The Author
Lyndsay was born in 1980. She worked as an actor doing professional theatre for ten years before turning to writing. In the course of her acting career, she went to college in the Bay Area, learned how to sing, moved to NYC with her husband, and had a ferociously, indecently great time. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Dust and Shadow: an Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H Watson and The Gods of Gotham and is a member of The Baker Street Babes, Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, and The Baker Street Irregulars. For more infomation on Lyndsay, go to www.lyndsayfaye.com.The Article
The first book I ever penned (typed on a laptop, but
let’s allow a little romantic leeway where verbs are concerned) was about
Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, a pair of characters I have unabashedly loved
since my childhood. Dust and Shadow set them the herculean task of solving the Jack the
Ripper murders, and I did terrible things to both my protagonists in order to
heighten suspense both emotionally and physically: I stabbed Holmes, for
starters, ruined his reputation, set an angry Whitechapel mob on him, and caused
him to feel directly culpable for defenseless women being slaughtered. I did all of this because I love him to
pieces, and thus—conversely, I grant—making the man suffer seemed like a
brilliant plan.
The
Timothy Wilde books (The Gods of Gotham
and my latest, Seven for a Secret) were
a trickier matter entirely, and a long time in coming. A gap of some two years divided my first book
from my second. See, I got it into my
head somehow that I should write serious historical novels about people with
repressed, decorous feelings, and that these people and their feelings should
be drawn obliquely, artfully, like a minimalist painting or a bonsai tree, and
then I would have written an “important” book that got on “important” book
lists made by people who thought that Nabokov’s works were a little pedestrian
for their tastes.
Yes,
absolutely, I was an idiot.
My
work during that time period might well have included some super-great, shiny
writing, and possibly similes as brilliant, pure, and cutting as the finest
diamonds. Whatever. No one bought
those books, and now I know exactly why no one bought those books; my heart
might well have been in them, of course it was.
But it wasn’t visible.
When
I wrote Seven for a Secret, I was
very angry. I was angry about complacent
people in the United States telling me that racism under the Obama
administration was over, and we could all go home, and get rid of voter
protection laws. Racism is alive and
well and living in our schools and our communities and our politics. Seven
for a Secret is about vigilante African Americans fighting back against the
system (yes, it was systematized) of white slave catchers simply grabbing a
person of color by the collar in the middle of the road, declaring that person
was an escaped slave, and hauling that helpless city dweller down South to be
sold to a plantation. Twelve Years a Slave, an autobiography
by Solomon Northrup before it was turned into an Oscar-winning film, tells the
other side of the coin I wished to mint: I wanted to tell a true story,
historically sourced, about people who escaped with their lives and their
names.
Trying
to write a book from a place of apathy or sadness is extremely difficult, but doable. Trying to write a book that is “art” is next
door to impossible—you either write the best and truest book you can, or you
don’t, and then it’s either good, or it isn’t.
Trying to write a book from a place of anger is fairly simple, however,
and anger is one of the more fiery human passions, so writing a book about
something that made me incandescent with pique over modern dismissal of global
race problems was not the most difficult challenge ever presented to me; words
just kind of kept tumbling onto my laptop screen.
Anyone
accusing me of caring a bit too ardently about politics and the consequences of
poor administrative decisions would be correct, but alongside the anger I felt
about a specific problem (racial injustice), I have other preoccupations I
worked into the narrative, aspects of human nature that will never fail to
fascinate me (courage and kindness and cruelty and unconditional love). When I realized after a couple of failed book
attempts that I needed to put up or shut up, I looked in the mirror and
admitted to myself that no one reads my fiction because it’s abstruse or
postmodern. The lovely people who read my
fiction do so because when I attempt to convey aspects of life I honestly find
ugly or beautiful, and I force myself to do so with my heart on the tips of my
fingers, some of those words end up in print.
Words
along the heated lines of:
The space Mercy’s absence created in me was a
voracious hole. Not a neutral erasure,
but a gleaming black bonfire. Had I
taken a keek in my chest, I’d have seen bluish flames skittering along ribbons
of ebony pitch. The sensation was pretty
specific.
Since
moving to New York City ten years ago, I have seen every single production by
the Public Theatre produced for their free Shakespeare in the Park
program. Shakespeare is an early love of
mine, and it’s Shakespeare who returned me to sanity when it comes to
passionate writing. His characters rail,
whimper, weep, laugh, bellow, plead, ache, mock, and love, and they perform
many other verbs equally as telling. And
while I ought to have stuck to the model I used in Dust and Shadow and caused my new characters to run the full gamut
of visible emotional highs and lows from the outset, ultimately I’m glad of the
journey. Because if I can expose my
heart to my readers now, and express the struggles I faced, then anyone can
take a stab at the same, and who knows what the marvelous results might be?
Write
from your heart, for your heart. There
is no better advice that I can deliver.
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