T.C. Lawrence leads two lives: one as a writer, the other as a lawyer. Here, he shares somethoughts about his writing life.
I was born, raised and mostly educated in New England. Though I've tried to write fiction about the Northeast, I've never found the region very interesting from a writer's viewpoint. In a way, everything of value that could be said specifically about New England had been said by the end of the 19th century, and most of what came after were just stories of 19th century characters trying to live in the 20th century. Other places I've lived, Paris, L.A., Hawaii, had much more of what's called a "sense of place". In Fatal Paradise, for instance, the island of Kauai itself is not only characterized in considerable detail; its terrain, flora, culture(s), weather and other attributes deeply affect everything about the novel.
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The power of words has always been at the forefront of my thinking, which is probably why I write, but also why I became a lawyer. The problem with my career choice was that for a long time my writing was channeled down a narrow and rather dark corridor known as "legal writing". When my first law book received its first favorable review, I considered myself a writer. But in fact it took a series of liberating events and processes, among them a huge unpublished manuscript of another novel, to develop the narrative style you see in Fatal Paradise.
....................................I'm doing research for the Sandwich Island Quintet at the moment, so most of my reading is Hawaiiana of one kind or another. Its a small but fascinating piece of world history, anthropology and geology, and it provides plenty of raw material for the writer. Book Two of the Quintet, tentatively entitled "Death and the Goddess," is a more challenging distillation than Fatal Paradise, because there's so much more going on than on Kauai.
....................................It might be interesting for readers to know what the inspiration for Fatal Paradise was. In February, 1993, I stopped in Hawaii on my back from Australia. Arrived early a.m., connection wasn't 'till well into p.m., so I hopped a shuttle to Kauai to see how the place was recovering from Hurricane Iniki six months on. The answer was, not too well. Power was still being restored, a lot of buildings were awaiting reconstruction, the foliage hadn't come back robustly. Standing on a bluff, looking down across what had been a sea of sugar cane, I saw only barren red earth. Stunned, I began to imagine the devastating force that could have led to such a condition, and to think about how long the land might remain barren. I wondered what use might be made of such a large chunk of the island in the future. Would it be replanted in sugar? The industry was already on a downhill slide. Would it be condo-maximized? Could such a large piece of land be developed without spoiling the essential nature of this tropical island? The germ of a plot formed at that moment, and though the questions are posed rather differently in Fatal Paradise, the tension between natural beauty and people "using" the land, and the tension between the organizing forces of life and the massively chaotic force of nature known as entropy, still inform the action.
T.C. Lawrence
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