Caroline Frost: On the Unlikeable Character Debate, Starting with a Screenplay, Writing About Toxic Relationships, and Her Debut Novel, "Shadows of Pecan Hollow"
Caroline Frost’s debut novel, Shadows of Pecan Hollow, explores the complexity of love and the resilience of women in this gritty, Southern thriller. Thirteen-year-old orphan, Kit, is unknowingly kidnapped by Manny in a moment of vulnerability. Before long, Kit and Manny became infamous for their string of gas station robberies throughout Texas, making a name for themselves as the Texaco Twosome. As Kit grows, so does her and Manny’s relationship; from toxic to violent. Kit has to make a choice- leave behind someone who use to feel safe or make it on her own.
I spoke with Caroline about the unlikeable character debate, how her novel idea started with a screenplay, writing about toxic relationships and how to keep writing fun.
Kailey Brennan DelloRusso: I’d love to know what the initial spark for this story was?
Caroline Frost: It started with a break up about 10 years ago, in 2012. He was working in New York for a year and it was just not going very well. And the only time we broke up was for this two week period. During that time, I was really torn up. I had this sense of a character who was all rage and violence (laughs). She was just full of hard feelings. At the time, I was not thinking like, oh, I'm going to process my feelings about this breakup. But I was kind of going wild in my apartment alone, trying not to watch the phone. I needed something to do with myself.
And so I was like, I'm gonna write a screenplay. (laughs) I live in Los Angeles, so everyone has a screenplay in their back pocket out here. It was sort of a natural thing for me to think. So I wrote the whole screenplay in two weeks, about a 90-page draft, and left it alone for a while.
But the main thrust of that project was what was going on in my heart. Then I kind of fell in love with Kit. I became fascinated with what made her this way and how she was going to get out of this state of constant self-protection and reactivity and how she was going to find a safe place to come out of herself. Back into connection with other people.
KBD: You do such a wonderful job fleshing out Kit and her childhood. As a writer, how did you get so close to her?
CF: Well, for those who aren’t familiar with a screenplay, the form is very sketchy. It’s very spare in terms of words and it’s more like a blueprint for directors and for filmmakers to put it into images that we can see. So Kit was not super fleshed out. It was much more of an action thriller, in the spirit of the 90’s Sleeping with the Enemy meets Blood Simple.
I hadn't really played around with it very much. So it wasn't until a couple of years later, when I was pregnant with my first child, that I decided I wanted to come back to it and just see if I could make it something more.
So I decided without any ambition of putting it in front of anyone's eyes, to start writing it as a novel. I actually wasn’t even thinking of it as a novel, but scenes would come to me and I would write those scenes down. So the first scene that came to me, the very first scene that I wrote, was Kit as a child, starving and tired, walking the lonely highway, looking for food, and headed toward Pecan Hollow. And it just came to me very viscerally. What it felt like to be hungry, what it felt like to not have a person in the world who cared about you, to have this kind of North star of a who knows if she's even real great aunt Eleanor. To be walking toward that with a little bit of faith and this letter in her pocket. And that became the heart of Kit. Then the process of getting deeper and deeper into it was layer upon layer of revisions and asking myself questions about her. Every time I had a new character, I was digging into how that relationship made [Kit] more complex, and asking how would she react to them. It was like those 3D printing things. Laying down one strip at a time.
KBD: Yeah. I found it interesting that, while I was reading a few reviews of the book, there were readers who found Kit unlikeable. I happen to really love unlikeable female characters. They are my favorite to read but I was curious if you wanted to comment on why we are so obsessed with needing our characters to even be likable.
CF: Absolutely. I have so many thoughts. I think it's a gender thing. I think that it's really hard to swallow a female character that completely issues all social norms, and etiquette, grooming, manner, whatever. I think that it can feel threatening. I think on a very fundamental level, it feels really scary for probably men and women. I understand that people want to see themselves in the main character, but the extent to which someone can identify with a complicated, flawed character, I think is the extent to which they are in touch with their own flaws and accepting of their own flaws. And this is no criticism on anyone. I love criticism. I love to hear how people are experiencing my book differently. I don't want everyone to kiss my ass. But I do think that the more we, as a culture, can embrace the dark side of our personalities - this is me as a therapist coming to play- the more that we can become comfortable with the parts of ourselves that are difficult and maybe unpleasant or not nice. Because, guess what, we all have a dark side. We all have the ugliness. And for most people, what's underneath the ugliness or the darkness is hurt. It's not badness. It's not a value thing. It's just hurt, fear, anger, shame, whatever, but we all have it.
KBD: Yeah, totally.
CF: So I’m glad you were able to get over that (laughs). But that was intentional by the way.
I did purposely make her tough to love but I also tried really hard to make her lovable.
KBD: Yeah, I mean you are definitely rooting for her. I guess I do understand where people are coming from but as I said, I gravitate towards stories like this so I didn’t have a problem with it. But yeah, it’s an interesting subject.
I was also really fascinated with how Manny and Kit’s toxic and misguided relationship affects her in the present as an adult. Was that one of the subjects, the trauma bond, that you were interested in exploring from the beginning?
CF: Yeah. So there is this idea of neglect versus abuse. There have been studies that show that children who are physically abused do better in life than children who are neglected. And that is because abuse, as horrific as it is, is attention. What is most deadly to a growing psyche is to feel completely alone in the world, unseen by anyone, and to feel that one not only doesn't matter, but that one doesn't exist. Without feedback from other people, we have this kind of existential sense of falling. So for Kit, without in any way endorsing this relationship, I did want to show how difficult it is for people who get into toxic relationships to get out of them. Because for many people, something bad is better than nothing at all. The part of them that needs love, and the part of them that needs to be acknowledged as a human being gets that even from a bad, abusive, exploitative, criminal relationship. I put her into this position and then show the reader this very exaggerated example of what I think a lot of people go through in toxic relationships. Certainly, people go through this for real all the time. Feeling this bond, the reader says, oh my God, but this guy's a creep and he's a criminal. But she just hasn't had anything so of course, she's going to imprint on this person and forgive him a million times until she finally can't forgive him anymore.
KBD: And I think that you really do such a great job in showing that throughout. I was completely sympathetic as the reader. Do you think your background as a therapist helped you through navigating this?
CF: Yes. I do want to say, for the record, that I never pull from my client’s stories consciously. I'm very, very protective of that relationship. But I think the muscle that I've worked really well is understanding, honoring, and feeling from within the experience of another person. And how it makes sense to that person to do the things that they do, even if they have painful consequences. So I can't sit and judge someone who's coming in saying, I keep dating guys who are bad for me, or I keep dating women who won't pay attention to me. I can't sit there and judge. I've got to really get into it and feel, and respect. Like, wow, you're making a decision that makes the most sense to you and I can see why. Let’s try to gently, step by step provide something that will make more sense to you going down the line.
KBD: I would love to switch gears to some craft questions. Let’s talk about structure. Was breaking the novel into parts, two from the present and one from the past, always the structure that worked for this story, or did you have to find that through revision?
CF: Originally I had it as a sequential narrative. My good friend, Julia Langbein, was one of my early readers and she said, you know, this is nice, but I almost want to start as close to the moment where Manny comes into the picture and then take a step back and figure out why this guy had this impact on this woman. So start off with sort of a mysterious encounter with a big reaction and then see the lead up to that. So it was a very simple cut and paste. There was some connective tissue I had to reconfigure, but for the most part that happened right before I submitted to agents, and then it's been that sequence ever since.
KBD: How long did it take you to write this novel? And what does your writing routine look like, either now or when you were working on the novel?
CF: I say 10 years because I started the novel almost precisely 10 years ago, in mid-January of 2012. I did leave it alone for a few years and then came back to it. Since I started writing it as a novel, I've had three children in, so I’ve been being pregnant and breastfeeding and giving birth and all that stuff, kind of nonstop for the last six years. So it's a model that not everybody necessarily has to follow, but for a while, I was waking up at like 4 or 5 in the morning before I knew the baby was gonna get up and writing for like an hour and a half. Or speaking into my notes files while I was breastfeeding. Scenes would come to me and I would write them down that way and then transcribe them later. I was just stealing moments. So I did learn how to write piecemeal, which I don't necessarily recommend, but it was the best that I could do. The result of that was I got to write a book, but it made the revision process really difficult. For the next book, which is in process, I have full-time help with my baby now, which is a godsend. And now I work about six hours a day.
KBD: Wow.
CF: It's a luxury. It feels so good. I love it. So I work from probably 10 or 10:30 until 4:30 when my big kids get home.
KBD: And you can work that way, with such a large chunk of time?
CF: I need the runway. I need the warmup time. I'm starting a new novel right now, so I have it outlined and I'm still researching. What I'm doing right now is very not even first drafty, but I'm just sort of saying like, okay, the main character walks into the room, she does this, this and this. I want to feel this at the end of the scene, blah, blah, blah. So it's just super roughing everything out and then I’m going to gong a bell at some point when I feel like I have the whole story sketched out and start, in earnest, to let the prose flow.
KBD: I’m always curious because I’m writing my first novel now and I’m still figuring out my process and what works. I actually just talked to an author yesterday who also would write in 4-hour chunks of time. And I'm just trying to think how I can kind of steal away some hours in my day try that out. Because like you said, the runway, the warmup time.
CF: And by the way, I don't feel like I have landed on my perfect way to write. I think it really just depends on what's going on. You know, like how hot the sun is coming through the window, where I'm sitting in the room, what I have around me and like did my pens run out of ink? That kind of thing.
Janet Fitch* is a teacher of mine from grad school and she recommends basically setting a timer for 25 minutes and don't stop writing for that time. And then at the end of 25 minutes, you can do squats or walk or go to the bathroom, have a drink of water, and then come back and do another 25 minutes. Do six of those stretches and that’s your day.
KBD: Oh wow.
CF: Yeah. So it ends up being three very efficient hours. I've tried that before and it's great. And sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn't.
KBD: As a debut author, what kept you in the chair to get this finished? Do you have any advice that kept you motivated that you can share?
CF: Yes. I have two things. One is before you start writing, write down what you want to get done for the day. Even if you don't do it, I think it just really helps to have something written down in front of you. It could be a post-it on the wall in front of you or whatever. Then save a couple of things for the next day. Then you've got a foot in the work for the next day instead of feeling like, oh, how the hell am I going to approach this chapter? You already have a little bit of a blueprint for it.
So that's one. Then two, follow the fun. I force myself to write stuff all the time and when I’m done with it, it’s flat. I don't know why I do it, except I think maybe there's just some functional reason for it. But whenever I write what feels fun to me, those are the scenes that always pop. They're always the scenes that readers connect with. If it feels like you should do something, write it down, table it and then write something that would be fun to write. Just keep it fun. Writing can be fun, I think should be fun. And when I'm in the fun is always when I'm writing my best stuff.
*Caroline also shared with me that Janet Fitch has a YouTube channel where she answers craft questions! Check it out here
Caroline Frost is a native Texan, and SHADOWS OF PECAN HOLLOW is her first novel. She has a Master of Professional Writing from University of Southern California and is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. She lives in the LA area with her husband and three young children.
