THE WRITE PATH with Jane Dougherty

Jane Dougherty

In this series, my guests talk to us about their books. Today I welcome author Jane Dougherty, who will be discussing The Green Woman series, a YA dystopian series of unexpected depth, with me. Today, August 21, you can find the first book in her series FREE at http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Citadel-Green-Woman-Book-ebook/dp/B00JW86TYM.

So let me hand over my mic. The next voice you’ll hear will be Jane’s.

1. What is your book about?

The Dark Citadel is the first volume of The Green Woman series. There are three main volumes, all three available as of today, and so far six spin-off stories. The world of the Green Woman is a post-apocalyptic world where the human survivors huddle inside the protective crystal dome of Providence. It isn’t a futuristic story, not techy at all, and closer to allegory than an attempt at ultra-realism. In this future, after generations of post-nuclear darkness, the citizens of Providence have fallen back on the great human stand-by—religion. With no opposition, the Elders have created a theocracy, which has changed subtly from strict to downright evil. The only dissent is from the Ignorants, the underclass who believe in the old stories of a utopia, a sort of Garden of Eden, and the Green Woman, the keeper of the Memory of the world, who will make the Garden grow in its ruins. The story of The Green Woman is the story of the reawakening of humanity, a great starting over, and the fight to put evil back in its place, the Pit.

The Dark Citadel is the first episode, showing the nature of the Elders’ regime and introducing the central character—Deborah, the Green Woman’s daughter. Slowly, the green magic is wakening to rebuild the broken earth. Deborah’s mother fled Providence when Deborah was a small child, when she began to have visions of things the Elders would rather keep lost and dead. Deborah’s forced betrothal to the public executioner’s warped son is the catalyst that sends her on the hazardous journey to join her mother, who is reaching the end of her strength, and pick up the task of making those visions live again.

In the course of her journey through the arid wasteland that surrounds Providence, Deborah meets Jonah and learns about friendship, loyalty, and love. She develops from a bitter and angry schoolgirl to a young woman ready to take up her responsibilities, whatever they turn out to be.

The Green Woman is basically about the very ordinary nature of evil, and how it can be overcome by very ordinary love. There are two main types of evil that beset humanity: the flamboyant, biblical, demonic evil that we all find easy to understand and point the finger at; and the ordinary evil perpetrated by ordinary people on their fellow human beings. Deborah’s role is to show the people of Providence where these two types of evil meet, and to offer them something different.

2. What do you think attracts readers to your main characters?

Deborah is not an immediately appealing character. She is opinionated, careless with her friends’ feelings, and bitter. In her defence, it has to be said she has a lot to be bitter about, and if she wasn’t headstrong and opinionated she wouldn’t have had the nerve to speak out against what she considers unjust. My son told me how much he liked the character of Deborah. “She’s a real bitch,” he said, “but it’s what keeps her going.” By the end of the story she has matured enough to be more than a bitch, and to channel her anger and energy into creating something wonderful.

One beta reader worried that I would alienate readers with some of Deborah’s behaviour, but I didn’t want her to be a plaster saint. Yes, she does plough ahead regardless of the consequences for other people, but that’s because she is a driven character, not because she doesn’t care. She often feels remorse and regret, but something is always pushing her on to what she firmly believes is her destiny, even though she doesn’t know exactly what it is.

Of the other characters, my favourite has to be Jonah. He isn’t the classic hero—a strong, silent, smouldering hunk—he’s a runaway, used to living on his wits in an inhospitable world. He has no savoir faire with girls, he’s wild and unkempt and he does seems to know exactly how to ruffle Deborah’s feathers. Jonah’s great strength is his heart. It’s bigger than anything else in the story and runs as a thread through the entire series.

3. What message do you hope the reader takes away from your book?

When I made my first stumbling steps on what has turned out to be a very long journey, I had a single idea about this story. I was going to create a society full of all the things I hate most—religious bigotry, misogyny, repression, cruelty, conformism, ignorance—and let the people who suffer the most in this ugly regime show the way to something better. The Dark Citadel starts in a cruel and dismal dystopia, and I wanted a girl, one of Providence’s most unesteemed inhabitants, to be the first to reach out to a utopia.

If I want readers to take anything away from this story it’s that for a world to be a good place to live in it needs compassion, courage and love, and all of us, even adolescents, have to stand up for what we believe to be right.

What most reviewers have picked up on is the setting for the story. Perhaps because it is incredibly clear in my own mind, to the extent that I know the street patterns of some of the neighbourhoods and dozens of characters who don’t even get a mention in the stories. It might be their invisible presence populating the story that makes it striking to so many readers.

From Kate Wrath’s review:

‘This book is beautifully rooted in mythology, borrowing symbolism and power from a spattering of ancient stories, all twisted into a modern legend. Somehow a huge variety of things– centaurs, demons, post-nuclear potatoes– are all brought together into a picture that makes sense.’

From John Collick’s review:

‘The author has created a massive tapestry for the backdrop to The Dark Citadel – imagine a painting by Hieronymous Bosch designed by George Orwell and set in North Korea.’

4. What was it about your book that made it so easy to attract your editor?

I attracted a publisher very quickly through luck (whether good or bad is debatable). I found an acquiring editor who loved the story of The Dark Citadel for what makes it different from much of what is written for YA—the language, which doesn’t pull any punches, and the relative complexity of the ideas and plot. Unfortunately, she left the publisher before my book had finished the editing stages, and those differences that had attracted her seemed more like problems to her successor. I had such an unhappy experience with this publisher, like fitting a square peg into a round hole, that I was offered my rights back five months after publication.

One problem is that The Green Woman series is classed as YA. Much YA writing uses simple sentence structure and reasonably straightforward plot, partly because the category is assumed to include readers I would consider children. For me, Young Adult means a reader who has adult reading ability and is capable of understanding adult emotions, even if they might not be old enough to have had time to experience many of them. I write for anyone who falls into that category, not children. I prefer much richer language than is usual, and I don’t believe in making things easy emotionally just because thirteen-year-olds might be reading it.

5. Comparing the ideas you had before writing the book with the finished product, would you change anything if you could travel back in time?

The disastrous episode with my former publisher did have a more positive side. It introduced me to an editor who really loved what I write and who has followed me through thick and thin to critique and make suggestions on everything I’ve published so far. The second bonus was that getting my rights back and republishing allowed me to overhaul the text in the light of how the world develops in the later parts of the trilogy and the layers I added in the spin-off stories. It was as though I was discovering this world the more I wrote about it. The opportunity to go back and change details in the social order as well as the characterisations has been invaluable.

When you create a world, you have to have worked out its technology, social structure and beliefs, history and background as well as the geography of the place. The deeper the writer digs into the world, the more she will discover about it. Sometimes there will be some minor detail in the first book that doesn’t at all fit in with the society as it has developed by the end of the third book. For example, through dint of writing about them repeatedly, I got to know how the military functioned in Providence, its hierarchy of soldiers and militia. In the first book there’s a scene that I originally wrote with the militia using spears, through laziness really, because it made what happens in the scene easier to describe. By the time I had reached the second volume of the story it was obviously a cranky idea to have these thugs of policemen using spears, so when I revised The Dark Citadel I rewrote that scene and reorganised all the references to soldiers and militia to make it coherent.

Here are Jane’ links:

Blog: http://janedougherty.wordpress.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MJDougherty33
Amazon author pages:
http://tinyurl.com/nholyft
http://tinyurl.com/m9xhyb6

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6953978.Jane_Dougherty