Having Fun with a Change of Genre in A Change of Location by Margaret Porter

Join me as I chat with Margaret Porter, author of four novels listed on Art In FIction, including A Change of Location, The Limits of Limelight, and Beautiful Invention: A Novel of Hedy Lamarr listed in the Film category, and The Myrtle Wand listed in the Dance category.

View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ijPu_SVzY1c

• Why switch to a new genre - "romcom" - from historical fiction?
• Writing fiction as a "palette cleanser"
• Inspiration for A Change of Location
• Summary of A Change of Location
• Why set the novel in Somerset?
• The concept of a "smart" love story and how A Change of Location fits the bill
• Challenges of writing contemporary fiction as opposed to historical fiction.
• Reading from A Change of Location
• Discussion of Beautiful Invention: A Novel of Hedy Lamarr; why write a novel about Hedy Lamarr?
• Hedy Lamarr's eventful life - myth-busting and research
• What was Hedy Lamarr like as a person? What motivated her?
• Hedy's inventions
• Inspiration forThe Limits of Limelight
• Women reinventing themselves
• The Myrtle Wand and the re-telling of the Giselle ballet
• One thing Margaret Porter learned from writing her novels that she didn't know before
• Write what you're passionate about!

Press Play now & be sure to check out Margaret Porter's novels on Art In Fiction: https://www.artinfiction.com/novels?q=margaret+porter

Margaret Porter's website: https://www.margaretporter.com/

Music Credit
Paganology, performed by The Paul Plimley Trio; composed by Gregg Simpson

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Transcript

Carol Cram 

Hello and welcome. I'm Carol Cram, host of The Art In Fiction Podcast. This episode features Margaret Porter, author of sixteen novels. Four of her novels are listed on Art In Fiction: her newest novel, A Change of Location in the Film category; The Myrtle Wand in the Dance category; and The Limits of Limelight and Beautiful Invention: A Novel of Hedy Lamarr, both listed in the Film category.

Margaret Porter is an award-winning, bestselling author whose appreciation for history, cinema, and foreign travel inspires her fiction. A former stage actress, Margaret also worked professionally in film, television, and radio. She lives in New England with her husband and dog, dividing her time between an architecturally unique book-filled house in a small city and a waterfront cottage on one of the region’s largest lakes. 

Welcome to The Art In Fiction Podcast, Margaret.

Margaret Porter

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here, Carol.

Carol Cram 

I am in awe of how many novels you've written. Is it sixteen at the moment? Mostly you've been known for historical fiction, but your latest novel, A Change of Location, is a new departure into contemporary fiction. So first off, why did you decide to switch to a new genre?

Margaret Porter

The decision was made many years ago. This manuscript was begun 20 years ago. I was in the process of reinvention, changing from writing more historical romance fiction into straight historical fiction. And I just needed a palate cleanser, and I had had some experiences that inspired me to write a contemporary book related to a film production.

And in the process of writing it, I decided that I couldn't write two books at once. I couldn't write historical biographical fiction and a contemporary novel at the same time. The biographical novel won, and this manuscript sat for ten years, halfway finished. And I wrote several books in a row, some biographical, historical fiction, and one that was a reinvention, reimagining of the ballet Giselle in The Myrtle Wand.

And these were all very high-conflict, some tragedy, people die in them, and very heavy. It was time for another palette cleanser. I thought, oh my gosh, I'd really like to write something light. I've always been tempted to write contemporary fiction. And the light went off.

Oh, I've got this manuscript sitting around. Maybe I should pick it up, dust it off and see what happens. And that's what I did. 

Carol Cram

I love that story. It's actually very similar to my own. My fourth novel, which is a contemporary novel, was actually my first novel. I wrote it 10 years ago. It wasn't the first published. Same thing. I kind of needed a palate cleanser right during the pandemic because I was deep into historical fiction. I was writing about the plague in the Middle Ages right when the pandemic started. I thought, no, forget it. I just love that you said palate cleanser, because I totally know what you mean.

What was your inspiration for A Change in Location? 

Margaret Porter

I'd lived in a town that was used as a film location and I went to a college like my hero Hannah that was used as a film location and a friend of mine and classmate was hired for different projects as a location scout, both for feature films that were shooting in the area regionally or locally, and also for advertising shoots.

And she eventually went out to California to do that in an even bigger way. But I was just so fascinated while working as an extra or in the theater department of the concept of locations and location scouting. And her experience was really interesting to me. I was a performance person at the time. That was before I started doing behind the scenes sorts of things, but that interest stayed with me a long time.

And then when I went to graduate school, I worked on location as an extra on a television series. And every time I was in England, it seems like we would stumble on a location shoot in the countryside or at a country house or someplace. And so that was the original inspiration twenty years ago that I just wanted to write about a location scout who was scouting for a period film set in England.

Carol Cram 

Yes, it's really a wonderful idea to base a romance around where she's scouting for this location. Could you just summarize A Change of Location for those who haven't read it yet? 

Margaret Porter

Hannah Ballard is half British and half American, but she grew up in Maine. So, she's essentially a New Englander, although she has family contacts in Great Britain. And she has worked across the country in New England and elsewhere and up in the Maritimes of Canada as a location scout for an independent film company. And she is promoted to location manager, which means she's not only in charge of choosing the locations, although she has to vet them, she's in charge of the whole location shoot. She’s sent to London to meet with the people who are the location finders, which is what they call them in Britain, who are going to have chosen places for her to tour.

She wanders into a cheese shop because she's going to throw a little thank-you party for these people who have helped her, and the gentleman at the cheese shop turns out to be not only an English nobleman, but he also owns a great country house and is landlord of multiple villages in South Somerset, and he tells her that he has the perfect location for her film.

And she's not quite convinced but eventually she checks it out, and it goes on from there. 

Carol Cram

You obviously traveled a lot to England to research this. Why Somerset? 

Margaret Porter

Well, Somerset, family and friend connections primarily, and just familiarity with it and spending lots of time there. And as a location scout for my own novel, the area that I set it in is the area that I know best.

There's a river, and there are villages around it, the architecture is lovely, there are lots of country houses around there, and so it just fit the story. And it's a chance to be there in this beloved place when I'm in the States, writing books, and then when I go there, I can be there in the beloved place, writing about it, and fact-checking, and what's blooming now, and what blooms then, and which lane goes where, and all that sort of thing.

Carol Cram 

It's such a beautiful part of the country. As we mentioned before we started, I lived in England for four years, and I go back there every chance I get. I just love it, especially all those lovely little villages in Somerset and Devon and all those places. It's never gets old. It's just beautiful.

You've inspired me. I'm thinking I want to set something in that part of England now. 

Margaret Porter

You should, you must. Well, and I'm writing a follow-up book. It's not a direct sequel, but it's a follow-up book and it's much more London centric, but I couldn't resist returning to Stanwell House and the Milver Vale Villages because there was a reason to do it, but I just wanted to go back and see those characters again.

Carol Cram 

I don't blame you. So A Change of Location was described by one of your reviewers as a smart love story, which I really like that description. Why do you think that's true? Because I think it is true about this novel.

Margaret Porter

I take that as a compliment. I think that romance readers in general want a read that may have some of the traditional tropes and it will have a happy ever after, but I think they want a read that is engaging, but also it's not too fluffy, if that's the right word. So that the conflict is realistic. And even though it might be based on some misunderstandings or lack of information that it's believable, I think, I assume, that's what was meant by that remark.

But I like to think that readers like smart love stories. I read lots of contemporary romance and I've written historical romance and I still read historical romance. Every book I write, whether it's mainstream fiction or not, has some sort of love story at the core. I think romance is a smart read, period.

Carol Cram 

It is, but I think one of the reasons they might have said that is that it didn't feel formulaic. I mean, I kind of vaguely knew it was a romance in terms of genre, but it didn't really feel like that. It just felt like a really good novel about this woman and her challenges doing a very interesting job.

And yes, there is a romance in there, but as I said, it didn't feel formulaic, which I think is a great tribute to your writing. 

Margaret Porter

Thank you. I really appreciate that. I think it can be a fine line sometimes in writing romance for today's market between contemporary romance or romcom and then what might be considered women's fiction which might deal with more family issues or family conflicts or their work style and work life and the conflict with that and maybe a love life or a home life or a family life or whatever, domestic life, whatever that could be, and trying to rise in a profession versus all the other demands upon them. I think maybe this book a little bit straddles the romcom and women's fiction, but for marketing purposes, very clearly, it's going to be marketed as a contemporary romance.

Carol Cram 

Yes, actually, Love Among the Recipes is like that, too. It kind of straddles the two because there is romance in it. But, like you say, it's about a woman coming to terms with her professional life and her personal life. 

What are some of the challenges of writing contemporary fiction that are different from writing historical fiction?

Margaret Porter

For this book specifically, I had to move forward 20 years in terms of technology. Filmmaking technology has changed massively. Equipment is lighter. Microphones are better. Location shoots and lighting equipment, you have many more choices. And that's why so many more films now are like Bridgerton and Poldark and fill in the blank that can be shot in these country homes much more easily and less frequently in a studio where a studio set is built. So, there was that aspect of it. Also, personal communication has changed as well. In an original version of this book, people were picking up a landline telephone to contact each other.

That was not the instant kind of communication that we have with texting and messaging, and you can be on one side of the Atlantic Ocean and someone else on the other, and you can still maintain your contact. And so that was definitely a challenge. Picking up something that had sat for 20 years, I was concerned that I would pick it up, read it, and go, Oh my gosh, what was I thinking?

But the characters had never left me. They had lived inside my head all these years. I think the book is far better, much deeper, maybe more resonant with my own experiences. I was more familiar with the locations themselves. So I was able to meet those challenges without much difficulty, but I think that in general, the switch between historical fiction to contemporary fiction, is more a mindset—how people talk to one another and the language that they use, and you don't want to make something too contemporary, too slangy, because then its shelf life will be very short.

So, trying to manage that and keep it sort of in this middle of being contemporary, but not overly contemporary with the use of language or anything so that it can live on beyond the year 2024. 

Carol Cram 

Yes, the technology is a huge challenge I find with writing contemporary. I actually cheated and set mine in the ‘90s, so I didn't have to deal with smartphones.

Margaret Porter

Brilliant. But I sort of feel that was cheating and maybe I should try again with the contemporary technology. l tried to be really careful. I didn't specifically mention FaceTiming or Googling. I would say Internet search or try to use terms that I think will live on, whether there's a Facebook in 10 years or something like that.

So that was a fun challenge to sort of massage the lingo, and not go with what some contemporary books will talk about their Apple watch or FaceTiming a friend or something like that. That's really very particular to the here and now, which might change. And that was kind of a little game I played with myself to try to avoid that.

Carol Cram 

Now that's really interesting and good advice too, to try and be a little bit more generic.

Would you like to do a reading from A Change of Location? 

Margaret Porter

Certainly. This kind of ties into the setup I gave. Hannah has been lured down to Somerset, having already visited other locations. 

After a surprisingly sunny, trouble-free tour of the hamlets and houses, the weather and Hannah's outlook abruptly changed, not only because of gray skies and intermittent rainfall.

This was the tenth anniversary of Chase's sentencing. Today, her mind frequently darted back in time to that chilly April afternoon when she'd helped her grandfather stack his lobster traps. Without her uncle's stream of jokes, the job had taken longer than usual. She remembered how the breeze rippled the water beyond the dock and the shimmer of sunshine on the surface. The screeching gulls drowned the droning voice coming from the portable radio until Grandpa turned up the volume. A decade on, she could still hear the words with perfect piercing clarity: Chase Ballard, convicted of manslaughter, a 10-Wayear sentence, transferred from Cumberland County Jail in Portland to the Maine State Prison in Warren . . .

He'd taken her fishing in his motorboat and helped her haul in her catch, shown her the best places on the river to spot eagles and ospreys and herons, supervised her 4 H projects when her parents didn't have time. An only child, she felt so lucky to have a big brother and uncle rolled into one. Someone to have fun with. Whose shoulder she could cry on—not that she often did.

She twisted her car radio’s volume button. As the final notes of an upbeat song faded, a pair of presenters began rehashing the latest development in the widely publicized Sterling Scandal. Several days ago, darting into a bookshop in the Reading railway station, she'd noticed large boldface headlines on the tabloid newspapers and garish color photos of a Member of Parliament and his glamorous lover, whose connection to an infamous crime family had recently been uncovered.

Hannah hadn't imagined that her opinion of the British press and its characteristic obsession with the private lives of public figures could sink any lower. Current events proved otherwise. Her expectations for Stanwell House weren't high, a judgment based on a few low-res images produced by her internet search, and doubts nagged her as she approached the final stop on her tour.

Shooting interiors and exteriors in a private residence would be a hell of a lot trickier than at any of the sites recommended by the location agency. 

Carol Cram 

Thanks very much. That's great. That gives a flavor of it and of Hannah, who is a great character. I really enjoyed Hannah. She was smart, but she had her problems as well, which of course is what makes a great character. 

I wanted to talk a little bit about your historical novels. At the moment, three of your historical novels are included on Art In Fiction. I read Beautiful Invention about actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr. So why did you decide to write a novel based on Hedy Lamarr?

Margaret Porter

A combination of factors went into that. Primarily, I'm a cinema buff. I have a Master's in radio television film. I studied film history extensively, and I love old movies. So, when I was growing up, if my mother and I—my dad was in the military—if we dressed up to go to a military ball or go to a party, or I was dressed up in a play or something, if we looked really, really nice, my dad would always say, Oh, you look gorgeous. You look just like Hedy Lamarr. Well, my mother looked more like Hedy than I did because she has black hair, so I knew the name before I knew anything about Hedy Lamarr. And to me, I just thought, oh, this is just some black and white movie queen. My dad's movie crush. No big deal, you know, but thanks for the compliment.

And some years later, and I remember it like it was yesterday, I was sitting at our lake cottage, and I had just watched a black and white movie on Turner Classic Films. And I think it was a Katherine Hepburn picture. And I decided I was going to do some Googling about Katherine Hepburn and the making of that film.

And for some reason, I guess because it was MGM or I'm not sure, but Hedy Lamarr's name came up. And I thought, Oh yeah, that's Dad's movie star crush. And I started following links about Hedy Lamarr and saw that she had invented technology during World War II and that she had been recognized and had received an award for this accomplishment, which did not get used because during World War II, before America got into the war, she and her co-inventor had created this technology known as frequency hopping, which would have enabled torpedoes from the allies to maneuver through the ocean without being detected by the U boats run by the Nazis. And I was just fascinated. I said, I have to write this. I mean, this is a story. And so I started seriously researching that. 

Fortunately, two main biographies of her life, plus a book about her inventions, had relatively recently been published, and then I went down the wonderful rabbit hole of doing research. This was my first 20th century novel, having written about 17th century and 18th century and early 19th century, and I learned that you have your newsreels, you have your newspaper articles, you have movie fan magazines. The wealth of information was massive, not only for Hollywood press or the American press, but also because she was a notorious actress in Austria.

So, I had to read articles in German, and it was a lot of research and then winnowing that down to what do I really need to tell this story about Hedy? Where do I start her story? Where do I finish her story? And so that's how Beautiful Invention came to be. I wish my father had been alive to have read it, but he knows, I guess. 

Carol Cram 

Yes, I really could see how much research you must have done. It's a lot of fun to read about Hollywood in that period in late ‘30s, early ‘40s. She sure had an eventful life. Wasn't she married six times?

Margaret Porter

Yes. And you know, about challenges of writing books. She kind of created her own myths about herself, which before she started doing it, Hollywood was doing it for her, the press office at MGM was creating all this information about her and also trying to sort of clean up her act because she came over with quite a reputation.

She was divorced from a man who had been in cahoots with the Nazis, and so she wrote an autobiography that was ghostwritten for her, and it was very inaccurate, very salacious. She sued the writers of it and said that it gave the wrong impression. But a lot of those myths that either she or Hollywood created have been perpetuated through the years, even up to and including in documentaries about her.

And the challenge for me, for any book just about, is myth-busting. I want to be able to present the factual truth that I find through my research. Sometimes it will confirm the general knowledge, and sometimes it will just completely counteract it. And that was sort of a directive for me for researching Hedy.

How did her first marriage end? Why did it end? Did she really drug her maid, dress up in the maid's uniform and leave her husband's house with only the clothes on her back and nothing else? That's completely not true. She and her husband were already practically in divorce proceedings. He was off on a hunting trip. She packed up all her clothes and her jewels and she went to Paris and lived there. Then she went to London. But it made a good story. And that story has been perpetuated, which is fine, but that's not really how it happened. So, my book was an effort to set the record straight.

Carol Cram

Yes. And how would you describe Hedy's character as a person? What do you think motivated her? 

Margaret Porter

She was a problem-solver. I mean, when she saw German U boats using torpedoes to attack transport ships from Britain that were taking refugee children to Canada, where they could either live in Canada or come to the United States. The U-Boats were sending out torpedoes and hitting those ships with loss of life in many instances.

And it drove her crazy. And so she remembered, having been the wife of a munitions manufacturer, some of the conversations and sorts of people she'd met and the technologies that Germans and the Austrians in cahoots with them were trying to develop, and the notion of wireless guidance systems stuck with her.

And so that's why she decided to create it; she saw a problem. Hitler was killing children in the North Atlantic, and she needed to stop it. And so, she and her co-creator George Anthiel put their heads together, and they each had the right kind of knowledge and drive to make this happen.

They handed it over to the Navy. And it ended up on a shelf because at the time, and this was even before America had entered the War, you could tell it wasn’t going to happen. They were so busy developing weapons and getting ready to use weapons. They just didn't have what we would say the bandwidth, ironically, considering what Hedy's invention led to, but they didn't have the bandwidth to create these new weapons.

So, her invention sat on the shelf until it was sort of rediscovered at a time when wireless, well, satellite communications first and then later wireless technology, Bluetooth and all of that was invented. She was the mother, grandmother of some of these technologies that we rely on every minute of every day. And she was inventing other things.

She wanted to invent a new kind of Kleenex dispenser. She thought that stoplights should be more sideways instead of up and down. Now, we actually have some that are sideways. She developed automobile bodies. She worked with Howard Hughes, who as we know was an inventor, in trying to decide how the wings of certain planes should be shaped; should be they be more shaped like a bird or more like a fish or more. That was her, that was her nature. And she was also a painter, an artist. She was a very creative person. She did woodworking. She did painting. She liked to garden. She had her little homestead farm. And, you know, she was a busy person and a doer, and I think acting for her ultimately sort of became a trap.

Her beauty was very much a trap because that's all people wanted from her. And so she didn't always get the best roles at MGM. She had a huge comic flair. She was really, really good at comedy, but they kept putting her in these femme fatale movies that were not as well scripted, and she wanted to do more comedy.

One of my favorite films of hers is Comrade X with Clark Gable and it is just hilarious. She does physical comedy. It's just really funny and you think, oh gosh, it's kind of a waste that she was the great beauty and not one of the more screwball type actor. 

Carol Cram

Well, it's wonderful that finally we are learning about how smart she was and all the things that she did because, you know, for many years she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

Margaret Porter

Right. But yeah, there was a lot more to her. Oh, yes. And she was always looking for the knight in shining armor. The right husband. Too many of them chose her as a trophy wife. The ones who didn't weren't worth having. And that was an unfortunate aspect that she maybe didn't marry the one that she should have.

Carol Cram 

Yes. So, you also wrote The Limits of Limelight, which we've listed in the Film category on Art In Fiction. And tell us a little bit about that novel. 

Margaret Porter

Well, that's the book that I discovered while I was researching the Hedy Lamarr book. For some reason, I was trying to determine if Hedy and Ginger Rogers had been at an event, I think it was, or a premiere or something at the same time.

And I wasn't really trying to get Ginger into the book because the book was already jam packed with Hollywood celebrities of the 1930s, you know, but I don't know that it was just some research question. I was looking up Ginger Rogers and I discovered the Ginger Rogers had a first cousin who Ginger and her mother Layla had plucked out of Oklahoma City and taken to Hollywood to make a movie star, just as Ginger was becoming really popular in the films, just kind of at the start, before she was performing with Fred Astaire as a dancer. And I thought, oh my gosh, I had no idea that Ginger Rogers had a first cousin who was in the movies also.

So off I went, did a little bit of basic research. And then I found out many more things about Phyllis Fraser who was born Helen Brown and she's the one who gave Ginger Rogers her nickname Ginger, because Ginger's first name is Virginia. And Helen, little baby Helen, couldn't pronounce it. So she called her Ginger.

And they were quite close, these cousins. And then when Ginger and her mother took Helen out to Hollywood to try her luck in the films, Ginger gave her cousin a name, chose a screen name for her cousin, which was Phyllis Fraser. And as a former actress who became a writer, that was an aspect of Phyllis that really drew me in, how you go from performing, but you're a reader all the time. You like to write. So, Phyllis got into writing for the fan magazine. 

She did some photography and ultimately, she ended up in New York and beyond the conclusion of my book, she worked at Random House Publishing with her husband Bennett Cerf, and she worked with Dr. Seuss and helped to invent the series of books that she published—The Cat in the Hat and all of those early reader books that Dr. Seuss produced. She was an editor and ran that division. And then she became a New York socialite and went on to have a whole other life. So, she was just an amazing person that is not extremely well known and unlike Hedy Lamarr, who did have a high profile, Phyllis did not have such a high profile, but Ginger certainly did.

And so that was an opportunity to write about Ginger Rogers without writing about Ginger Rogers as a main character, but to have her more in the periphery with this extraordinary cousin who had struggled in Hollywood while her cousin Ginger was becoming the pinnacle of success in the films with Fred Astaire.

Carol Cram 

I love that both of those main characters, in both novels, were constantly kind of reinventing themselves in a way. I mean, the idea that you start something and you stick with it for your whole life is not true. And I think we're kind of living proof of that. You had other careers. I've had other careers. Now we're novelists. And so, it's interesting to write about these women, you know, from 50, 60, 80 years ago, that did the same thing. 

Margaret Porter

Yes, and the fact that they their accomplishments at the time, they found the way to use, and this is true, especially in historical fiction, that's set farther back in time, as you know that kind of soft power, being able to use their female special powers to create the kind of life that they want, not strictly on male terms, or being defined by men. 

It was harder for Hedy than it was for Phyllis, because ultimately Phyllis went into publishing, which, as we know, women have been in publishing for a long, long time. But it's really interesting to write about and study about when doing research. These women in the past, of whatever generation of the past, who found a way to make their way.

And sometimes they were satisfied with the choices they made and the fate that they ended up with, and sometimes they weren't. But that's where good stories come from. 

Carol Cram 

No kidding. I mean, they refuse to be victims. I think we tend to have a bit of a black and white idea of the past. So, you know, women were kept down. Well, no, women did a lot. And they did, reinvent themselves, and they did have soft power. So, I love that. Yeah, my books are kind of that theme as well. Your most recent historical novel is The Myrtle Wand, which is a retelling of the classic ballet Giselle.

Tell us why you chose this subject for a novel. 

Margaret Porter

I'm just obsessed with ballet as a dancer, a performer, the whole world of ballet, the physicality of it, the beauty of it. And in fact, two of my next three novels have dancers in them. But I happened to attend a live broadcast of the ballet Giselle directly from Moscow, from Bolshoi Theater.

That was not exactly a recreation, it was a restoration, I guess you would say, of the ballet Giselle, which debuted in the 1840s, of the original story of Giselle, which is classically known as one of the great canons of the ballet world. But originally, the girl Giselle falls in love with the nobleman in disguise, doesn't realize he's engaged to somebody, she meets the fiancée. And in the version of Giselle that you will normally see on ballet, the fiancée is a complete and total bitch, and hard-hearted, and doesn't care about Giselle's tragic fate, and is mad, and not very nice. 

Well, in the original version, the fiancée, Princess Bathilde, was just this lovely person. She was kind to Giselle. She gives her a necklace. She asked Giselle to dance for her. She is just completely warm and lovely. And then when Giselle finds out that the Duke is dead, engaged to the princess, the princess is just mortified, she's sad, she grieves when Giselle, spoiler alert, dies, and cries, and is very sad.

And then in the second half of the ballet, there's the sequence of where the ghostly women, the willies, come up from the graves and chase men who betrayed maidens and try to kill them. But at the very end of that original story there is a reconciliation and the princess returns.

And Giselle tries to put her betrayer back with the woman he was supposed to. It was just a beautiful bookend. And I thought, Oh my gosh, I never knew this was originally the way it was supposed to be. What is the deal with Princess Bathilde? Who is this woman? I decided to write her backstory and her forward story and then weave in the characters, including the queen, of the dead girls.

And so I made Giselle and Mert and Princess Batilde begin their friendship in rural France and an area that I know where family come from and I set the whole thing in, instead of 19th century whatever, or medieval times, which is quite frequently a setting, I wanted to write another 17th century novel.

I wanted to write a novel set in France. And I decided that I would set it in the early reign, of King Louis XIV, and before he created Versailles, when he was a young king. His mother was still the regent for most of the time, and so it's kind of a mashup of a lot of things that fascinated me—the ballet, the original story, the area. And you said that I know quite well Paris and the castle and court life of the aristocracy and nobility of France, how they lived, grape-growing, winemaking, Louis XIV, his love of dance and music and all of this. So that's how The Myrtle Wand came to be.

Carol Cram 

Isn't it wonderful that we get to be novelists and we get to explore all our different interests like you did in that novel? 

Margaret Porter

Absolutely. And people say, what do you do when you have writer's block? Or how do you deal with writer's block? And I think if I have writer's block on a project, I've got them stacked up, you know, because I've got all these things are so intriguing to me that I want to create some kind of a novel from. So, I have so many ideas and so many more books that I would like to write. Oh, I wish I were a faster writer, but The Myrtle Wand was the fastest book I wrote, and both it and The Limits of Limelight were kind of both written during the pandemic, and I know some writers had a little bit of difficulty focusing when all of that was going on. And for me, I wasn't traveling as much. I wasn't traveling at all for a certain period of time. And I was able to live in other worlds as the world around us was coping with how do we live in this world when we have to be contained.

Well, that's kind of a writer's dream, to just shut out the rest of the world and to be able to produce and not do much else. So, I had a very productive pandemic and now I'm sort of back to my little bit slower writing style, I guess you would say. 

Carol Cram 

Yes, well, like me, you like to travel a lot too, and I find that does kind of interfere with my process.

One of my goals with The Art In Fiction Podcast is to inspire other authors. What's one thing you've learned from writing your novels, your many novels, that you didn't know before? 

Margaret Porter

Well, if you can't tell from everything I've said so far, you have to write what you're truly, truly passionate about.

And you have to write what you are truly, truly passionate about reading. That to me is kind of like the crucial advice to any writer, whether they're writing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, doesn't matter. The market, the fiction market, the book market, publishing world, has just always been a little weird, and there are trends that come and go, and you know, when I first started writing A Change of Location, Romcom and ChickLit were hot, hot, hot, and then they weren't hot, hot, hot anymore, and that's not why I stopped writing it, but when I picked it back up again, I realized that this wasn't a choice I made because of it, but that the market for romcoms and chicklit was hot, hot, hot again.

The timing worked in my favor, but it was purely coincidental. I wasn't chasing a trend. I wasn't writing to the market. I was telling a story that I loved and wanted to complete. I think that's really important because I think the excitement, the enthusiasm and the passion for, whether it's a historical character, a historical period, a contemporary setting or type of person or profession, any of those things, I think it carries through in the fiction.

It certainly pulls you through on the harder writing days when you have to remind yourself, why am I writing this book? But I think for aspiring writers if they're not sure what they want to write, they should ask themselves, what do I most like to read? What are the books on my TBR? And what do I check out of the library? What shelf in the bookstore do I go to most often? I don't know if it's cliche or trite advice, but for me, that's where it began. That's where it begins with any project. 

Carol Cram

I think it's great advice. And I think it's very, very true. We do have to write what we like to read.

Thank you so much, Margaret, for chatting with me. It's just been great. 

Margaret Porter

Carol, this has been an enormous pleasure. I know we have so much in common in terms of the types of books we write and our travels to England and I'm a fan of your podcast and still working my way through a lot of the episodes because of the types of writers you have on and the concept of art in fiction.

There's so many arts and so many ways to portray it in fiction through so many different types of characters and it's so well reflected on the podcast. 

Carol Cram

Thank you. Yes, well, because my novels are inspired by the arts, I thought, gee, I wonder if other people have written novels inspired by the arts. Well, apparently, they have. We have well over 2,000 books now on the website. 

Margaret Porter

That's wonderful. Thank you so much for your support of that, too. 

Carol Cram 

I've been speaking with Margaret Porter, author of four novels listed on Art In Fiction including A Change of Location, The Limits of Limelight and Beautiful Invention: A Novel of Hedy Lamarr all listed in the Film category, and The Myrtle Wand, listed in the Dance category on Art In Fiction at www.artinfiction.com. 

Be sure to check the show notes for a link to Margaret’s website at www.margaretporter.com. You'll also find a link to a 20% discount on a subscription to Pro Writing Aid, a fantastic editing tool for writers. 

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out the Art In Fiction website at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2100+ novels inspired by the arts in 10 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany and Love Among the Recipes. Find out more on her website.