Friday from the Archives: “Gwendolyn Parker on Community, Writing, and the “Human Capacity for Forgiveness and Growth”” an interview by Jenn Brandt in NCLR 2020
Brandt interviewed Durham-born author Gwendolyn Parker for our “North Carolina Expatriate Writers” special feature. After moving to the North with her family, for school and then work, she quit corporate roles and devoted herself to writing full-time. She would take off and go in a number of directions. In addition to These Same Long Bones and Trespassing, she has had a over twenty-year career producing and writing in Hollywood on such well-known shows as “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” “Without a Trace,” “CSI: Miami,” and “NCIS: New Orleans.” In all her work, Parker is motivated by an empathy toward the human
condition, a desire to understand the way individuals overcome enormous challenges and loss, and the precarious balance between community needs and personal desire.
Brandt: There are so many interesting characters in the novel, each playing a role in the central conflict. Can you talk about a few of the characters or, more broadly, about how you approach character development?
Parker: I am a very intuitive writer, but I also have a pretty strong sense of form and structure. And I kind of bounce back and forth between the two. I like to have characters just begin talking to me and sort of show up. Then I interrogate them and try to understand what their role is in what I’m creating. But I don’t do it at the same time. I remember there was a scene I was writing where I was trying to write this character being on this porch, and every time I tried to begin it, I couldn’t figure out what her voice was saying or what she was
doing. So I sat down and I began questioning her, and I said, “Why don’t you come onto the porch?” and she said, “Because you don’t know what I look like.” And I said, “I do!” and I was referencing back to a scene that I had written where someone else was viewing her, and she said, “That’s what he thinks I look like.” That became the beginning of that character, it was her claiming that she was not exactly the person from this other person’s point of view. So it’s like the characters have to become real and talk to me. I won’t write a
whole book and not know what people are doing, but I’ll let them emerge, and I’ll sit and I’ll look and I’ll ask, okay what have I got here? I’ll look at it from the whole and try to see what role the characters seem to be playing in the story. It’s a conversation between my intuitive side and my more structural side. I actually sit in different places when I do this, and usually different times of day. The morning is more intuitive, creative, and then when I start getting a little, not so much tired, but when the world starts to exert a little more of an influence, then I sort of switch to the more critical, analytical side. I print pages out, and I go sit in another chair. Then I mark things up and ask questions and make pictures and do all that.
Read the rest of the interview on ProQuest. Add the 2020 issue to your collection today!
