SHINING ARMOR
JUDE DEVERAUX
In the fourteen years since I wrote A Knight in Shining Armor, I’ve received many queries about the book, especially about how I came to write it. Many times I’ve been told that it is “a perfect love story,” but I think that the appeal of the book for me—and, yes, it’s my favorite of my books—and for readers is the underlying theme.
What people don’t know is that A Knight in Shining Armor is about alcoholism.
Before I start a book, I think, I want to write about . . . I fill in the blank with something that’s of interest to me, then build the plot on that subject. Sometime during the 1980s I was researching another book when I came across some information that startled me. I read that, in many cases, alcoholism is as much a state of mind as it is a physical problem. I had assumed that a person who had stopped drinking, would no longer be an alcoholic.
But what I was reading—and forgive my paraphrasing, as I’m not an expert on this—said that there was such a thing as an “alcoholic personality.” In fact, a person didn’t even have to drink to have this personality, and in that case, he was called a “dry drunk.”
What interested me about this personality was that a person who had it desperately needed to break the spirit of another human being. A “dry drunk” will choose the strongest, most moral, and most generous person he or she can find, then dedicate his life to trying to control, and therefore change, this person. The ultimate goal is to be able to say, “I’m not so bad. Sure, I do bad things, but look at this person. Everyone thinks she (or he) is so good, but I’ve just proven that she, too, can be bad.”
An example of this thinking at work is depicted in the movie Dangerous Liaisons. The characters played by Glenn Close and John Malkovich search for the strongest, most highly moral person they can find, portrayed by Michele Pfeiffer, then set out to destroy her.
After I spent some time reading about the alcoholic personality, I knew I wanted to write about it. I also wanted a heroine who was strong but believed herself to be weak, who was generous, the kind who’d help another human even if it caused her hardship, yet thought her generous spirit was a weakness.
I wrote down my goal, then set about creating a story that would show what I wanted. However, I knew my heroine had to be in a nondrinking relationship, because I was sure that if she were involved with an active alcoholic, I’d lose the sympathy of the reader. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people—including many therapists—who say, “All you have to do is leave,” and they truly believe leaving a bad relationship is that easy. Also, I didn’t want to give away the problem in one sentence. All I’d have to do is have the heroine’s boyfriend drink his fourth whiskey and everyone would know they were reading about an alcoholic relationship. No, I wanted more subtlety than that. In fact, at the time, I told my editor that I wanted to write a book about alcoholism but that I was never going to mention the word in the book.
As some of you know, I often write about a family named Montgomery. The Montgomerys are all brilliant, rich, and afraid of nothing. They are true heroes. I thought, What if someone was born into that family but felt she didn’t fit in? What if she was intimidated by her glorious relatives and felt that she’d never live up to their standards?
From these questions, I created Dougless Montgomery, a young woman who had three formidably perfect older sisters and had, all her life, felt inferior to them.
It was easy to imagine Dougless being swept away by a man with an alcoholic personality. Robert Whitley was a successful man, and on the surface, he seemed like someone Dougless could show to her family with pride. If Dougless herself couldn’t be the tower of accomplishment her siblings were, then she’d do the next best thing and bring such a person into her family.
Once I had my idea of Dougless’s background, I needed a story that would change her. First of all, I needed to get her away from the family that made her feel inferior. But how to do that? Part of the Montgomery creed is that they always help each other. How could I put my heroine in a situation dire enough to fundamentally change her personality yet prevent her relatives from bailing her out?
It was this idea of taking my heroine “away” that made me think of writing a time travel novel. I’d always loved to read time travel stories, so I thought it would be interesting to write one. Right away, I saw that I needed two things from my plot. First, my heroine needed to discover that her generosity and kindness were worthy traits. And, second, Dougless needed to accomplish something that made her truly proud of herself, and this accomplishment had to be so big that she could overlook her past failures, her bad boyfriends, and all the embarrassing situations she’d been in.
From these two needs, I constructed a basic time travel plot in which a medieval man comes forward in time and Dougless helps him. She’d be reluctant at first, but her sweet nature wouldn’t allow her to abandon him. In order for Dougless to learn that she was actually a very strong woman who could rely on herself, I decided to send her back to the Elizabethan era, where she’d have to use all her wits just to stay alive. And since I didn’t want her disappearing under the protective arm of a man, I had her return to a time when the Elizabethan man didn’t remember her.
After I had my plot, I spent months researching. When I had read time travel novels in the past, I had always been bored by the long explanations of political history. What I wanted to read about, a
nd certainly to write about, was what the people wore, what they ate. I wanted to know how they thought. I wanted to know every detail of Elizabethan life—with no boring politics!
I enjoyed the research very much, and as I discovered things that fascinated me, I added to my plot so I could include what I’d learned. For example, I’d never thought about what people did with their children before there were day-care centers. While the serfs were out working all day, who took care of the toddlers that were too young to work but old enough to wander into trouble? I can tell you that I was shocked to read that the children were bound tightly enough to put them into a stupor, then hung from a peg in the wall!
When I had many pages of plot and hundreds of Rolodex cards full of research, I went to my cabin in the Pecos Wilderness in New Mexico and isolated myself for three and a half months while I wrote the book. I got up at daybreak, ate a bowl of cereal, then wrote by hand until noon. After lunch I went for a walk and plotted the next day’s scenes in my head. Since my cabin was at a nine-thousand-foot altitude, this meant climbing above the tree line, often to eleven and twelve thousand feet. That summer I climbed so much that when I got into bed at night, my calves were so heavy with muscle that my heels didn’t touch the sheet.
When the book was finished, I’d poured so much of my heart into it that, instead of mailing it, I flew to New York to personally deliver the manuscript to Pocket Books.
I was pleased with the book for several reasons. For one thing, I felt I’d done what I’d set out to do: I’d written about alcoholism without ever mentioning the word. And I’d made my heroine realize that she was strong enough to stand up to her controlling boyfriend—and to her overbearing sister. On the day I wrote the scene where Dougless tells her sister not to speak to her in a disrespectful manner, I did a dance of triumph.
In the years since A Knight in Shining Armor was first published, I’m happy to say, readers have seemed to like the book as much as I loved writing it. However, in the last few years, I’ve thought that I’d like to go back through the book and apply some of what I’ve learned over time about writing. So, in January of 2001, that’s what I did. I didn’t change the plot, didn’t really add any new information, but I somehow managed to add fifty pages to the book. In the end, I think it’s now a smoother read, and, maybe, it’s a bit more understandable why Dougless wanted to marry a jerk like Robert.
I thank all of you for your kind words about a book that has been so close to my heart for so many years, and I hope you continue to enjoy the book for a long time to come.
Turn the page for a preview of
Jude Deveraux’s newest novel,
Stranger in the Moonlight
From Pocket Books
PROLOGUE
EDILEAN, VIRGINIA