We Need More Mary Wollstonecraft with Samantha Silva

Join me as I chat with Samantha Silva, author of Love and Fury and Mr. Dickens and His Carol.

Highlights:

• Origins of Love and Fury
• Why Mary Wollstonecraft--her life, her writing, and her ongoing contribution as the "first feminist"
• Structuring Love and Fury - the use of ten plot points
• Sense and sensibility in Love and Fury
• Mary Wollstonecraft's long road back into public consciousness a hundred years after her death
• Reading from Love and Fury
• Finding moments as metaphors when writing historical fiction
• Writing history and writing historical fiction -- what are the differences?
• Origins of Mr. Dickens and His Carol
• Charles Dickens--rock star of his age
• Screenwriting vs novel writing
• Advice for new authors

Press Play now & be sure to check out  Love and Fury and Mr. Dickens and His Carol on Art In Fiction.

Samantha Silva's Website

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Transcript

Hello and welcome. I’m Carol Cram, host of the Art In Fiction Podcast. This episode features Samantha Silva, author of Love and Fury and Mr. Dickens and His Carol listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction. 

In addition to writing novels and short fiction, Samantha is a screenwriter who has sold film projects to Paramount, Universal, and New Line Cinema. Samantha graduated from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, where she studied in Bologna, Italy and Washington, D.C. She’s an avid Italophile and a forever Dickens devotee.

Carol Cram:

Welcome to the Art In Fiction podcast, Samantha.

Samantha Silva:

I'm so happy to be here, Carol. Thank you for having me.

Carol Cram:

Well, thank you. I want to chat today about both of your novels that are included on Art In Fiction. First off, I just loved them. I'm a former English major, as most authors are, and I so enjoy getting into the heads of both Mary Wollstonecraft in Love and Fury and Charles Dickens in Mr. Dickens and his Carol. 

But let's start with Love and Fury. I just loved how you went back and forth between the points of view of the midwife Mrs. Blenkinsop, which is a great name, by the way, and Mary Wollstonecraft with her newborn baby, who we all know will become Mary Shelley. So, what inspired you to write Love and Fury?

Samantha Silva:

I can't really talk about that without talking about Charles Dickens, which you'll probably find true in all my answers. But I cut my teeth as a screenwriter, which I did for several years. And so, Mr. Dickens and His Carol actually started as a screenplay, which I wrote probably 20 years ago. And it's the screenplay that got me an agent and my first deal in the business. We optioned the script over the span of maybe 12 years to four different companies in the US and in Europe. And each time, we had a kind of heartbreaking near-miss with the big screen. And so about 10 years ago, the circumstances of my own life changed, and it didn't make sense for me to really try to be in the business anymore without being in L.A., which I didn't want to do.

And so I thought, I know this story works. I own the rights to it, which is kind of amazing after having sold it four times. And maybe I'll try my hand at writing it as a novel. I'd written some short fiction, which I love. I love short form fiction, but I hadn't written a novel, and I sort of approached it the same way I did when I learned about screenwriting, which was that, well, this can't be that hard.

And as it turns out, it's extremely hard to write a novel, even if you know what the story is. And the story didn't change very much. So anyway, it ended up having a life, Mr. Dickens, which thrilled me. And then I owed Flatiron Books a second book, and I really hadn't thought about anything else.

I'd written other screenplays in the meantime but had not thought about any other novel subjects. And I was sitting in my agent's office in New York, a lovely English woman named Emma Perry. And it was the anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein. So Mary Shelley was everywhere. She was in the Zeitgeist, and everyone was talking about Frankenstein, but she said, what about Mary Wollstonecraft? Because everyone knows Mary Shelley, but almost no one knows Wollstonecraft. And when she said it, I myself had a flash of right, Mary Shelley, because Mary Shelley often wrote as Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft, and identified very much as Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft.

I knew almost nothing about her. And so, just really based on that simple conversation, I started reading biographies and her letters, and pretty soon you're completely seduced by what an extraordinary person she is. She was. I say is because she's very much alive to me. And it's a shame that we don't know more about her. She should be one of the heroes of feminism. And so that really launched me on kind of an extraordinary three-year research and writing project that ended up as Love and Fury.

Carol Cram:

Well, that's fantastic. So, Mary Wollstonecraft has been sort of in the news more, more lately, but, what did she write  that earned her this description as some people call her the first feminist, as you said?

Samantha Silva:

Well, of course, in the late 1700s when she was living and writing, there was no such ideas. Feminism didn't exist as a word. And so, she's considered sort of one of the original people to lay out an argument, the feminist argument, that women are equal to men. It's that simple. And it happened around the French Revolution when Edmond Burke, the conservative, Edmond Burke, sort of wrote a defense of the monarchy after the revolution, and against the rights of man.

Everybody wanted to respond to Burke. But I think Mary Wollstonecraft was actually first out of the gate, and she wrote a Vindication of the Rights of Man, which was this pamphlet. It was not published initially under her own name. So for a while, people didn't know she wrote it, but it's an eloquent argument for the French Revolution and the ideals of the French Revolution of equality, human equality and human rights, and human dignity and freedom.

And about six weeks later, she realized, well, I'm not done with that subject at all. And she wrote a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. And that was really the thing that I think still puts her on the map for people as the mother of feminism. Because in it, she argues that men and women are born with the same souls and the same brains and the same capacity to learn, and must be given the same opportunity, must be educated in the same way, that women cannot be siloed off as lesser citizens. They must take their place as equal citizens, which at that point, early in the French Revolution, was also being argued for. And that got lost along the way, but she was incredibly passionate about it. And so, that's sort of what put her certainly on the map as the person we now think of as kind of an icon and avatar of feminism.

Carol Cram:

Yes. And what comes through in your novel, which is written from the first person for Mary's part, is just her keen intelligence and her sensitivity and also her passion. You really just got that out so well. That must have been very interesting how you managed to do that. How did you do that?

Samantha Silva:

Well, I was daunted by the prospect of writing about her life. Not only because with Dickens, I chose a six-week period in his life when he's writing A Christmas Carol. And so in some ways, as a writer, when you give yourself more constraints, sometimes there's more, you can play more within the constraints. But the idea of trying to encapsulate her extraordinary life, even though she only lived 38 years, into a novel was really overwhelming to me. And I didn't understand how to do it and how to frame it. And then my screenwriting brain kicked in and I thought, what I really understand is plot points. And if any of us were asked what are, say, the 10 most significant plot points in your life, that being when you felt under pressure and you had to make a decision, and the decision that you made changed the trajectory of your life, or who you were as a human being.

And so, I really began to think about what those were in Mary's life and reading the biographies and letters and everything, like her writings, everything I could get my hands on. And I had a big piece of butcher paper up on my living room wall. And every time I found something that I thought might be a plot point, I would just put up a multicolored post-it note with that on it. And I was trying to look for a shape and a frame. And there were still so many incidents and so many things. But then I also remembered that I was first drawn to this because of the relationship between Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. And this idea that these two extraordinary women, mother and daughter, only shared 11 days together on this earth.

And I was sort of obsessed with what those 10 or 11 days would be, especially if in the first half of it you thought the baby was going to die because she was born weak and low. And there were rumors that they were building her coffin in the house. And then in the second half, after a doctor comes and sticks his dirty hand in your womb, you get puerperal fever when the placenta doesn't deliver. And so, Mary suddenly begins to realize that she's the one who's dying. So, like, having the frame of that period of time when they're together gave me sort of the real impetus for the design and structure of the novel. Like how, if you wanted to tell the story of your life, both to fill your daughter up with life force and then to leave behind your own legacy and your own experience, what stories you would tell.

And so I knew that I needed to choose 10 of those, one for each day. And once I have a structure again, I think because I come from screenwriting, I'm very structurally oriented. Once I had that structure, the novel started to fall in place for me. And especially Mrs. Blenkinsop. In fact, there, there was a midwife named Mrs. Blenkinsop who came from the Westminster lying-in. But almost nothing is known about her. And for me, she is the most fictionalized character in the novel. I really made her up pretty much out of whole cloth. But it was really important to me to have someone else in the room because they're alternating chapters. We could experience what was happening in the room in the house with Mary, each of those 10 or 11 days. And then that would alternate with Mary telling a story from her life to her daughter.

Carol Cram:

And that was brilliant. I think is what makes this novel is how you framed it. And I just love hearing that you started with those 10 plot points. That's actually very inspiring to me, just the way you framed it with that 10 days, and then from there it just exploded outwards into this incredibly rich and diverse story that you've come up with. But yes, structure is everything. 

I think sometimes new authors and old authors forget that. Get the structure right. I find that myself that when I can see it in my head as a whole, like an orb almost, then I can finally figure out what I'm doing. But it's like seeing the forest for the trees, right? So thank you for talking about it that way, because that that really makes a lot of sense. 

And then why you chose those 10 days after the birth, and also the alternating between Mrs. Blenkinsop, who of course, how can you not love her? She was great and Mary herself. It was wonderful because you got that interior and exterior at the same time.

Samantha Silva:

I really also came to love Mrs. Blenkinsop. I mean, it's scary to just make, in a world where there are all these real people, you're fictionalizing it's sort of scary to inject someone fictionalized into that. But I knew I'm very also very interested in and devoted to the idea of theme and that if you know what you're writing about all the time, if you get stuck, remind yourself what you're writing about. And so much of this novel, I mean, obviously it's about freedom and human dignity and the dignity of women and all of those things. But it's also a lot about sense and sensibility. And I hadn't realized when I started the novel, I guess I assumed that the idea of sense and sensibility was something Jane Austen made up.

I didn't understand that they had been arguing over those terms, philosophers and writers had been arguing over those terms, for a century. And that this is the tension that exists between the sort of the waning of the enlightenment and the emergence of the romantic movement is this tension between reason and feeling, sense and sensibility. And Mary lives in that tension. And because she herself is such a sensitive human being. And I would say probably mentally not well. She suffered from terrible depression and anxiety attacks and had been traumatized probably, terrible post-traumatic stress from her own childhood. But as much as her feelings led her to try to kill herself two times, she also is keenly aware that her emotions matter and that she knows she has a fine intellect, but what she wants is an intellect sort of tempered keenly by emotion.

And that is the tension between sense and sensibility. And so I loved the idea that that Blenkinsop would be an aspect of that conflict or that theme. And so, whereas Mary's always arguing for sense plus sensibility, Mrs. Blenkinsop is all sense, all rationality, all pragmatism. And then finally sort of through her engagement with Mary over the course of those days, she comes to be more self-aware and have an awareness of her own emotional life in a way she hadn't before. 

And so their goodbye scene is one of the most sort of important things I've ever written for me. How as a writer you still have favorite things that you go back to. And that scene makes me cry because they're so real to me. I can hear them having this goodbye scene, and that's the kind of magic you wait for. And I almost feel like I call it magic on purpose because at that point, I think you don't even feel like you're authoring it. You feel like you are the vessel for it. 

Carol Cram:

Like Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol. Yes, yes. And  when hearing you talk about sense and sensibility reminds me probably why I like your novel so much and wasn't even aware of why is that melding of the classical and the romantic, which has always been my favorite period in literature, in music, art—the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century or when the romantics were starting, and that age of reason was being questioned. And that is sort of Mary Wollestonecraft, isn't it? She's right in the middle there.

Samantha Silva:

She really is. And she wants to be taken seriously as an intellectual. And many people do, as a philosopher. And we should know her that way too. I mean, she's one of the most important 18th- century thinkers in the western world, and people don't know that. And that's an outrage. And in part that's because after her death, I mean, she still obviously had a lot of enemies, particularly, and in England they were terrified of her. But her husband, William Godwin, who was so touched and profoundly moved by his experience of her and had terrible grief when she died. And he wrote very quickly this memoir of her. It's not very long, I think it's called A Memoir of Mary Wollestonecraft. But in it, he sort of laid out everything.

I mean, he didn't hold anything back. He talked about her sex outside of marriage, her anxiety, her trembling fits, her child out of wedlock, her various= affairs, you know? And so everyone was scandalized by it. And the conservatives in England saw that as a way to denounce her and say, do you see what we've said about Mary Wollstonecraft? We must remove her from public consciousness. She's nothing but a kind of shameless hussy, and we always told you so. And so she disappears. Wollstonecraft literally disappears for more than a hundred years until people like Emma Goldman and Virginia Woolf start writing about her again, reading her work and writing about her. And it seems, I feel like now, Mary Wollstonecraft needs to make a return every hundred years to remind us how important she is and how important her work is, and that we still are fighting her fight. 

Carol Cram:

Yes, we are.

Samantha Silva:

I find that shocking. And it's certainly from the time I started the novel to the time I finished it, and now, I mean, we've watched in real time women being aggressively denied their rights as citizens, as equal citizens aggressively in the United States. And it makes Wollstonecraft and her story and this story all the more important, especially for young women to know. Young women must rediscover her. We need them to understand her as a living, breathing, experimenting thinker still among us, still influencing us, still causing us to question and argue and fight for our equality.

Carol Cram:

Exactly. Yes. I mean, I remember back in the seventies when I was first in university, she was starting to become very popular at that point. But you're right, it's so important that people understand what she did. And I think another thing that was wonderful in your novel is her intellectual abilities definitely shine through, but also her love for her daughter and the fact that you framed it around the birth of her daughter, which is an important event in a lot of people's lives. So you get both sides. You get the mental and the physical and the emotional in there. She was a very much a whole person in your novel.

Samantha Silva:

I think she is a whole person, and I really wanted to represent that. And of course, as is true for all whole people, there are contradictions and paradoxes and we're not consistent.

Carol Cram:

She was all over the place. Sometimes you wondered, what are you doing?

Samantha Silva:

I've spoken to lots of book clubs and various groups and, and there were people who said to me, I really didn't like it when you had her like fawning over Fuseli, the painter and sort of humiliating herself with the speculator Gilbert Imlay. And I said, yeah, I know. Isn't that a drag? How humans behave when they're in love. I mean, we all lose our minds. And actually, that's a good point about how to write a novel about someone with the stature of Mary Wollestonecraft. Because as long as I had that distance from her, I felt that I wouldn't do her justice. I didn't know how to tackle the sort of amazing subject. And then, after a while, you, well, the only way you're going to do it is if you can just understand her not as an icon or an avatar, but as a human being living in the time that she lived as a woman.

And so I really started to think about what was it like when she was a teenager? What was it like to be a teenager then? Because my guess is that even though so much of our lives are different in these two centuries we're talking about, a lot of the feelings are the same. And so it was kind of an entree, like an emotional entree for me into her life as a woman. If I could understand what it was like to be a teenager then in her circumstances. What was it like to give birth to a daughter out of wedlock? What was it like to fall in love, fall head over heels in love? What was it like to have an affair that ended up being unrequited love?

What was it like to discover sex when you were 30 years old and be a virgin until then? What was it like to fall in love with a woman, which I think, in many ways she did with her best friend Fanny Blood who died of tuberculosis in Portugal, very tragically. But I think that they probably came close, if not right across the line of being lovers. And so, beginning to really connect with her experiences as a woman in that way helped me write the novel. The intellectual stuff wasn't hard. It was allowing myself to just treat her as a human being and to show her flaws and show her foibles and the ways in which she was tortured and the ways in which she triumphed.

Carol Cram:

Yes. And that is why the book works so well, because as I said, you've got both sides of her, because we might not have the intellectual status of a Mary Wollstonecraft as a reader, but we all understand what it is to be in love. We understand what it is to be rejected, what it is to love a child, all of these are human emotions that we all get. So, by humanizing her, you make her even greater because she's also got that intellectual status.

Samantha Silva:

Thank you. And I did have women who came of age during the seventies who said to me, this was my life after reading the book. And they were really moved how much their experience still resembled hers.

Carol Cram:

And as you said, we're starting to return to that. 

Samantha Silva:

Like a fight for really a seat at the table. It's really incredible. So I'm glad that you saw that in the book, that what I wanted the book to be and hope it will be for anyone who reads it.

Carol Cram:

And so, would you like to do a short reading from it now?

Samantha Silva:

I would, and I'm actually going read a section that I've never read aloud before, but it's about her friend Fanny Blood, when they first meet, and they're both about 18, 19 years old. And Fanny makes her living doing botanical illustrations, and she really supports her family, her entire family, doing it. And they meet and Mary's just completely taken by her. Fanny is showing Mary some of her drawings. 

“A flower sometimes looks small and simple at first, but then you look closely, and see a world unto itself.”

“These are beautiful,” I said, looking across them.

“I love the idea that one with only male or female parts is an ‘imperfect’ flower, but one with both, that can reproduce on its own, has achieved the status of a ‘perfect’ flower.”

She was standing beside me with her hands on her hips, surveying her own drawings. She blew away a lock of hair that had fallen across her forehead, and pointed to the topmost part at the center of one of her flowers.

“They call this female part the ‘stigma.’ It’s where bees and insects drop the pollen in. But why a ‘stigma,’ I often wonder? I think of a stigma as a stain or scar.”

“A blot, a disgrace,” I said.

She looked at me. “A taint, a mark, a blame.”

“Yes, I said,” turning back to the drawing. “Females take so much blame, don’t they, for everything, and deserve almost none of it.”

“I think I would call it the ‘vessel’ instead.

“The blessed vessel.”

“’The blessed vessel,’” she repeated. “Yes.”

And like that, somehow, I knew that Fanny Blood would be the truest friend of my life.

She had better handwriting than I, better writing altogether, was calmer, neater, more precise in her thoughts and words, more disciplined and demanding in her thinking. Yet she possessed a sense of wonder; she laughed easily, at even the silliest things, and was capable of whimsy. Like me, she had a father who drank and gambled, but she didn’t resent him, and had found, through her drawings, a way to support herself and her family. She loved nature as much as I did, taught me the names of more flowers than I knew—the perfect and imperfect alike. In public we observed a personal reserve, but in private we were better than sisters, brushing each other’s hair, talking through the night, arguing over petty nothings, just for the fun of it. Every step I took toward her was rewarded with a step closer to me.

We soon began dreaming aloud of a life together. We would read and study without interruption. She would teach me the German and Latin she knew, and we would teach ourselves French, some days converse in French alone. We would take turns making meals, or stand side by side and cook them together; we’d share books, clothes (our simple taste); she might teach me to draw, I might teach her to dance, and if we could only afford one bed, we would share that, too. We would make, the two of us, a perfect household, where we would be the male and female parts together, whole unto ourselves, without a man.

Reverend Clare had imbued me thoroughly with a reverence for the ideas of John Locke, and Fanny was my ardent pupil. I read to her while she drew, and we talked of it, even on the pillow. Creatures of the same species, we agreed, had a natural equality, and no husband should have more power over his wife’s life than she had over his. I told her of my pledge never to marry, but now, all my resentment about my father’s cruelty, the favoring of Ned, had a basis in thought. It was unjust. It was my right, my human right, to shape my own future, just as it was for her and everyone else. It was an obligation to overthrow tyranny wherever it was found. That was our pledge to each other. Together Fanny and I would be free from the despotism of men, whether at home or in the world.

Carol Cram:

Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you, Samantha. What a wonderful image of the flower that you used to show that we need both. We need wholeness. That was a great idea. How did you get that idea of using the flower?

Samantha Silva:

Well, Fanny in real life was a botanical illustrator. And sometimes again, as when you write historical fiction, you're just handed things that that you think, okay, I've got flowers here. What are you as the writer going to do with those flowers? It's a little bit of the Chekov idea. If you put a flower on the mantle, it better go off by the end of the play. And so it was so rich. And of course, I'm a research hound, and I spent so much time looking at botanical drawings and reading about flowers. And another character, Erasmus Darwin, shows up a little bit later, and he's written The Loves of the Plants, which is a series of poems, really sexy, erotic poems about plants.

And so I just spent a lot of time on kind of understanding how flowers could be kind of an objective correlative for the book, how they could function as metaphor. And I love all these ideas. And later on, they choose a flower for each other. Like, if I were a flower, what flower would I be? And it's such an opportunity for a beautiful, intimate moment. And as a writer, you just can't resist those when they're given to you.

Carol Cram:

Exactly. And that does show you too, as a writer, to be on the lookout for those. You never know when you will find that kind of wonderful metaphor, which is what you made of the flowers. There's the magic, isn't it?

Samantha Silva:

It is. And I am always on the lookout, and I'm also superstitious enough that that I sort of think when I do stumble upon those things, that it means I'm on the right track somehow.

Carol Cram:

Yes, you get that feeling. And it doesn't happen every day. You kind of live for those moments.

Samantha Silva:

You do. In fact, in the middle of writing Love and Fury, it was right before the pandemic, I was in New York, and kind of having a crisis of faith as one does in the middle of an endeavor like this. And so a friend of mine for my birthday gave me the gift of a reading with her astrologer. And so I trundled off to her astrologer in New York. And he sort of identified immediately that you're doing something that's really hard. You feel like it is a slog; you can barely put one foot in front of the other. You're questioning all this stuff. But anyway, I said, well, yes, I'm writing a novel about Mary Wollstonecraft, and I don't know if I'm up to the task. And his eyes kind of lit up and he said, oh, well, when's her birthday?

And we spent the entire rest of the session doing Mary Wollstonecraft and looking at her birth chart and looking for confluences with mine. And I came out of it, in fact I wrote an essay about it for LitHub, thinking that it doesn't require me to believe in astrology or to be devoted to astrology to understand that that session was a gift to me, that he was giving me permission. He was saying to me, Mary Wollstonecraft wants this story to be told, and she wants you to tell it. And that was all I needed. I just needed a nudge from the universe. And it was enough. I came home, the pandemic roared to life. I put my head down at my dining room table, and when I looked up it, the novel was finished.

Carol Cram:

That's what you call, what Carlos Castaneda used to call, the agreement? When you find these intersections that just like, okay, you're on the right track.

Samantha Silva:

Yes, I love that idea. And I think that it's easy as a writer to be bereft when you don't have that because then you think, am I on the wrong track? Because I'm not getting any signs from the universe. So what does that mean? Should I rethink this all together?

Carol Cram:

Sometimes, yes.

Samantha Silva:

Sometimes yes! But that's also, I think, like the tension between intellect and feeling and sense and sensibility. It's like sometimes you set yourself a thinking problem, but there's this other huge weighty aspect to it. And you need to also pay attention to it as well, because the story needs to be whole. And can’t only be an idea, an intellectual idea that you're exploring. It has to also have this other component. And sometimes the component, it's given to you in ways that are beyond reason.

Carol Cram:

They are. Well, because you have that emotional resonance, and we can't explain that.

Samantha Silva:

No, no.

Carol Cram:

Which is part of being human.

Samantha Silva:

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Another aspect of writing this novel is that, as I said, the first thing I did was read every great biography I could get my hands on. And all the great biographers have tackled Mary Wollstonecraft. And you read them and they read like page-turners and the biographies of her are just fantastic. And so, you feel like, well, what's the point of writing her life as a novel? Because these people have pretty much done it. They've sort of found the novelistic aspects of her life. But then you start to realize that they've left cracks in her life story, which are also sort of where they leave the crumbs. Several biographers mentioned the possibility or alluded to the possibility that Wollstonecraft and Fanny Blood were lovers, but they don't have any letters to prove it.

There's nothing, there's no proof of it. And so they can't go there as biographers. But as a novelist, I can. That's where biographers leave you crumbs and cracks in their own sort of the structure of their own argument about the life. That's where the novelist can play. And so it took me a while to figure that out, that really, I was a detective. I was sort of hunting for the crumbs that they were leaving me. And that’s where the novel would be born.

Carol Cram:

That's a very good analogy. Yes. I think as historical novelists, we're not historians. We might research. We do research, but we're doing something a little bit different. Well, quite a bit different, actually. Yeah, I like that idea of we exist with the crumbs and then we can make with them what we will, and we can imbue the emotion and the things that historians can't because they have to be true to their sources. Exactly. We need to know some sources, but we don't have to be true to every single little thing. Right. We don't have to footnote. I think that's why I wanted to be an historical novelist and gave up being an academic because I really hated doing all the footnoting.

Samantha Silva:

Right, right. Not nearly as fun as what we do. I mean, they seem to be having fun, but it's, I agree, I don't have that kind of mind.

Carol Cram:

But when I talk to historians when I'm doing research, they are often quite excited about historical novelists. Like, they kind of wish they could do that too. And they think it's a really cool thing to do. I remember being very intimidated the first time I talked to an historian when I was writing my first novel. She won't want to talk to me. I'm not an historian. Well, she was absolutely fascinated by how I was taking the history she was confirming, but then turning it into characters and story and plot and all that. She says, wow, that's so cool.

Samantha Silva:

That's great. I also had a lot of anxiety about academic. I didn't know how this book would be received among the Wollstonecraft scholars. And because I'm an American, quite frankly, and the English academic world a very particular thing. But wow, those people have been nothing but warm and welcoming.

Carol Cram:

Let's talk a little bit about your debut novel, Mr. Dickens and his Carol. That's so delightful. Oh my goodness. It's funny, it's heartfelt. Back when I was in university, I had to read all of Dickens’s novels. I went to university in England and when you studied an author, you did everything. Actually, I don't think I did read all of them, but I read most of them. So I'm pretty familiar with Dickens's work. You really brought him to life in a way that I never really experienced him. So why did you choose Charles Dickens?

Samantha Silva:

I was not a Dickensfile when I started it. And I'd probably only read the obligatory, the requisite books from high school at that point, which in America are usually A Tale of Two Cities. Everyone knows A Christmas Carol, but maybe Great Expectations, but almost nothing else. But I had a writer friend who said, at one point we had to write a ghost story anthology movie about how Dickens came up with the carol because Victorians love to tell ghost stories and so when I read about how he actually came up with Carol, it didn't make any sense to me to do that. And so we let it drop completely. But I'd read enough about it that I think it lingered in my imagination.

And about two years later, I literally woke up one morning and I knew the entire story. It was definitely one of those things that was just given to me. I don't know if it was a dream or a visitation or from a Ghost of Christmas future, but I knew the whole story, and it never changed. The story never changed from the time I wrote it as a screenplay through to the novel. And I've just adapted it for the stage for Seattle Repertory Theater. And it had its world premiere in last November, which was really wonderful. So now it's had all these iterations. So, I knew the story in a way before I really knew Charles Dickens. And what we all know enough about him and have a sense of who he is.

But I did, as I did with the Wollstonecraft book, I just started reading everything I could of his work, his letters, the great biographies. Again, all the giants have written biographies about Dickens. And I really just came to be completely enchanted by him.  I also realized, like, I come from a father who has similar characteristics. My first marriage was to a man who was larger than life and kind, brilliant, charismatic, sucked up all the air in the room, a great, great storyteller, all of these things. And I realized after years after writing about Dickens that I’m also kind of working out my relationship with this kind of man. So it ends up being a very personal journey for me with the writing of the novel. Because in the beginning I felt somehow I'm Dickens's muse and he's using me to channel this book. And so I'm just writing down what he's telling me to write down. I mean, that's an exaggeration, but because the story is definitely, definitely mine. But I just heard it in my head and I wrote down what I heard in my head. So, much, much later, I sort of understood that Charles Dickens was my muse. And that’s a really different idea for a writer and for a woman. 

Carol Cram:

So how much of the novel is actually real?

Samantha Silva:

What's real are the circumstances of Dickens’s life. He was a kind of a literary rock star. There was no one like him. Everyone knew his name, knew what he looked like. And he just had this sort of rising rocket of a career. He is married and he has all these children, and he is just taken a bigger house. He writes Martin Chuzzlewit and it's just an utter flop. And so the true story is that his publishers came to him, Chapman Hall, and said, you've got to figure out something to write to get us out of this money pit because otherwise Martin Chuzzlewit is going to ruin all of us. And so Dickens actually came up with the idea of a Christmas story as a money spinner, which I think is so ironic, that he writes this story about a miser who sort of discovers his own heart in order to earn money for himself to pay off his debt to his publishers.

But I sort of loved the idea again, because I'm always looking for the potential conflict in any situation. I loved the idea that they would come to him and try to blackmail him into writing a Christmas book. And he would refuse, and that refusal would start him on his own Scrooge-like journey that ultimately would lead to the writing of A Christmas Carol. And to me that was a much better story than the actual story of Dickens having a problem and Dickens solving his problem. So that was really where the novel was born.

Carol Cram:

Well, yes. And that's why the novel was so delightful because he was growing throughout it. He didn't just write a book. He had to change in order to write the book, which is what we want our characters to do. 

Samantha Silva:

We do. And it's amazing how often people don't get that.

Carol Cram:

It's kind of like the most important thing in a way. If they just start at one point and they end at the same point, it's like a bunch of plot stuff that's not a novel. A novel really at the core of it—and I think is why your two novels are so compelling—is character and the characters. They grow and they change and they make mistakes and they do stupid things, and then they eventually come out.

Samantha Silva:

Right. And I do think, again, that comes probably from just my screenwriting background, because you really are taught that that character is structure. You just have to put people under pressure. And that's what drives the plot. Without that kind of pressure and without having to make choices, even if it's the wrong choice, the wrong choice can be a plot point too. But that is so, so important. And for me, sort of gives me the hooks that I'm hanging the silk drapery on that's the novel. Those are all the hooks that I'm working with. 

And I mean, there are writers far more gifted than I am who I bow down to, who get it almost it seems like instinctively, like they don't even have to work for it. And I have to work really hard for it. Yeah. And I love that. I love that to me is a really interesting problem to have to solve with every story.

Carol Cram:

My mother, my beloved late mother, always used to say that life is a product of our choices. And so is a novel. Really, it just occurred to me it is a product of the character's choices all the way along.

Samantha Silva:

All the way along. That's so great.

Carol Cram:

Yeah. That's what she always used to say. But it just at this moment I realized that's exactly what we're doing with our character.

Samantha Silva:

That is what we're doing. Yes. 

Carol Cram:

Because if it's just life happening to them, that's not a novel. What's interesting in life is what we choose to make of it.

Samantha Silva:

Yes. And as I said, I really love short fiction as well and I love writing it. And I think one of the cool things about short fiction is that the shift in awareness, the change, can be so subtle and in a novel it can't be. You really have all these pages and you have to sort of build up and deliver, the more pages you write, the more chapters, the more plot points, the more you have to deliver on what you've set up. With a short story, it can be such a gem, kind of self-contained in a way that I really love. I really love working in the form.

Carol Cram:

Yes, it is a good form. I haven't worked on it enough myself, but I think it's fabulous discipline for an author to work with short stories because yeah, you've got to get to the nub of it very, very quickly. 

Samantha Silva:

I mean, for me, if I had designed my writing career, I don't know if I would've done it like this. It's been very circuitous and kind of strange in some ways. But now that I'm here working across these different genres, I feel pretty grateful that I've had these experiences because each form feeds the other form.  Like being in a room with actors during a six-week rehearsal period for Mr. Dickens, where they're asking really hard questions and I have to come up with really smart answers. And they made the story better and they made me better as a thinking writer. So I have so much to learn from all these forms. I very much consider myself a student of all of them.

Carol Cram:

I think we're always learning. And actually, I wanted to ask what you consider some of the differences between writing novels and writing for the screen or the stage. 

Samantha Silva:

What I finally realized is that in some ways they're opposite disciplines because when you're writing for the screen, you're really trying to create a blueprint for something, an efficient blueprint for something that if you're lucky enough to get your movie made, you'll be on set. And there will be a production designer and a set dresser and a costume designer and actors and a director, et cetera, et cetera, who are really making the choices to bring your blueprint to full expression and full life. And when you're a novelist, you have all those jobs. So it's not about being efficient. In a screenplay, there's really no interior life unless you're showing through action or dialogue. You're not describing interior life and you're picking such scant details so that you know you're leaving the bulk of the imaginative work, for instance, to a production designer for what the house is going to look like, et cetera. But when you're a novelist, you're making all those choices all the time. And it took me a long time to give myself permission to do that and especially to have enough layers of sort of interiority, all the feeling, because you don't have actors performing it. All the feeling has to be on the page. And so that I think that's the biggest difference.

Carol Cram:

Do you think one is more difficult than the other? Or are they they're just so different that you can't really say that?

Samantha Silva:

I think they are so different. 

Carol Cram:

I mean, I've only written novels and then one screenplay and to me, writing the screenplay seemed a little easier, but that's because I didn't know what I was doing. 

Samantha Silva:

Isn't that funny?

Carol Cram:

It's like, oh boy, I get to leave all that stuff out. 

Samantha Silva:

Exactly. But in some ways I think the better you get at something, also the harder it is. Do you know? Do you know what I mean? 

Carol Cram:

Oh, absolutely. That's why whatever novel you're working on, whether it's the 10th or the second is the harder one. It doesn't get easier. Unfortunately, I'm on my fifth. It's not getting any easier. It’s getting harder.

Samantha Silva:

I'm so sorry to hear that. But I loved, I really loved writing a novel and I don't think of myself as a screenwriter anymore. I think of myself as have having sort of earned my stripes as a screenwriter. But I feel very much like being a novelist suits me or being a short story writer really suits who I am better.

Carol Cram:

Are you working on a novel now, or can you talk about it?

Samantha Silva:

I'll only say that I'm playing around with a novel right now and I won't reveal what it is because it's sort of quite surprising for me. It's a bit of a lark, but I'm having fun. And for me as a writer, not working on something is where I start to get dark and depressed, If I'm working on something, even if it isn't the best thing or the right thing or the thing it ends up being, that's when I'm happy is when I'm really engaged with the page.

Carol Cram:

Yes, that's true. And I think the most important word you said there is fun. We have to enjoy this.

Samantha Silva:

We do. And I don't have fun not writing, and I really have fun writing.

Carol Cram:

I totally get that. Hard as it is sometimes.

Samantha Silva:

Right. Very hard. And I beat myself up and, and I stall out and I have a lot of self-doubt, but it's ah, there's just nothing like it.

Carol Cram:

There isn't. So, one of the missions of the Art In Fiction Podcast is also to share advice with new authors. So what advice would you give to new authors?

Samantha Silva:

I was in a writing group for a long time here in Idaho with really wonderful writers. And the difference between me and them was that I finished and they didn't. I have different ideas about why that is. I mean, being a structuralist helps because I spend a lot of time outlining and planning and plotting before I even put pen to paper. And I think that serves me well. But just getting to the end, I know better writers than I am who just can't seem to finish, who can't seem to get the momentum to finish. They lose interest or it's not sustaining them, it's not generating enough energy, whatever it is, they run out of ideas. And so I really believe in writing a bad first draft, but getting to the finish line because most of the novel will happen in revision. The best stuff you write will happen in revision. And I personally think revising is fun. I like it a lot. And I've ended up doing it a lot and pretty globally on Mr. Dickens certainly. Those are my two big things. Like, just write it down and get to the end even if you think it's bad. And then remember that you will sculpt the novel in revision and you'll have ample opportunity to do that.

Carol Cram:

I agree with you on the revision for sure. That's my favorite part after the first draft is done and then you can go back and you can start making it good, but it is difficult to get to the end because you want to get it right and you're not necessarily going to get it right. When I was first starting, I felt that I should be able to sit down and just write the novel and it should be really good. And when I finally realized that, no, it's not good, but that's okay, just finish it and then go back over and make it better. And I had some great mentors that helped me with that. That's when you become a writer.

Samantha Silva:

Yes, yes. And of course my dad was a journalist when I was growing up and he just learned to sit down at a typewriter and put his notes away and just type everything he could remember, everything he knew. And I'm not like that at all. I need a lot of time and a lot of papers around me and a lot of journals and notebooks and books and post-it notes and, but I do believe in sort of getting all the way to the end and that's when it's a novel just because you finished it.

Carol Cram:

Exactly.

Samantha Silva:

That's my advice.

Carol Cram:

Well, thank you so much, Samantha, for chatting with me today. This has been just great. I loved going back over these two novels that I enjoyed so much.

Samantha Silva:

Thank you so much for having me, Carol. I really enjoyed it.