How I Came to Write The Art of Love

Why do historical fiction writers choose the time periods they do? Perhaps a book or movie they enjoyed in childhood stuck with them, or an article about a facinating historical event caught their eye.  Sometimes the concept for a complete book or even an entire series pops into a writer’s head.  I wish!

For me, it was all about the numbers.

Back in 2013 I began writing a contemporary novel of romantic suspense which turned into Sinner’s Grove, Book One of my “Sinner’s Grove” series. The story is about a family working to re-open an artists’ retreat on the northern California coast that had been shut down for decades.  I needed an “origin story” about the retreat, so I got out my calculator and worked backward to figure out when the founders might have lived.  The numbers pointed to the turn of the twentieth century, so that’s the time period I dialed into.

I put my main characters in San Francisco because I grew up near there and after college, I earned a master’s degree at San Francisco State University. “The Golden City” has always held a special place in my heart.

So, I had a time period and a place.  Now what?  I remembered enough local history to know that the city I loved had boomed as a result of both the California and the Klondike gold rushes.  I thought of my dearly loved Da, who as a teenager had worked in Canada’s Yukon Territory, on and near the Klondike River, in the aftermath of that wild time. His sister, my great-aunt, had even married the brother of one of the “Klondike Kings”!

A few years before my grandfather died, my father and I recorded his recollections of that period.  Da was quite specific about what he remembered.  Here was someone in my own family who had hiked the infamous Chilkoot Pass, mushed sled dogs, worked a placer mining claim, dealt with sub-zero winters, and flourished in conditions most of us would consider primitive at best.  He’d not even graduated from high school, but he was smart and honest and an extremely hard worker.  Eventually he became a successful rancher and businessman, and I admired him greatly.  Why not built a story around a character with my grandfather’s qualities?  And August Wolff was born.

The time period I decided to set my stories in is known to most historians as America’s “Gilded Age.” It generally spans from the end of the Civl War to the turn of the twentieth century. Many call the period just after that (up until WWI) the “Progressive Era,” but today that word has too many connotations, both good and bad, so I stay away from it.  Besides, I love describing the entire era as “gilded” because it brings to mind a country that is shining on the surface, but perhaps not so luminous underneath. However you choose to refer to that period, it’s marked by the first “cracking” of social constructs.  Like the ice of the Klondike River after the first spring thaw, society was starting to experience upheavals in traditions that had been followed by generations.

America was becoming an industrial power and jobs in cities convinced many men and women to leave their rural roots behind.  That migration opened up doors for women that had not been available before.

At the same time, traditionalists worried that women were starting to flout society’s rules.  The tension between old and new always makes for great fictional conflict, and I knew my main character, Amelia Starling, would somehow push against the norm.

I know very little about classic visual arts–my creativity usually ends up on the page and not on a canvas or pedestal.  To learn more about painting and sculpture, I created a fictional group of artists, one of whom became my Amelia.  She is a budding portraitist with the talent and courage to press forward into what had for the most part been a man’s world.  Family dynamics complicate her life immeasurably, causing her to make a gut-wrenching decision that most of us would not be able to make.

As I think about it, the ideas that went into my novel The Art of Love consist of “a little bit of this and a little bit of that.” All those memories, bits of family lore, and “what if” moments came together in a novel that launched what is now a six part historical saga called “The Golden City.” Soon a mystery series will spin off from that.  Not bad from a story that started with a calculator!