Don't Let Research Get In Your Way, by Ames Sheldon

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Forty years ago, I had a dream in which Blanche Ames told me to write her autobiography. I’d just read about Blanche while I was working with a team to assemble a massive reference book entitled Women’s History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States. Of course, her name had caught my attention. Then I learned that Blanche was a relative of mine – she was my grandmother’s aunt.

How could I possibly write an autobiography for a woman I didn’t know? I figured what I wrote would have to be fiction – historically accurate fiction.

I’m grateful that historical fiction doesn’t go out of date, though it certainly can reflect dated language, attitudes, and prejudices that can make a person squeamish. It has taken me decades to get my Blanche novel completed, but I think it is actually more timely than ever.

After my dream, I started doing research – a lot of research. I spent three separate visits to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College perusing primary sources in the Ames Family Papers. I read and had copies made of cartoons and drawings by Blanche, notes, speeches, meeting announcements and minutes, flyers, newspaper and magazine articles, academic papers, and a history of the birth control movement in Massachusetts.

I learned that Blanche Ames was involved in the suffrage movement; she was art director of the Woman’s Journal; and she created suffrage cartoons that were published in newspapers and magazines across the country. She helped found the Birth Control League of Massachusetts in 1916 and served as its president until 1935. She was president of the New England Hospital for Women and Children. A portrait painter, she also was a talented botanical illustrator, wife of Oakes Ames (a Harvard professor and world authority on orchids), and mother of their four children.

 Then it was time to start writing. I thought the best way to approximate the feel of an autobiography by Blanche was to create my own version of her diary. I didn’t find any diaries in my research, but I had letters to and from her to work with.

The problem with doing a lot of research is that one can get bogged down. I love the details. For example, Blanche and Oakes rang an old bell every night until women won the vote in 1920. During World War II, Blanche demonstrated her invention for ensnaring the propellers of enemy airplanes to invited guests from the Pentagon and the president of MIT. I loved learning things like that! But how to fit in this information? A writer can drown in details. Trying to incorporate everything I learned about Blanche got in the way of telling my story. Blanche did not provide me with a plot to propel the action.

What struck me most about Blanche’s accomplishments was her role in founding the Birth Control League of Massachusetts. When it came to developing the character of Kate, the fictional protagonist inspired by Blanche in my novel LEMONS IN THE GARDEN OF LOVE, I had to get creative. I needed to come up with a reason why Kate is so passionate about reproductive freedom. What drives Kate – and why? What does she want? What happens when she doesn’t get what she wants? As I tried to answer these questions, I ended up creating a history for Kate that diverges from Blanche’s in important ways. I decided to give Kate a botched abortion in Paris while she was studying painting in an atelier there, and then later she learns that she can never have children.

In order to provide more tension, I developed another character, Cassie, Kate’s descendent, who is trying to learn all she can about Kate. A graduate student in women’s studies at the University of Minnesota in 1977, Cassie is seeking a topic for her doctoral dissertation. On the way to her sister’s wedding, she stops at Smith College and discovers Kate’s suffrage cartoons, records of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts, and many other items. At the wedding, Cassie starts hearing bits and pieces about Kate’s life, as she tries to piece together what happened to Kate in Paris.

Kate’s diary dominated the first draft of this novel. The diary entries about Kate’s life over the years from 1910 to 1960 contained a great deal of historical detail about her life and accurate language from the period. The entries were loosely strung together by narrative about the wedding weekend, Cassie’s frequent ducking out of the festivities to read Kate’s diary, and minutia about housing, meals, gifts, and the like. There wasn’t enough tension. The result was still too close to the facts I started with. Eventually I put the manuscript away.

When the 45th President was inaugurated in 2017, I pulled my draft back out of its box because it seemed to me that my story had become more pertinent given the state of the nation and the increasing limits being placed on women’s reproductive rights.

As I rewrote this novel, I had to decide on my leading lady: was it Kate or was it Cassie? Whose story would have enough power to drive the action? It didn’t seem to be Kate’s. I drew up new scenes and developments that focused on Cassie’s story.

For a historical novel about reproductive freedom, wouldn’t I need more than one pregnant woman and a variety of ways these women respond to their circumstances? I added a few more, starting with Cassie’s sister, whose wedding is necessitated by her unexpected premarital pregnancy. I thought I’d better interview a number of women who’d had abortions before and after Roe v. Wade as well, which added another layer of historical accuracy.

By that time, I’d written and published two award-winning historical novels, Eleanor’s Wars and Don’t Put the Boats Away, so I had a better idea what was needed to bring LEMONS IN THE GARDEN OF LOVE to life. Finally, I had a manuscript that passed muster with She Writes Press.


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