How I wrote Slow Dance in a Winter Garden

R. Thomas Sheardy

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Slow Dance is actually a composite of three unfinished stories, neither of which seemed to spring from a strong premise. This probably explains why they had remained unfinished in the first place. But when I began to pull them together into a single story a clear premise emerged. A middle-aged writer of uncertain talent, wintering in Rome, is trying to write what he believes will be his masterpiece, a novel that will also purge him of his guilt for events of his past life; events over which he had no control but for which he feels responsible.  

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I began to write the first version, which never had a title, several years ago. My characters were inspired by people I knew then, but they have morphed over time into independent sorts now totally unrelated in any way to the originals. As with other writers of whom I’ve read, once our characters are discovered, their own personas take over and the author has little control over the lives those characters may choose to follow. This is certainly true of my protagonist. He makes decisions and chooses life paths that make me cringe but there is little I can do to help him once his strong personality becomes established. This is also true of his lover. I have known her for over forty years and to this day am baffled by her behavior. Oddly I don’t consider either of them as sympathetic characters. Certainly not heroic in the traditional sense of the word. 

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This story seemed to be going nowhere and so, after only a hundred hand-written pages or so, I gave it up and filed it in the back of my cabinet, with a dozen other unfinished stories. It had no ending as far as I could see. I didn’t like the characters very much. I could not find a reason to keep writing. I started another story a few years later. For this one, I had a premise: What happens when a naive man of thirty-something, obsessed with his winter garden – his house of exotic plants – falls in love with a younger woman and tries to deal with these two irreconcilable loves, only to be undone by a third party? The winter garden, with its collection of delicate tropical plants, was fun to work with as a metaphor for the main character himself. It seemed a good idea at the time but was difficult to write and so, after a hundred pages or so of unresolved storytelling, I abandoned this one as well.

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Meanwhile, I started visiting Italy on a regular basis and began toying with an idea inspired by experiences there and by the odd relationships that often develop among unlikely travelers in foreign countries: A middle-aged writer, as yet unpublished, a sensuous but less than attractive poetess and, a mysterious and beguiling stranger who claims to be a painter, find themselves thrown together in Rome. The other two stories seemed to relate to this new one and it was easy to merge all three into one. The theme that finally seemed to tie them together was my discovery of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s last romance The Marble Fawn of 1860, which I had included in a class I had put together on American Romanticism. Hawthorne was in Italy when he started writing the strange tale of four artists of diverse backgrounds who are brought together through strange circumstances, exotic locations, and murder! Here was inspiration for my three characters, each encountering the sensuous worlds of art and Italy and trying to make sense of it all. The result, Slow Dance in a Winter Garden, is a thoughtful and thought-provoking travelogue through the lives of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

I invite your comments and questions. Contact me at the email address noted on the website. rtsheardy@gmail.com.