and published by Serenity Press.
Juliet is currently working on a two-book fantasy series. The first book in this duology, The Amber Owl, will be published by New Dawn in February 2025.
When not writing, Juliet looks after a small crew of rescue dogs.
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Juliet, I love how you describe home on so many levels. The story I’m working on has its roots in a family ‘myth’. As the young protagonist seeks to prove its veracity and live up to its lofty standards, her naive view of the is myth is shattered. Only when she embraces the dark side of her family’s history does she begin to see it as a whole. That hard-won acceptance of who and what she really is becomes her new definition of ‘home’. I grew up hearing that my heritage was mainly Italian, but the first time I heard the wild notes of a bagpipe, I burst into tears. That deep soul response has led me on a wonderful journey that has ultimately led me home. Thank you for this delightful and beautiful post!
Susan, how wonderful to hear about that ”deep soul response” – I believe those of us who experience that are truly blessed by the connection. I love the sound of the story you are writing!
Hi Juliet — It’s funny how the concept of home plays so heavily into my work without my conscious effort. I’ve been working on getting book two of The Sundered Nation ready for publication, and I can see how home plays into this stage of Vahldan and Elan’s journey. They’re both so ready to reject their ancestral home and its bonds that they go to great extremes to create a new home, only to learn that such bonds are not so easily severed.
As for me, I have come to an appreciation of Lake Michigan’s powerful presence in my own comprehension of home. Although I don’t live in the town in which I grew up, all I have to do is visit the shore, hear the lap or roar of the waves, feel the freshness of the windy air and the soft sand under my feet, and I am home. Thanks for another evocative and wise essay!
Thank you, Vaughn! Our senses remind us of home and heritage in the most surprising ways, sometimes. Reading your comment I can see you there on the shore. I’m about to take a physical trip home (to New Zealand) and I will no doubt return here enriched by the experience.
Hello Juliet. Thank you for taking up a great challenge facing all writers: to give readers a sense of home, a sense of place. I know a man who insists it makes no difference to him where he lives. Although his view couldn’t be more different from mine, I am inclined to believe him. His home is his head. What engages him are the printed page and music, neither of which require any literal home. He puts me in mind of a scientist in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle who finishes the breakfast his wife made him, and leaves a tip.
For me, home is also a state of mind, but wholly dependent on the sense of security and belonging that come from familiar surroundings. People and pets I know and care about, objects where they belong, routines firmly in place. It’s reflected in what I write. My characters are strictly fictitious, but they always operate in settings that I know well by having lived in them.
You ask for stories that treat of home. It’s been about sixty years since I read The Grapes of Wrath, and I’m reading it again. The power of home is again being branded on my psyche by seeing and feeling what its loss does to a sharecropper family. The book is still worth everyone’s time.
Hi Barry. Pets and routines play a big part in creating home for me too – I’m noticing it this week when I am visiting the home of my birth and upbringing, but far from my current home and beloved dogs, and also discombombulated by the changes in routine – I, too, need the security those elements provide.
I should revisit The Grapes of Wrath, some time when I have the emotional fortitude required! Haven’t read it since I was a student, long, long ago.
Home can be family, hearth, heritage, community, and the place of childhood safety and innocent adventures. Home is where we learn what we need for life: love, loyalty, kindness, courage and connection. Home is where we form our values and become ourselves. Home is clean honesty, unconditional acceptance and unstinting forgiveness.
More than anything, though, home is where goodness dwells. If the place where you grew up is not like that, it is not home. Home, then, is somewhere else. In a story, returning home is powerful. It’s safe harbor, the anchorage at the end of the journey. Odysseus sailed home for a reason. Adventures are grand but home is where what we truly seek is found.
In life, we must leave home–most of us anyway–but emotionally home never leaves us. That’s because what we truly seek is goodness. That’s the quest. That’s the treasure. We journey only to find what we needed is what we had all along and we have that because whether it’s still there, reachable or not, we all have inside of us home.
Not everyone is writing a return, or a there-and-back story. That’s okay. But what makes a hero or heroine is what’s inside them and how they act and nothing is more heroic and binding as goodness. There are many protagonists in the stories that I read, but there are few heroes. Maybe we need to spend more time at home.
Written with your usual wisdom, Donald. Thank you for the insight.
Juliet, I focussed on your mention of the spirits who came before us, for in my WIP, the novel starts with the MC coming upon her old home while running. Why has she avoided it? We get some sense of the ghosts of her life occupying that space. We come to know that her unsavory childhood still lingers with unanswered question. Am I writing a ghost story? No, but I do believe we all live and walk with the memories of the places where we have lived. I focus on that. Just today, my husband was asking questions about my grandmother’s basement! Are we a strange duo? No, we just hunger to know and understand the lives of our forebears. Thanks for this post.
Elizabeth, it sounds as if there are some intriguing story questions in your WIP. There’s at least one big unanswered question in my own family history, about which the truth will never come out now. In my grandmother’s time it would have been shocking; now, not so much. I guess many lives have restless ghosts, or powerful memories. Great fuel for storytelling.
Home! Sometimes I wonder if I’ll always write about it. But as an immigrant, who hasn’t stayed in one place for more than a few years until now, one has to carry the sense of home within oneself. Still when we moved to Charleston, SC, eleven years ago, I wept because I felt at home. Never before did I have this feeling. And it is puzzling because I grew up in the interior of India, so it has nothing to do with the salty sea air. But the people! The beautiful liturgy!
I’m reading a gorgeous book–The Book of Everlasting Things by Aanchal Malhotra–an epic tale of two lovers, a Hindu boy and a Muslim girl, during Partition. Above all, it is about home. She evokes it so beautifully with smells–my own sense of smell has been heightened as I remember long-forgotten smells…of my mother, a friend, the pup. Ah! Home! Thank you, Juliet, for this lovely post.
Hi Vijaya, and thank you for the comment. I will look for The Book of Everlasting Things, it sounds wonderful. As for smells … I keep being reminded of how important the five senses are in storytelling, not only to conjure up a setting, but for the way they may awaken memories or bring emotions to the surface.
Juliet, You’ve caught me during a week when I find myself unexpectedly contemplating how many of my 1st draft chapters deal with my heroine’s struggle for recognition at home among family before she losses her identity and must take on the gods. When I started writing I never expected her to spend more than a few pages at home. But perhaps I should have. For I have learned this. Writing them I’ve become intimately connected to my heroine and life in her story world. Home is where we first collide with others’ expectations. Where our hopes and doubts and courage and fears are first stress-tested. Home roots and forms us. And it is what we must leave behind ir transcend to grow in power, wisdom, and/or heart. Doubtless these early chapters will be condensed or killed. But I writing them gave me so much more than backstory. They gave me who she is.
Wonderful comment, Torrie. Even if you ditch those early chapters, what you learned about your heroine will make the whole story deeper and more meaningful (but you don’t need me to tell you that!) Good luck with the project, hope it continues to go well.
Juliet, thank you for this potent and pungent essay. Reading your first few lines, I thought instantly of A Gentleman in Moscow, of the home the character creates, and especially of the moment (spoiler alert) when he breaks house arrest in desperation and utters (for the first time, as I recall) the words “my daughter.” His action and his words together add up to more than their sum.
The home I have written about countless times, never to my satisfaction, is a stretch of sandy rocky beach on the coast of Southeast Alaska: fog burning off to reveal mountains still topped with snow, mussel shells, tiny crabs under smooth gray rocks, strands of seaweed, driftwood, gulls, fishing boats chugging through the bay between tiny green islands, the tide approaching or receding, a very large rock with a hollowed-out shelf on the ocean side, big enough for a little girl to dream on, watching the tide, or for a courting couple to enjoy a little seclusion. When I returned years later, it had all been drowned to accommodate a marina for pleasure boats.
Beautifully written, Anna. How devastating to return to a special and beloved natural place from your childhood to find it obliterated to make way for a man-made environment. You brought back an old memory of mine with this, related to a light-filled birch grove in the place of my childhood holidays, which I tried to revisit as an adult – it was gone. It felt like the wanton destruction of something magic.
This was lovely, Juliet, thank you. I’m always intrigued by the notion of home and how it changes as we change. There are places I’ve lived for brief periods that almost instantly felt like home, that I still dream of, and places I’ve lived that had all the ‘right’ requirements but never felt like home at all.
Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite books about home. The moors are described so vividly, and the way Heathcliff is driven out of his home, returning rich enough to purchase it only to destroy it and everything he’s loved, fascinates me.
Thank you, Liz. I hadn’t considered Wuthering Heights in the context of home. Although it’s such a celebrated work I’ve never engaged with it for various reasons, mostly my failure to feel much empathy with any of the characters. Maybe I should attempt a re-read in the light of your observation!