A Craft Essay by Elaine Neil Orr
The Present Tense: Conversing with Characters, Then and Now 

In my new novel, Dancing Woman, the protagonist, an expat American woman named Isabel, unearths an ancient work of art in her garden in northern Nigeria—a terra cotta sculpture in the shape of a dancing woman. She rinses the figure at the outdoor tap, takes her inside, and sets her on a table. Isabel ponders her discovery, and—over the course of days and weeks in which Isabel’s life comes unmoored, largely as a result of one reckless decision—she begins to commune with the dancing figure. Her large eyes seem to peer into Isabel’s soul, yet the figure’s upstretched arms and the turn of her torso appear also to embrace the world around her, like a wise mother.  

Recently, I had a sudden insight about the novel and, of course, I passed it on to Isabel. An artist long ago created this figure intact and separate, a woman in her own sphere. When Isabel dug her up, she emerged whole from the earth. She had not been, like Eve, created from Adam’s rib. I was delighted in this inspiration, its feminist bent, the mythical depth it offered. The book of Genesis offers two creation stories. In one, Eve comes from Adam’s rib. In the other, man and woman are created from clay. The contradiction confounds us. But history tells us the first story has reigned. “Man” precedes Eve. “Man” governs her. She is secondary, a helpmate. 

Yes, the idea of the sculpture’s wholeness, her emergence independent of Adam, of man, would alight on Isabel’s head like a small bird. Ah ha! she would exclaim into the air of her sunroom. Eve is wholly herself and free.

There was only one problem.

I had finished the novel. Not only that, my editor and I had combed through page proofs. The book had been delivered to the printers. Then, it had been launched, published. And was already on bookstore shelves!

I was an artist still holding her palette, wanting to add one more stroke to my painting. But the painting was hanging in a museum. 

Do we who are writers ever stop writing?

***

In the New York Edition of Henry James’s novels (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907-1917), a twenty-four-book volume that includes a selection of his major works, James wrote new prefaces and made extensive alterations in the works themselves. His critics then and now disagree as to whether he did himself any favors. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published anonymously in 1818, was rewritten and republished in 1823 after she lost her daughter and her husband. In the new edition, Dr. Frankenstein is no longer capable of good, only evil. 

Our characters haunt us for we have given them up for adoption. Most of us don’t have the good fortune of a James or a Shelley, to revise our books and republish them. Instead, we launch our books (and our characters) one time. And then they are out of our control. The publishing industry supersedes our capacity to control what we have created.

 Yet, I wake from a dream or turn around in my kitchen, and there is Isabel. She is holding a cup of coffee, looking out the window, and I discern her thought: the dancing woman emerged whole from the earth, not from Adam’s rib. A thrill runs up her spine and mine too. And then her form begins to dissolve, and I’m left with the epiphany but no book to put it in. The novel has flown.

Perhaps I am actually saved by the novel already being on shelves. I can’t add a summation, a postscript, a P.S., a moral—as I might be tempted to do if still in the revising, editing, or even page-proofs stage. Perhaps the novelist who does her duty and follows her thought to the end and then has the book taken from her by the publication machine, is given a critical assist. Time is up. No more revision.

When literature was oral and more liquid, the storyteller could revise with every telling. Homer could revise the Odyssey a hundred times. I think of him up at night with his wife, brainstorming. “Perhaps tomorrow, I’ll give Odysseus a stomachache.” 

“But what has caused it?” his wife says. 

“A sour apple,” he says. 

“Nay,” says the wife, “a woman has given him a bit of poison in his bread, for he spurned her.” 

And off goes Homer the next morning with a spring in his step. 

The Genesis creation myth must be the result of oral storytelling. Even when written, two versions remained. 

Why didn’t I come to Isabel’s epiphany earlier? It’s already there in the ancient book. But not quite. One Genesis story has Eve and Adam created side by side. In my character’s story, she digs up one sculpture, and it’s a woman. There is no accompanying male sculpture, no Adam. Isabel’s Eve is indeed whole in herself. I don’t have to give her my late-stage epiphany after all; perhaps readers can already deduce it.

***

For every writer who publishes a book, you will find one who wishes she could add one more sentence, revise one paragraph, give more depth to a secondary character. We don’t want to let go of our books though we want nothing more than to have our books well published. We just want to time-travel back to our characters. For it’s not the books so much as the characters that we wish to converse with, even after they’ve been adopted by readers.  Perhaps the measure of success for the writer lies at least in part in the degree to which we still feel our characters. I spend 5-10 years writing a novel. That’s a lot of living.

My second novel, Swimming Between Worlds, is set in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. After it was published and to the present day, I feel deep in my bones that I will see my protagonist when I drive from my Raleigh home back to the novel’s setting. Tacker Hart, (my main character) will be in Hanes Park, or the kitchen of his house on West End Boulevard, or stocking groceries in his father’s store on First Street, or trudging up a wintery slope on Glade Street to meet with his lover, Kate. I had killed him in the book, but he was—he is—still alive to me. 

“Characters live,” I tell my students. “They’re not dead. The novel isn’t dead. That’s why critics and readers write about it in present tense.”

Elaine Neil Orr is the award-winning author of six books. Dancing Woman (Blair, 2025) is her third novel. Her work is informed by the American South and Nigeria, where she was born and grew up. She has been writer-in-residence at numerous universities and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the North Carolina Arts Council. She serves on the English faculty at North Carolina State University and teaches in the Naslund-Mann School of Writing, Spalding University. She lives in Raleigh, N.C. Learn more by visiting Orr’s website, or at her Facebook page.  

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