JAVS Spring 2022

Eclectic Violist

On Creating a Fictional Violist by Claire Handscombe

I wish I could say that, in creating the character of violist Clara for my novel Girl, Unstrung , I always set out to champion and better understand an under-appreciated instrument. The reality is much less poetic: Clara came to me fully formed from a previous novel I had written. Unscripted is a novel about a young woman, Libby, who spends the summer with an actor and his children—and Clara is one of those children. I needed her to be able to petulantly correct Libby when she mentions her violin, and she does so, as many of you no doubt have countless times, by saying, with some superiority: “it’s a viola. ” In Unscripted , Clara plays a pivotal role, but only appears in a few scenes. I had a good sense of her as a person; her voice was clear in my head and she intrigued me. I wanted to give her a story of her own. I loved the characters I had created for that world, and I longed to spend more time with them. And so, in November 2016, Girl, Umstrung was born. The reason for November, too, is fairly prosaic: it’s a month during which thousands of writers across the world take part in NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month—in which the challenge is to write a 50,000-word first draft of a novel in just thirty days. That works out to 1,667 words per day, which is significant but not insurmountable—if, as with the daily practice of musicians, you are diligent and accepting of incremental progress. There are many ways to approach NaNoWriMo. Some writers go in cold and let the writing take them where it will. Others meticulously plan their book chapter by chapter the month before, during what’s been affectionately dubbed Preptober. I fall somewhere in the middle. I’ve used NaNoWriMo to produce first drafts four times now, and the more prepared I’ve been in advance, the better it has gone for me.

Sometimes I have some scenes in my head in advance. Sometimes, I know the ending. Often, I have the first line, and thus the voice of the character or narrator in my head, which is crucial. For me, preparation is all about getting to know the character. The novels I write are more character-driven than plot-driven, and that reflects my interest in people’s motivation and desires. That is true of Girl, Unstrung , where I was interested in exploring the internal world of a young teen growing up peripherally to Hollywood, with ambitions of her own that are overshadowed by the success of her parents and, potentially, of her younger ballerina sister. For Clara, achievement means everything. It’s the way she’s going to get her parents to notice her—she may be the eldest, but she feels a little lost among the four siblings. And it’s the way she’s going to get the world to pay attention to her as more than just somebody’s daughter. She genuinely loves the viola, so it makes sense that when it comes to having serious ambitions of her own, those ambitions would relate to her instrument. One thing I love about reading and writing fiction for teens as an adult is the cognitive dissonance between what we know and what the narrator does. Clara is good at the viola, excellent even, and she’s very dedicated. But she’s not quite good enough or quite hard working enough to get to where she wants to go, and, as adults reading, we know that better than she does. That’s something I relate to as a musician. I grew up playing the flute, and when I think back to my teens, it seems as though if I was awake, I was either doing schoolwork, at a church meeting, or practising my instrument either at home or in one of four orchestras I

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring 2022