The Long and Winding Road, Writing "Finding Filomena"

It took three years and a huge pile of writing just to figure out where to BEGIN!

Now and then people ask me where I get my inspiration for writing fiction. As I mentioned in my last post, it’s a bit of a mystery how ideas come to me. And how they evolve. The story behind my new novel, Finding Filomena, is, well, complicated.

It all started five years ago, almost exactly when the Pandemic hit in March, 2020.

Things were topsy turvy back then, for everyone. But a strange thing happened to me. I had been writing for months about a character named Leah, who was a photographer or an artist or a writer, or all three. Leah had been wrestling with the feeling that she was “frozen.”

Suddenly, on March 19, 2020, as the Pandemic hit, and without any warning, I began to write this story:

LEAH at SUNRISE

Leah has been up since sunrise taking photos of the sky. But when the clouds close in and the sky grays over, she starts to panic. What can she do to hold onto sunlight? Two weeks ago on a morning when the meadow was blank with fog, she sat in her study hoping for inspiration.

But each time she opened her mouth to say something, her breath was frozen. Her heart felt like a stone. She felt so lonely and scared. And the worst part of it was, she didn’t know why.

Finally, she sat down with her journal and with absolutely no warning, she wrote: “Try saying it in Italian.”

Suddenly, she felt like somebody had turned on a warm faucet inside her chest.

From that moment on, Leah started translating everything into Italian. Like Leah, I too began writing in Italian. And like Leah, I couldn’t get enough of the melodic language that I had grown up hearing my mother speak to her parents. As I wrote in my story:

“There was something so comforting about the soft round sounds of the Italian. Leah felt more alive speaking sentences that were warm and beating inside her heart. She had never felt quite this alive!”

Like Leah, I too started to feel more alive. Which was great, as the Pandemic would certainly foist its challenges and threaten everyone with illness and even, the possibility of death.

What’s interesting is that looking back, I can see that this was the moment when I started “listening” to my own inner history. I started listening to how the Italian language made me feel. As I listened, I started to think more and more about my ancestors and their stories.

Curiously, I had studied Spanish and French in high school, and French in college. But until 2020, I had never had the least interest in studying the language of my ancestors.

For the next three years, I thought I was writing a novel about Leah. I probably wrote two hundred — or maybe even more — pages. I printed them out and placed them very carefully in a giant three-hole binder. I had two different working titles for this novel, first: “HEAL LEAH,” and later, “Angels Keep Whispering in My Ears.”

My long-time friend and writing companion Peggy Woods, an amazing fiction writer, stood by me, and read every single page, encouraging me at every turn to “just keep going.” Because that’s what writers do, they keep going, they keep writing even when the destination is completely unclear.

My husband, on the other hand, told me what I didn’t want to hear. Even though I was producing a lot of pages, he said, “You aren’t writing a novel.” Looking back, he was right. I had no clear story line. I had very few scenes. My character, Leah, was not all that interesting. But what was true was that I was starting to write my ancestors’ stories.

At some point, I stopped calling the book a novel, and started calling it a family memoir. And then, in November of 2022, my third grandchild was born in Colorado. Little Monte (Italian for mountain) and I share a birthday weekend. And perhaps because I was overwhelmed with love for this new baby in the family, I started thinking in earnest about my great great grandmother, Filomena, who, like all unmarried mothers in those days, had to give up her baby. That baby was my great grandfather, Pasquale Orzo.

Shortly after Monte

was born, at the end of December of 2022, I wrote a blogpost called: “Take me, Take me, Take me but not My Precious little Squash!” I didn’t realize it then, but I was starting to write Filomena Scrivano’s sad story. In the next few weeks, I wrote a couple more chapters — all of which would ultimately fit into the end of the present novel.

In March of 2023, I finally realized that I was ready to tell Filomena’s story. So I went back to the beginning of the story and started writing what is now Finding Filomena.

Some people might say that I wasted a lot of time. And they would be right. For three years, I wrote a huge number of pages that never saw the light of day.

But that’s the nature of fiction writing. It often takes a lot of writing to figure out what you really want to say, and where exactly you are going to begin. And how you will proceed.

And while I’d love to say that once I started writing the novel, I wrote in a completely straight line, starting in March 2023 and finishing at the end of 2024, alas, it wasn’t that simple. Readers of my blog, MyStoryLives, might recall that the whole time I was writing Filomena’s story, I was also writing a boatload of blogposts about the book, in a kind of kooky “meta-narrative.”

In fact, I was trying very hard to compose an outer story for the novel. If you want to get a sense for how convoluted (and crazy) that writing was, treat yourself to reading this blogpost, called “All Things Must Pass, All Things Stay the Same.” In that particularly quirky post, I talk about the nature of time. I talk about T.S. Eliot and Albert Einstein. I include part of a calculus textbook in the post. And the piece actually has a bunch of footnotes!

Yes, it is a nutty thing I wrote. But often I find that I have to write a lot of nutty stuff to know, finally, when I’m on the right track. It took me until May of 2024 before I finally figured out the right voice for the outer story in Finding Filomena. That’s when I knew, or at least I was pretty sure, that the book was finally coming together.

As I write this piece, I can imagine some people shaking their heads, wondering what keeps a person writing (or trying to write) a novel for five long years? Fair question. It’s a lot of work to write a novel, but it’s also incredibly rewarding to see a world come together in words. I couldn’t have done it without the steady encouragement from Peg, and from my friend, Nancy Dunlop, an extraordinary poet who joined Peg and me in a writing group a couple years ago. The three of us meet on Zoom every Friday afternoon for two hours to share our writing.

In celebrating the appearance of Finding Filomena, I am also celebrating the act of faith that it takes to write a novel. You have to keep believing wholeheartedly in your project even when others don’t love it. You have to keep believing in your book even when you feel sometimes like you are out of your mind, and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing from one day to another.

In that sense, it feels to me a little bit like the kind of faith and fortitude it takes being… a mother!