A Writer's Edge ...

Petru Popescu
On Writing Girl Mary

Girl Mary is a historic novel that digs into the unknown lives, the true human lives of the most iconic characters in Western civilization, starting with Mary herself -- the mother of the man later known as Jesus.

Had I been told that I would write this book some five years ago, I would have found that very doubtful, not because writing about biblical characters is hard, though it is. Not because I felt intimidated by how much lip service people pay to religion in general, or specifically to the icons of goodness, courage, selflessness, etc. And therefore, to take liberties with the icons is not what one expects of a writer.

I would have been surprised because I was not sure what exactly could be told about Mary of Nazareth that would sound new. Mary seemed paralyzed in a stance of goodness and obedience, which is pretty much the stance of the icon, the symbolic but not true-to-life woman to which people pray.

In the meantime, I kept doing research on the subject, because I've been for over twenty years an informal student and archeologist of the early Christian times. Why am I so fascinated by those times? Simple. Rome and ancient Judea are a fascinating historic backdrop, and God's involvement in the lives of the high and mighty and in the lives of the righteous and humble is an incredibly fascinating story.

So, while taking trips to Israel or to Rome, reading apocryphal gospels, and discussing the character of Mary with eminent mariologists, I was accumulating a lot of information about the early Christian era and the main players of that era, and was surprised to find out that those people were people of flesh and blood, just like us, and yet their human passion and strife seemed to have been left out of the gospels.

A strangely fertile critical mass was thus accruing inside me, until I sat down and wrote, quickly, torrentially, the first draft of Girl Mary, in which Rome's secret agent in Judea, Pontius Pilate (yes, Pilate had a whole life of involvement with the holy family and with faith long before he came to be the ultimate judge in the trial of Jesus), gets to meet, and falls in love with this incomprehensibly charming young girl from the line of David, who is rumored among her tribe and other tribes to be "the girl of the promise," the promise itself being this unwritten first chapter of the gospels.

Pontius Pilate falls in love with Mary, and it seems that through her incredible spirit and strength of character, this girl is irresistible. Pilate falls in love with her, the eldest son of king Herod, Aristobolus, is in love with her, a certain genius woodcarver (called Joseph in the gospels) is in love with her and asking her in marriage, and finally...

God himself falls in love with Mary, and chooses her for a mission way more frightening and unusual than the one Pilate is devising for her – to inspire the cynical Romans, who lost all faith in their own temples after Hannibal's invasion of Italy, with a brand new mystical sense, and hope for a grand renewal.

At the time when my research started to carve this storyline out of the drab and tepid information we usually think of about Mary (nowhere in the gospels is said why she was so special, that she would be selected for a supernatural motherhood!), I started to write with excitement, and found myself deeply believing in the supernatural elements of the story, and finding them easy to apply to the true flesh-and-blood characters which I had discovered through years of research.

How does one write about the religious, the mystical, the supernatural? By believing in it, throughout the duration of the writing, even though at other times the writer may be a skeptic about the possibility of miracles, or even an atheist.

When you write about the mystical, you believe in it. That is the rule of thumb and the best advice I can give to writers who attempt to write about religion and its formidably puzzling characters and events. Make it all true, with candor and simplicity, and do not shy away from the naturalness, love and romance, sexuality, ambivalence, weakness and strength, peace and strife, in one word, the PASSION of it all.

Write it as if it were happening to you. You will do a good job.