Meet the Authors: Melody Groves

This last Wednesday I attended the Meet the Authors lecture with Melody Groves.  Melody Groves is a writer of a number of Western novels, both fiction and nonfiction.  She has also written for magazines.  She had quite a bit to say that related to Tolkien’s work, as well as other interesting information.

She was born in Las Cruces, but spent a significant portion of her time growing up in Guam and the Philippines.  She was interested in writing Western novels from living in Las Cruces, but it took her a long time to reach that point.  Her mother had written some romances and gotten money for them, so that gave her some motivation.  She has always been drawn to Westerns rather than any other genre.

She discussed conducting research for her writing.  In nonfiction works, the research is extremely important.  She explained that she looks for quirky details to make the books interesting.  The research for her fictional works is less detailed.  She often tries to visit the places she is writing about to get a feel for what they are like.  It’s interesting to see the difference here between historical fiction and Tolkien’s fantasy.  Historical fiction is limited by real places and real events, whereas Tolkien could do whatever he wanted with his world.

She spoke about writing in different perspectives.  She used to write in third person but has come to increasingly like first person because it really lets the author get into the character’s head.

She also explained that it is more difficult than it seems to write good action sequences.  Her process is making notes of the cause of the action and all the different elements involved before writing to check through and make sure none are forgotten in the finished scene.  Tolkien does an excellent job especially in The Lord of the Rings of planning out the battles and all the different groups involved, taking into account the logistics and the movement speed of the different pieces so that everything comes together at the right time.  She also mentioned that, if possible, it is good to act out an action sequence with people.  Authors can learn a lot by doing this.

On the subject of plotting, however, Melody said she usually doesn’t plan out all her characters’ actions before writing a story.  She lets them do their own thing as the plot progresses, and when they come to a crossroads she usually asks herself which choice they could take would be more interesting to read (or write) about.  This seems like a very different approach from Tolkien, since Tolkien plotted out all of the characters’ choices and events in a timeline so that everything works out.

She also discussed the importance of community to an author.  She said that Albuquerque has a wonderful community of authors, bookstores, and more.  A critique group is important for catching contradictions and errors in written work, problems with the characters, and grammatical errors.  However, negative criticism cutting down an author’s work without being supportive can be crushing.  This reminded me of the critiques the Inklings conducted on each other’s work.

Finally, a recurring idea idea was that she had always wanted to write Western novels, she just wished she had realized it and started earlier.  She regretted not doing it for most of her life.

~Ulmo