On a recent trip to Atlanta, I had no intention of visiting the birthplace of
Gone With The Wind (GWTW), but somehow between this and that, I ended up at the
Margaret Mitchell house.
I’m glad fate led me there. Myths were dispelled and I learned things that both humbled and inspired me. I had to put away unfounded assumptions that Margaret Mitchell and Scarlett O’Hara were one in the same. Oh, they have their share of similarities, but Margaret Mitchell, I learned, was not the spoiled Southern Belle (SSB), I had assumed. In fact, she was much different.
The Margaret Mitchell house is not the house Mitchell grew up in. That is long gone. It’s not even her house. No, it is an apartment house where Mitchell and her husband rented a cramped three room (+bath) apartment during the eight years Mitchell wrote GWTW (1926 to 1934).
So how did a SSB end up in a shotgun-style ground floor flat with mismatched furniture writing one of the great American novels? Read on, my friend.
Margaret "Peggy" Mitchell was a new sort of Southern woman back in the 1920s. Daughter of a wealthy Atlanta family, Peggy’s behavior scandalized her family and friends. She smoked, wore trousers, cut her hair short and turned Atlanta society on its ear by dancing the sensual Apache Dance at a debutant ball (
click to see). Some of her biographers have called Peggy "free spirited," but she was more than that. She was singular in her desire to make her own way in life and, to my great surprise, to right the wrongs of society.
According to
Pamela Roberts ("Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel" documentary), "[Mitchell] was a lifelong rebel who looked deeply into life and challenged the hypocrisy of society whether taking a job as a reporter — or secretly funding African-American education, an act for which she could have been killed had it become known to the public."
Peggy had a disastrous first marriage to handsome playboy, Berrien "Red" Upshaw. The young couple lived with her father in a grand mansion. Red, a wife beater and a bootlegger, was the kind of man my grandmother would have called "no count." Peggy, determined not to rely on her father’s money, went to work and shortly thereafter to divorce court. She began writing for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine where she earned $25 per week.
Somehow, Peggy made a living writing for the Journal. She ditched Red and married former beau John Marsh and they moved to the little apartment on Peachtree Street, which she christened "the dump." Today, we’d call it shabby chic with an emphasis on the shabby. After settling into marriage #2, Peggy injured her ankle and was sent home to recover. John would make daily trips to the library to get books to feed her voracious appetite.
One day he came home empty handed and history was made. He told Peggy something like this: "
You’ve read all the books in the library. If you want to read any more you’re going to have to write the book yourself."
Yep, that’s how GWTW was born, a challenge from a loving but frustrated spouse. Peggy sat down at the tiniest little desk you can imagine next to a high window (you can’t actually see out the window unless you stand on the window seat) in her dumpy apartment and started typing. She used a Remington manual typewriter to pound out 1000 pages of a story she never planned to publish. If fact, she didn’t even bother to write chapter one. When complete, she put the manuscript in a drawer and went on living, never dreaming that one day she’d sell three million books for the unheard of amount of $3 a book in the middle of a depression (1936) and make a whopping $300,000 (from which she would make secret charitable gifts to Morehouse College). She never dreamed that in 1937 she’d win a Pulitzer Prize or that in 1939, GWTW would become the highest grossing film in the history of Hollywood. The movie received a record-breaking ten Academy Awards.
Nope, she put the manuscript in a drawer.
But GWTW was destined to be more. It’s the stuff of legend and what makes it legendary is just what you hear from agents and editors: Write a damn good story with compelling characters. Make me feel something. Well, frankly Scarlett if you aren’t feeling something when reading GWTW then I don’t give a damn. (Or something like that.) Peggy's characters are large than life and pack a huge punch. A slew women (moi included) suffer from Rhettism, a condition whereby you believe you're not truly loved unless pursued by a handsome scoundrel and made love to with steamy abandon. How you get the dishes done, the kids fed and the dog walked with all that steam going on, I don’t know, but that’s my expectation and I blame GWTW.
Agents often tell you to write something that stands out, the breakout this or that, but, really, are there any new plots? Maybe, but mainly I see the most room for breakout in character development. Characters only you can create because of your own individual experiences and creativity. To me, it’s all about characters. Even if you build characters around solid archetypes— like Cinderella—there is still plenty of room for crafting a character that is unique and three dimensional.
Peggy Mitchell had a few other things going for her besides the ability to write a damn good story. She was persistent, passionate, incredibly brave (or maybe reckless) and at some point she believed in herself and her story. She worked hard and she didn’t take anything for granted. She’s a Cinderella character herself in that despite great privilege early on, she experienced the loss of that privilege, called upon her core strengths (storytelling, imagination and passion) and made a success of herself on her own terms.
I left #1 Crescent Apartments at 990 Peachtree Street inspired, by Peggy’s passion and courage, and humbled, by Peggy’s good works and dedication. It was a fortuitous side trip that I will remember for a long time.
How about you? Are you writing a damn good story? Are your characters compelling? How do you make the compelling characters? Tell me about it.
