Journey to Nora Roberts' River's End

Since beginning her writing career almost 20 years ago, Nora has told stories the way she wants to tell them. As for anything she's been holding out on, she says, "If it's in my head and I can figure out how to tell it, then that's the one I'm going to write. I have really wonderful editors who have that trust factor, and if I have to reined in, they're going to rein me in. But primarily it's the story that interests me abd that catches me up, and if it does that, then I'm going to stick with it until I hopefully make it a good, entertaining tale for the reader."

She attributes the flexibility and range of her writing to the strength of the romacne genre itself, "[Romance is] so fluid. I think that a lot of people who don't think they read it [and actually do] consider it much more limiting than it is. Romance as a genre itself accepts elements from every other genre that there is - that's what it is. As long as you have the basic elements of romance - that love story and the resolution of that love story - then you can do anything else. You can have a thriller, you can have a straight relationship book, you can have a police procedural, you can have science fiction, whatever. As long as you have that core love story as an essential part of the plot - not a by-0p[roduct, not something that just happens, but it has to be essential to the plot - that's it. Otherwise you can do anything.

Her latest book is by far her most intense to date. River's End is the suspensful story of what happens to a young girl who witnesses the brutal murder of her mother. Pursued by public scandal, the girl takes refuge in a secluded forest haven. As she grows older, the girl becomes more obsessed with her mother's death - and the one man who knows the truth.

Nora says it is this young woman - Olivia MacBride - who was the impetus for writing River's End, "Just watching her [character] grow up - trying to put a small child in that sort of a situation to see what kind of a person she would become with her background and that sort of a trauma and the way she was raised after it. It's all a matter of layering and hoping that the characters become real enough for you so that they drive the book themselves - they become.

As Nora Roberts' fans know, she loves to get into her characters. For this book, she was able to show what effect a tragedy, expecially the death of a loved one, can have on people over a long period of time. "It's very rewarding to do that, and I think one of the points that I tried to make, after I got a handle on it, was you don't just get over it. A lot of times in real life people will think that 'she really ought to just get over it,' or in fiction a great deal of the time [it's done] just to sort of move the plot along. I've done it myself - things are resolved a lot more quicky than they might be. She [Olivia] carried a lot of baggaege and emotional turmoil with her throughout her childhood and into her adult life. She didn't just get over the murder of her mother and hwat that had done to her and hwat it all had meant ot her. It took a lot of time and effort on her part - and her relationship with other people - to finally open herself up to that. So, it's really rewarding to watch a character grow and to come out the other side of something like that.

"I fell it's always a defferent experience for me and for the reader to have a different set of characters in a different situation with different personalities and conflicts. And, it's always a challenge because you never know how it's going to work out and if you're going to pull it off this time or not. So I enjoyed, in particular, watching Olicia develop. There's a scene in River's End, where she's college age, that I hadn't really planned to put in the book. I had moved on, and then I realized I was missing this important part of her life - this time, her first taste of independence - so I had to go back and see what was happening to her then, and what she was feeling and what she was trying to be so that it could be a fuller story."

While Nora is known (and loved) for her characters, River's End gave her a chance to explore nature as well as human nature. The Olympic rain forest of Washington state does seem to take on a life of its own - almost like a character - as the setting of Olivia's home in the years following the death of her mother. The forest seems to be at times a sanctuary and at other times a prison.

Nora explained how she was able to communicate the landscape of htis exotic place with the ease of a naturalist: "There was an awful lot of information that I found after digging long enough. You just sort of have to immerse yourself before you can describe it to the reader and put them there."

Nora Roberts has certainly come a long way since the days she wrote her novels in spiral-bound notebooks with a number two pencil - and she's been making publishing history ever since. "I really love the writing process. I just think it's the best job in the world, and I am constantly grateful that I got a chance to do it."

Graphics on this page courtesy of
.