After Many Years of Writing Nonfiction, How I Wrote My First Novel

After Many Years of Writing Nonfiction, How I Wrote My First Novel

"Write what you know." That’s the advice every writing teacher gave me, from high school through college and beyond.

I always believed, from high school on, that I would write fiction, short stories, and novels. But write what you know? How did a novel fit in with what I knew? Growing up in a conventional family and then as the wife of, first, a medical student and then a doctor, I was a good listener, and I knew something about my husband’s work: rehabilitating paraplegic, quadriplegic, and other disabled patients. No book there, I thought. But as a mother of three, I knew about supporting my kids’ work, preparing healthy meals, and planning family excursions to mountains and seashores. So that’s what I wrote.

In my first writing job, I prepared workbooks to go along with remedial readers: The Phoenix Reading Series, and then Duplicator Books, supplemental material for classroom teachers. Next I co-authored four low-fat, low-salt cookbooks—No Salt No Sugar No Fat; Hold the Fat, Sugar, and Salt; Low Fat American Favorites; and The Quick and Delicious Low Fat, Low Salt Cookbook. Then I wrote Backpacking With Babies and Small Children, which over the years grew to three editions, followed by Camping With Kids.

I was writing what I knew and enjoying it, but all of these works were helpful nonfiction books. Where was the novel I had always dreamed of writing? Then in the mid-1980s, I accompanied my husband to a meeting of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in Baltimore. During the day, I went out by myself to explore this historic city, and in the evenings, I joined my husband and his colleagues for dinner. Late one afternoon, I returned to the convention center to look for him. The lobby was deserted. The lights were dim. The only movement came from the tall escalator silently climbing up almost three stories to a bright space above. As I was contemplating what to do next, from a dark area on the other side of the lobby a man in a wheelchair rolled out. He went straight to the base of the escalator. If he saw me, he gave no indication of my presence. He rolled forward, grabbed the moving hand rails with both hands, and pulled himself up onto an escalator stair. I watched him ride up and up, and then roll away in the brightness above.

I was astounded. I had never seen anyone like that, so casually strong and sure. I thought, what an amazing man he must be, and what would it be like to live with someone like that. That’s when my novel was born, or better to say, conceived. I would write a story about a woman meeting a man who used a wheelchair. I could use the material that I had learned from my husband, from meeting some of his patients and going with him to some work related events. I knew something about living as a paraplegic. I planned that, at first, my heroine would try to deny the attraction she felt for the man in the chair, but then, in the tradition of conventional romantic novels, he would rescue her from harm, and they would go off hand in hand.

Well and good, but first I needed to put my woman in harm's way. I decided she would be employed in a confidential shelter for abused women. I needed to visit such a facility for background. For several years, I had been supporting New Beginnings, an agency in Seattle that served victims of domestic violence, so I called and asked if I could visit. Of course I was turned down, because, as I knew, it was a confidential shelter. Next, I asked if there were any way I could come inside just to look around. The volunteer coordinator, Betty, said that if I took the eight weeks training course for new volunteers and committed to serving as a volunteer for one year, I would have access to the shelter. One year as a volunteer, I thought, that would give me lots of opportunity to collect background. In 1989, I signed up for the course and for the year.

Almost twenty years later, 2008, I retired from volunteering at New Beginnings. In the preceding years I had moved with the agency from just one house that held both the shelter and the offices to an organization that had a shelter, a separate site for offices and meetings, and an apartment building for transitional housing. During that time, I had taken crisis calls, picked up clients in waiting places, driven clients to the bus station, oriented new residents to the shelter, supported the advocates, assisted in group meetings, and, in general, tried to make myself useful. The staff was always extremely appreciative, including me and making me feel that what I was doing was really important. I had never before or since been treated so well as a volunteer. When I left, the staff organized a beautiful farewell luncheon on my behalf. So many people stood up and complimented me for the work I had done. It was like attending my own memorial service.

During those years, I was writing the second and third editions of Backpacking With Babies and Small Children (1998) and Camping With Kids (2006). All that time my novel was incubating in the back of my mind. Other things—life—got in the way. We had two grandchildren, and then two more. The arrival of number three was the reason I retired from New Beginnings; I wanted to spend more time with her. I'm not sure when or why I actually started to work on the novel. It took many years, but I think that around my seventy-fifth birthday I realized that if ever I was going to write it, I had better get started.

Much of it was already in my head. I wanted Molly, my woman character, to be fifty years old, so I set my story in 1983, the year I had turned fifty. I gave her many of my own feelings of my early years—little opportunity for independence, transferring from the protection of a father to the protection of a husband, nervousness in new situations, feelings of triumph when I conquered those situations. (Molly drove a rental truck cross country all by herself, something I could never do.)

I wrote about the meeting between my characters, and how they initially got off on the wrong foot. I had Molly show up, nervously, for her first day at work, and step by step, over three months, gradually learn the ways of the shelter. At the same time, I had Molly and my wheelchair user, Kevin, become closer and closer. However, as I wrote, a strange thing began to happen. As Molly learned about domestic violence and controlling behavior, she noticed that Kevin had many of the characteristics of an abusive person. At New Beginnings, I had learned that many women have difficulty facing the fact that their partner is abusive. I had the same reaction! This was not a development in the novel I had planned. I set the whole project aside for several months, while I tried to decide whether Kevin could be an abuser. I tried to find the line between nurturing and control. I read chapters to my writing critique group, and we discussed Kevin's behavior.

When I went back to work, I wanted to find a title that would reflect Molly's ambivalence, and mine. In the Bible, in Song of Songs 2:14, I found "Show me your face, Let me hear your voice." I used these words as the epigraph in my book, in my own edited version that suggests how a woman in Molly's situation might interpret these verses, and the book title became, Show Me Your Face.

For a number of reasons, I decided to publish independently. The publishers I had worked with previously had taken a long time to get my books into print, and I had not been happy with the covers they had selected for my last two books. I took my novel to CreateSpace which publishes both paperback and eBooks. Almost the entire communication with the publisher was done by computer and the internet, on my time. I photographed the car for the cover myself. Show Me Your Face came out in early 2015 with little fanfare. Now I hope that people will read it and learn about domestic violence and paraplegia.

As a resident of Seattle for fifty-eight years, world traveler Goldie Gendler Silverman still believes there is no place on earth she'd rather call home than here. Show Me Your Face is available from Amazon as a paperback or in the Kindle edition, or your favorite independent bookstore can order it for you.

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