- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Ebury Press (16 Feb 2012)
- ISBN-13: 978-0091944902
- Also available on Kindle
Today Roberta Rich joins us as part of her blog tour for The Midwife of Venice.
Where did you get that idea?
Most writers, myself included, dread being asked this question. Often I just don’t know or can’t remember, so I just make something up like, ‘it came to me in a dream,’ or ‘the same thing happened to my sister.’
However, here are five genuine examples from my debut novel, The Midwife of Venice or from its sequel, (tentatively entitled), The Levirate Marriage. Here goes―the creative process made real. The straight goods. I vividly remember being smitten with these ideas.
1. Birthing Spoons: I visited the Jewish museum in the Venetian ghetto and saw a pair of silver spoons resting slightly crossed, in a display case in such a way that I was reminded of my daughter’s birth which required forceps. And so my heroine, Hannah is struck with the idea of forceps as she is ladling out beet soup one Sabbath dinner.
2. Make-up: I have always loved make-up and rarely leave the house without a bare minimum of mascara, lipstick, eyeliner, etc. It comes of having pale skin and a mother who always thought I was anemic and would, during winter months, force bitter ‘tonics’ down my throat.
Years ago, I started experimenting with mixing my own skin creams and got rather good at it. I read that kohl was originally made from soot and grease from cooking pots. I tried it but it made my eyes smart. I read a biography of Helena Rubenstein, who was a great instinctive chemist and thought of rich women using cosmetics compounded from ground pearls and powdered gold. I used this idea in The Midwife in a scene in which Jessica, a courtesan, dresses for an evening at the theatre.
3. Coins on an icy window: In the first chapter of The Midwife, my protagonist, Hannah is looking out her frosty window one cold Venetian winter and melts two eyes holes with a pair of coins so that she can peer down into the square below.
I grew up in an old brick house in Buffalo, New York built just after the American Civil War. The house lacked central heating. On winter nights my sister and I used to warm pennies on our tongues and press them to the glass so we could watch the cute boy across the street out shoveling snow.
4. Scar on back: In the 16th century, before the days of fingerprints, photos and DNA, how could one confirm a long lost person was who she said she was? One way was identifying marks on the body.
I used the lack of a scar as a way of raising suspicions about Ada, one of the characters in The Levirate Marriage, who is not who she claims to be.
Ada’s late husband spoke of her having a scar on her back from a drainage tube when she suffered from pleurisy as a child. Ada has a mark on her back but is it from an operation or is it simply a burn mark?
My mother, as a child, contracted pleurisy. It was long before the days of antibiotics. The doctor inserted a tube in her back to drain her lungs.
5. Eating a rat: Last year my husband and I visited the maritime museum in San Diego, California. The oldest sailing ship of the lot was the Star of India, a square-rigged beauty. Her walls were covered with enlargements of diary excerpts from passengers who made the trip from Britain to New Zealand. Many mentioned ‘ship’s steak’’ and described different cooking methods. It was all wonderfully disgusting and an entirely fitting ordeal for my villain to endure.
So there you are. Ideas all come from somewhere. The trick is to remember where.
Roberta Rich
Author of The Midwife of Venice
Find out more about Roberta Rich here
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