Writing My Horror Novel: The Story Process
The Beginning
It’s occurred to me that, while I’ve given cursory and pithy summaries of Dove Keeper, I’ve never really gone into detail about what it’s about. Part of this is because of certain reveals I’m trying to keep hidden, but I think it’s best to talk about the process behind crafting the story.
When I was in high school, I tried to write a Gothic horror story about a girl named Jehanne who woke up with amnesia in an old manor, and she only has her father and herself. However, this story never really launched off the ground because I felt like I didn’t have enough material, even though I had a clear idea of the protagonist, antagonist, and general conflict. It’s a story that was at the back of my mind, but I have a menagerie of those.
Fast forward about three years, and I was a sophomore in college. I took a poetry writing class; poetry was something I enjoyed reading, not so much writing (this has changed) because I was used to prose. One day late in the semester, I needed an idea for a poem. I thought about how I was told that the Deiblers were executioners in the past, but I only knew two names: Louis and Anatole, two of the executioners, the latter being the former’s son because the position was largely inherited. I decided to write about that, and I focused on Anatole. I was surprised to learn he was born in 1863 and died in 1939; the guillotine, the method of execution, was France’s means of capital punishment until 1977. When I talk to people about the history and the guillotine, many people assume Dove Keeper takes place in the 1700s because they associate the guillotine with the French Revolution and a more distant time. I also learned executioners were paradoxically pariahs and celebrities and that “Deibler” means “dove keeper.”
However, I also learned that the Deiblers’ lives were more than a little tragic. I especially learned about a substantial loss Anatole and his wife, Rosalie, faced shortly after they were married. Without giving it away, what I read detailed Anatole’s devastation and how he coped. Shortly after the trauma, the Deiblers took in their infant nephew, Andre, when Rosalie’s sister, Juliette, died. Raising their nephew helped Anatole because he enjoyed raising a surrogate son. Nothing about Rosalie’s grief was mentioned because she was very much on the periphery. Nothing much is really stated beyond that she was once a government clerk and she was France’s first female cyclist; her family also committed executions.
I was curious about how she dealt with her grief and her position as an executioner’s wife. I remember speaking to Lynn Cullen, the author of Mrs. Poe, about the story and how excluded female perspectives should be explored more. Rosalie was the first voice I experimented with for the poetry class, and I knew I wanted to expand the story. But, like with the Jehanne story, I was unsure of an overarching conflict. I could’ve done creative nonfiction, but I personally don’t enjoy stories without a supernatural element.
Okay, the Real Beginning
In the first semester of my junior year, the year had started off rough, and I didn’t have a novel project I was working on. My recurring project, the story of a girl adopted by cannibals, was on hold after several drafts. I played with a Southern Gothic “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Frankenstein mishmash I’d like to return to one day. Again, I wanted to do something about my ancestors, but I still struggled to think of an overarching external conflict. Ultimately, I enjoy horror, especially Gothic horror, and wanted to do something in that vein.
Ultimately, in around October of 2015, I turned to fairy tales as a source of inspiration. I went on Wikipedia and looked up French fairy tales, and one made everything dovetail (get it? ha...I’m sorry) together. There’s one particular French fairy tale that has a historical connection to the overarching plot--and the Jehanne story I tried to do years ago. What if I combined the two stories into one? Was it really possible without making everything messy?
Could I balance the characters?
The Characters
There are three narrative POVs in Dove Keeper. Originally, there were only two: Rosalie and Marcy, Rosalie and Anatole’s thirteen-year-old daughter. This is because a great deal of the novel hinges on their relationship. I’ve noticed mother-daughter relationships in media are rare, so I decided to make it a pivotal part of the story. Rosalie was the first voice that came to me because I wanted to explore her side of the story, the untold part.
Because most of the story action occurs at Jehanne’s home, the manor, I wanted everything about the manor to be shrouded in mystery. I feared if I introduced the characters at the manor early on, I wouldn’t be able to hold back any of the major revelations in the second and third act. Also, I might have to, gasp, develop more secondary characters and give them names. I tried to make Marcy and Jehanne established friends to explain Jehanne without having her be active. However, it became increasingly obvious the story wasn't holding up with only Rosalie and Marcy's POVs.
So, along came Jehanne in all her sassiness, and her conflict revolves around a similar one as Marcy's: she wants freedom, but all the same, her loss of memories holds her back, and the questions remains: Is this "holding back" actually keeping something worse at bay?
What the Story is About
Dove Keeper is a supernatural horror novel that occurs in 1918 Rennes, France. It is set in this time because it allows Marcy to be autonomous, but also struggling with how much of that autonomy is allowed by her parents who grew up in the last century. This is near the end of World War I, or the Great War. Children are going missing, and the Deibler family is splintering apart because of both recent events and, as mentioned before, past trauma. The most recent issue is that Andre, now nineteen, was kicked out of the army and made a woman pregnant.
Oh, Marcy also kissed her cousin because, well, not that many guys who aren't her dad in the house besides Andre. Those in an executioner's family were the only people allowed to marry cousins (and the marrying age was thirteen) because of social prejudice limiting their romantic options. Andre's role in this and his actions incite the immediate tension between him and Rosalie, but it's recurring anxieties and suppressed trauma that rise to the surface. These put all the Deiblers at odds with one another, and this causes Marcy, the sheltered one, to reach out for outside sources of comfort, and in doing so, she may cross paths with the force behind the children's disappearances.
What happens after that? You'll have to read Dove Keeper to find out!
The story explores social isolation, postpartum depression, grief, anxiety, and agoraphobia. It also explores love and sacrifice, mostly between the female characters who drive the narrative. It dissects the situation where, when one grieves, they tend to receive sympathy for their loss only if they they grieve “normally” and aren’t too angry or don’t grieve too long (or too little). There are also issues of class and xenophobia. It is mostly geared toward neurodivergent female readers in their twenties and thirties, but it is my hope the characters' struggles and triumphs are relatable to those suffering from similar plights.
Y'know, hopefully excluding the "family members cutting off heads for money" issue.
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