A Creative Process on Crafting Women's Fiction and Character Development -116

Kathleen Basi [: 00:00:02

Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for checking us out. This is the podcast where you give us fifteen minutes of your time, and we give you a chance to hear the voice behind the pages and get to know some of your favorite writers in a new light. I'm one of your hosts, Kathleen Bassey. I'm an award winning musical composer, feature writer, essayist, and of course, storyteller. Let me tell you a little about today's guest. Donna Norman-Carbone, the award winning author of All That Is Sacred and Of Lies and Honey, published by Red Adept Publishing, has a passion for writing women's fiction that tugs at the heartstrings. Donna is also cohost of the podcast, authors talking bookish, and the program director for the bookish road trip.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:00:52

Her writing affiliations include membership of WFWA and CAPA. Donna is an English teacher in a small Connecticut suburb where she and her husband have raised three children, two Labrador retrievers, and a Siamese cat. In her spare time, she enjoys reading a good book on a sunny Cape Cod beach, her happy place, spending quality time with family and friends, and traveling overseas.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:01:14

Welcome to Author Express. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:01:18

So Connecticut, tell me the most interesting thing about where you're from.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:01:23

People know us from our pizza and the shoreline. The shoreline's my favorite, though. We have a boat, and we go out on it frequently when the weather permits. So that's my favorite part about Connecticut, but it's really a beautiful state.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:01:37

What kind of boat is it?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:01:39

So it's a fishing boat. My husband fishes while I read.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:01:43

Oh, yes. So that sounds like an evoking division of labor to me.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:01:47

Yeah. That's my idea of boating.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:01:50

I agree with that. Do you want shade on this boat or do you just have to.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:01:54

There are some spaces of shade. Yeah. Mostly in the sun, though.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:01:59

It has to be a specific kind of boat to be ocean worthy. Right?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:02:03

Yeah. It does. I wanna say it's about I don't even know. It's like a 30 foot fishing boat. I'm embarrassed that I don't know that. My husband would get mad.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:02:14

Yeah. Well, my brother-in-law who lives up in the Northeast has built a sailing boat out of wood. And so I know just about the tiniest little bit about it from watching that happen over the course of years.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:02:27

Oh, that's cool. Fun fact for you, the third book that I'm working on has a character who builds sailboats out of wood.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:02:34

There you go. Very cool. Yeah. Alright. We will get to see to that down the line a little bit. But right now, let's get to know you just a little bit better. If you could live anywhere in the world other than Connecticut, where would you go and why?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:02:49

Probably Cape Cod. My lifelong dream is to live on a beach and to work full time instead of teaching. I love teaching, but I'm ready to move on to the next chapter. What do you teach? I teach English to high school students, mostly honors and college level classes.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:03:10

That's what I was going to ask because I knew I read in the bio English, but I was like, what does that mean exactly?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:03:15

Yeah. I teach British literature, film, creative writing.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:03:19

Film and creative writing sound like a lot of fun.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:03:22

Yeah. They are a lot of fun.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:03:24

So tell us, you know, all of us who had to read things that we hated when we were kids in school, what kinds of things do you read in British literature these days?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:03:32

So right now, we are reading King Lear by Shakespeare. We do the Canterbury Tales. We do my favorite book, Wuthering Heights. We also do David Copperfield and then some Virginia Woolf.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:03:45

David Copperfield, all of that. The Dickens is is surprisingly easy to read, I think, compared

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:03:50

to the classics. Yeah. Yeah. I love Charles Dickens, and I like that David Copperfield is his most biographical novel. I do a lot of ties into his life.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:04:02

That's very cool. Yeah. The kids seem to like it. High school teachers are heroes. That's all.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:04:09

Well, thank you.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:04:15

You're a pretty content person. You're living you're living you would not go very far in about the same kind of area that you are. You're not craving palm trees?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:04:20

No. I really like living on near the shoreline. So Cape Cod is really my happy place. I think if I had to pick another place, it would be somewhere in England, probably on the coast as well.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:04:32

Yeah. Have you been to England a number of times?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:04:35

Yeah. We have. Yeah. I actually traveled there a handful of times with my British literature class. That was my first exposure to England, and it was very cool. I designed my own literary tour of England based on the things that we were reading. And so my husband and I have gone back several times on our own.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:04:56

That sounds really, really great. Yeah.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:04:59

It was a lot of fun.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:05:00

Good for you. Well, let's kinda pivot and talk about your book a little bit. Tell us about your book, Of Lies and Honey, in one sentence.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:05:08

So Of Lies and Honey is about three women all struggling with some aspect of motherhood. It takes place over two time periods, and their lives collide based on one dark secret.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:05:20

Oh, intriguing. We can't ask you what the dark secret is.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:05:24

No. There's a little bit of a twist in there. Okay.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:05:28

Tell me what's the hardest thing about writing a book like that?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:05:32

Probably, this one is in three points of view. So trying to get all their story arcs together, I almost had to do three separate outlines when I originally started writing it. And that helped me keep track and also, like, find parallels to decide where which chapters would go.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:05:52

Yeah. So it's not just an alternating in an person a person

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:05:56

No. It's not. I mean, it it pretty much is, but there are some chapters double up on one character based on where they are in the story, and I tried to find parallels to kind of transition from one character's chapter to another.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:06:13

So you've got three women in this, and they're in different time frame. So can you kinda lay that out for us?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:06:18

Well, two of them are modern day, but separated by geography. And then one of them is in the late nineteen sixties. They're all in Georgia, and it kind of centers around social class, the debutante society. The older character is coming out as a debutante and has come from a very wealthy family, and she gets pregnant as a teenager. And her mother is afraid it's gonna stain the reputation of their family. So they tell her that she needs to get an abortion or put the baby up for adoption. An abortion was illegal at that time, so it would have been an illegal abortion. So it's about her story, and it's paralleled with two other women who are struggling with different aspects of motherhood, and their stories collide based on a common place.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:07:16

That's interesting. One of the questions that we like to ask is about the importance of setting. So, you know, you live up North Connecticut, so why Georgia, and what is it about Georgia that made it the place for this story?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:07:28

Well, I originally came upon a similar story from an article that I read, and it was about a debutante who was forced to give her child up for adoption against her will for a similar reason because her family were they were afraid it would put a stain on their reputation, and it just kind of rolled over in my mind for years. I probably didn't start writing it until, like, seven years later because I just kept thinking about it. And as a mom of three, I had a hard time grappling with the idea of putting a child up for adoption against your will. So that was the impetus of the story. And because I, in my research, I found debutante society originated down south in Georgia. Georgia had the biggest debutante society during that time. I decided to set it there even though I've only ever traveled through there. So I did a lot of research, Georgia.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:08:27

How do you do research without actually going there and spending time?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:08:31

You know what? I do this for every novel. I go online as if I'm going to move there. So I will look at real estate. I will look at different towns. I will look at different sites to see if you're a visitor moving through. I'll even look at Google Earth when I hone in on a town or an area and kind of move through that to get a sense of what that's like.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:08:56

That's really cool.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:08:57

Yeah. It's fun. I enjoy that part of the process.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:09:00

You know, it occurs to me that you have this website and podcast, the bookish road trip, and that sounds like, I don't know. There's something very appropriate about that. Like, I take my road trips through Google Earth. Yeah.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:09:15

I know. I'm you know what? The bookish road trip is an online book club. My podcast is Author's Talking Bookish, which are similar. But I am very much about books, reading books, writing books, and traveling. Like, those are my three things, my favorite hobbies. So I love the combination of those.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:09:37

Okay. We're gonna back up here a second because you said you love traveling, and so we're gonna go back to a question about you because we're just gonna be that way today. The technology is not cooperating, folks. We're kind of flying by the seat of our pants as we were. What places have you traveled to that have really stuck in your mind aside from you've already talked about Cape Cod and England?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:09:57

Probably Italy is my second favorite country. I am from an Italian family, very Italian, and I have been there twice. Once for my husband and my fiftieth birthdays, we decided to go on a trip, and we traveled from Northern Italy to Southern Italy stopping in many places along the way. I just felt at home there. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. It's a beautiful country. But, yeah, I've been to a handful of countries in Europe and Canada and, you know, many different states.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:10:34

I just love discovering new places. Great. Okay. Back to the book.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:10:39

Who do you think is gonna connect with this book?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:10:42

Anybody who's a mother, honestly. There's so many facets of motherhood in here. There's one mom who has multiple kids, and she's been described as like a very earthy, crunchy mom. There's another mom who described as, like, a very earthy, crunchy mom. There's another mom who is going through issues conceiving. There's another mom who's, like, super overprotective of her kids and another mom who is just the devil mom, kind of like a Joan Crawford kind of mom.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:11:11

Wow. Lots of depth and lots of breadth in those mothers. So who encouraged you in your writing journey when you were young?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:11:20

You know, my parents. My mother says I was writing since I could hold a pen in my hand. And I actually have a picture of, like, my three to four year old self sitting at a dining room table just writing. Who knows what I was writing? And my grandmother took me to a train station to pick up my parents one time, and I wrote everything that I saw. I was basically people watching and recording everything. I called it Blinky the camera. I've just always been writing in, you know, many forms, mostly poetry and novels. I think in long term, I have a really hard time writing a short story.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:11:56

Whenever I try to write a short story, it turns out more novella like. But, yeah, it just fills me with a passion. It's not even a choice as much as I feel like I need it to survive.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:12:09

Yes. You know, you talked about going to the train station and writing down everything that you saw, and that made me think of this exercise that we did in drama class, actually, in high school where we had to go outside and sit. And we did it with visual and we did it with auditory. Everything you could see one time and everything you could hear another time, and you had to just keep writing for ten minutes. And it was incredible how you ran out of things that you thought you could hear because you were editing out all of these other sounds and had to figure Yeah. They were like, yeah, that's really neat. But it occurs to me that that was probably really good training for being an author because that that's how you dig into a sense of place.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:12:49

Yeah. I think the more sensory you can get with a setting when writing setting, the more connectable it is to readers because they feel like they are there and can experience it.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:13:02

And sometimes it's the smallest things. I was thinking of it this weekend. I live I live in Central Missouri, but I had traveled to Tampa for the weekend for a professional gig. And while I was down there, every time I went outside, there were insects singing. And we're recording this in December, so in the heart of the winter up here, and there's no insects making noise around here. So that was very striking, and it's just that very tiny little thing that's makes a really big difference to how the place feels.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:13:28

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think I think writers have a knack for this, but I think if you're not a writer, those things might be lost on you unless somebody brings them up, brings them to your attention.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:13:39

Yeah. I remember this other thing once about I can't even remember where I encountered it, but everyone in the class was convinced that it was a full moon in this story, but no one could find it. Everyone had the same thought. And finally, somebody realized that in one place, he had mentioned a white rock that was glowing.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:13:58

Oh, wow.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:13:58

And it becomes that tiny detail. Everybody knew the setting.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:14:02

That's amazing.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:14:04

So where do you see yourself ten years from now?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:14:08

Oh, jeez. In my beach house, sitting by a window where I can see the waves crashing on the shore, writing ten years from now, maybe my tenth book.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:14:19

Oh, she's ambitious.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:14:20

Yeah. I'm on number three.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:14:23

You don't even have to write one a year at that rate. No. But you're a high school teacher.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:14:28

Oh. I know people say to me all the time, when do you find time to write? I squeeze it in as much as I can. Yesterday, we had a weather day. I wouldn't even say it was a snow day. It was like a mix of snow and sleet. But those days, I just love them. It doesn't matter to me that they get tacked on to the end of the year because I feel like that's found time. Any found time to me means writing time.

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:14:53

So I spent the entire day writing, and it was wonderful.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:14:57

Wow. That's lovely. And being with my kids at home dreading every snow day, I envy you. So as we start to wrap up here, tell us what's the best place for people to find you if they wanna go find out more about your books and you.

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Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:15:14

I think the best place to find me is on my website at www.donnanormancarbone.com. You will find links to all my books there. You'll find my blog there. You'll find everything. A way to subscribe to my newsletter, which comes out monthly, and that will keep you updated on where I am and where I am in my writing process.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:15:39

Very good. Thank you. So, oh, English teacher of high school students, what book or story inspires you the most?

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:15:48

I'm gonna have to say Virginia Woolf's A Room of Her Own. I absolutely love that book and I've been so inspired by her as a writer. She just writes such beautiful prose. I also love her diary entries, which are fascinating to read if you like Virginia Woolf. But a room of one's own is about what a woman needs to be a successful writer. She says women need money and a room of her own if she is to be successful.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:16:20

Interesting. Very good. Well, that is a good way to end today for all of us because there are lots of writers who listen to this too. So

Donna Norman-Carbone [: 00:16:28

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. This was a blast.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:16:33

I enjoyed it too. You and everybody check out Donna. Thanks for joining us today. Reviews help other people to find us. So please take a minute to give us a rating and leave a few words. We'll be here again next Wednesday. In the meantime, follow us on Instagram at author express podcast to see who's coming up next. Don't forget.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:16:54

Keep it express, but keep it interesting.