In The Night Child, Nora Brown, descends into the kind of fragmentation that results when traumatic events have been repressed, her world becomes anxious and dark. In Anna Quinn’s skillful hands, both the world inside of Nora (who is no longer able to repress terrifying memories) and the world of loving people in her adult life carry the story into healing. Nora’s supportive school colleague, her skillful therapist, and her loving brother are there for her. Her young daughter, filled with the poetry of life, brings innocence and pleasure to a woman whose innocence was impinged upon early in life. But it is Nora who must do the work of survival, integrating her past into her present for stability and strength, and that is lifetime work.

Readers leave the novel encouraged that goodness and happiness are values worth fighting for. One way of fighting, as author Anna Quinn has done with this exquisite and artful book, is to let others know what it means to suffer the ensuing psychological pain of childhood abuse and what sort of support helps the abused child heal.

The Night Child encourages us to see that hurt can foster resilience, deep empathy and a huge desire to help others. We understand these attributes as alive not only in Nora but in ourselves, too. The Night Child ignites a commitment to noticing and listening carefully to children and to getting abused children the help they require, proving to them that they are not alone.

How does Anna Quinn’s use of craft engage us as readers?

1) Time and point of view are the writer’s friends.
It is always important for a reader to understand how the characters and story are moving through time. In this novel, each of the chapters are dated: November 22, 1996 to February 20, 1997. Some chapters follow one another by only one day while others follow after several days. One significant day is covered in two consecutive chapters, titled the morning of and the afternoon of.

Interspersed in the chronological narrative in the present of the novel are two chapters, also told in present tense, dated by the years 1969 and 1965. The departure from specific days to whole years, lets us realize some occurrences are repressed yet about to bubble to the surface in the present.

Here’s a passage from one of the chapters in the past when Nora is with her parents:

“Karl! For God’s sake, stop!” Helen doesn’t like it when Karl acts silly, which seems enormously unfair to Nora. Her mother never uses the Lord’s name in vain when her father plays with James.

Karl sets Nora on her chair, which is right next to his, straightens his tie and sits down at the table.

We don’t seem to be experiencing this through young Nora’s eyes but somehow through the eyes of a stage director explaining how to perform a scene.

Compare this to a passage from a chapter in the present of the story where Nora’s husband Paul was speaking to her:

“What’s happened to you?” he says. He stands and picks up the paper plate, folds it in half and then in half again, the sandwich squished inside it. “You used to be meticulous. You used to care.” Something catches in his voice then, and she thinks he might cry.

Now it feels as if we are Nora seeing Paul with her eyes and listening to him with her ears.

The change in voice underscores something important to the message of the story. The young Nora has no agency in her life but is acted upon, objectified. The adult Nora is the author of her own life, examining her real feelings about Paul and herself.

Try this:
Write two segments of a story. Write one as a description by stage director to his actors. Write a second one from your own or a character’s perception. Think about the differences in tone and the differences in what that tone imparts.

2) Scenes contain emotional information.
Early in the novel, Nora is on a Thanksgiving getaway with her husband and daughter:

In the hotel, Nora pulls open the heavy curtains and is immediately comforted by the wide expanse of beach, water and sky. The tide plunges in, silver-colored water flashing whitecaps like a thousand gulls who might at any moment lift up to the sky, light meeting light. Fiona, already on the beach, happy to be alive, laughing and chasing a white feather, her blond hair flying wild. Paul strides behind, hands in his pockets. He moves differently here than he does at home. Here, in the beach grasses, he is easier, but at home, when she sits with him at the kitchen table, the purple lupines in a vase between them, his beauty vanishes behind his preoccupations and she feels an overwhelming urge to knock the vase over.

We feel Nora’s poetic nature, her love for her daughter, her sensitivity to her husband’s mood and demeanor and the way his unacknowledged discomfort at home incurs Nora’s unexpressed anger.

This is in the details—Nora is opening the drapes and looking out. She is not on the beach walk and will during the story be outside of the family unit and outside of the person her daughter Fiona and her husband Paul have known her to be.

In Quinn’s writing, the curtains are heavy, the tide plunges in; water is flashing whitecaps. Fiona is her happy self. Paul, in the beach grasses, seems happy too and that is in contrast to how he is at home across the lupine filled vase from Nora, who wants sometimes to smash that vase. The emotion is in the adjectives “heavy” and “plunging” and in the contrasts Nora observes between the Paul she sees near the wide expanse of ocean in the unrestrained beach grasses and the Paul she sees at home before the wild lupine constrained in a vase. It is in the fact that she is watching rather than engaging with Paul and their daughter; there are separate emotional worlds here.

Try this:
Write a paragraph for a personal essay or fiction piece in which you or a character is looking at a scene. Make sure there is a feeling you want to evoke without naming it—inclusion, separation, fear, worry, or harmony for instance. Allow the emotion to come directly from the images and words you use to describe what you or the character see.

3) Action is character.
What a character does is not only necessary to the story we are telling but has to promote a direct experience of that character’s needs. As a little girl, Nora is pounding on the old piano in her basement:

Her mother still screaming from the top of the stairs, “Stop that goddamn noise,” her mother’s words mud thick, suffocating in gin. Nora, in her plaid school uniform and saddle shoes, doesn’t stop beating the song into herself, absorbing the flats and sharps, Let it out and let it in.

This is a girl frantic with terror. We know it is Nora’s point of view because it feels so close to her, Let it out and let it in.

Try this:
Pick a moment in your life or in the life of your character. Place yourself or your character in the moment you chose and give them something active to do that will allow them to express, not say, who they are in that moment. Are they playing an instrument, kicking a ball, making a dress, sweeping the floor, driving too fast or too slow? Whatever action you choose, linger over it to show the character doing it, rather than saying something like, “The young girl pounded on the piano as her mother screamed for her to stop.”

If you practice exploring the actions you give a character and allowing the reader to be with the character in the moment of the action, you will have an easier time moving your story forward and helping it reach its depth. Your characters will be real and they will prompt the reader to continue to read, and, as all fine literature does, change their lives.