I'm glad to be featuring Kristen Loesch here today with an essay on a unique variation of the multi-period novel. Her second work of historical fiction, The Hong Kong Widow, is out today from Allison & Busby (and from Berkley in the USA). As a gothic thriller featuring séances and a heroine who can see ghosts, it sounds ideal for this time of year.
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A Different Kind of Three-Act Structure:
Writing my Main Character as a Child, a Young Woman, and an Elderly Grandmother
by Kristen Loesch
In each of these three timelines, she has one goal: Seven-year-old Mei in Shanghai wants to find her missing mother. Twenty-something Mei in Hong Kong is hell-bent on revenge, and enters a séance competition at a haunted house hosted by the wife of the man who once destroyed her life. Elderly Mei in America wants the truth about the final night of that long-ago séance competition to come to light.
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Pub. by Allison & Busby (Oct. 2025) |
The best feeling, when you’re reading a dual or multi-timeline historical novel, is when the narratives come together seamlessly. Not only do they make sense, presented as one story, but you get the feeling that actually, they couldn’t exist without one another. Ever since reading my first Kate Morton novel, I have been drawn to that kind of historical fiction: Usually one timeline is contemporary, in the POV of a present-day protagonist, and the other is historical, but I’ve increasingly seen multi-timeline novels in which all the timelines are historical, set at different points in the past. Either way, when this is done well, it’s breathtaking; when it’s done badly, the reader ends up more deeply invested in one timeline and one protagonist over the other. The writer, therefore, takes a risk by splitting up the narrative in this way, in the hopes of achieving that perfect plait, one timeline woven neatly into the next, all the way to the end. It is certainly what I hoped to achieve in my debut novel, The Porcelain Doll.
But in The Hong Kong Widow, all three timelines are written from the perspective of the same character. And although Mei is the same person across all three timelines, in many ways she’s also a very different person. (It’s almost like I was trying to make things harder on myself!)
When I first read Emma Donoghue’s Room, I was struck by the storytelling power of a young child’s perspective, and I knew that I would one day want to try it myself. Writing Mei as a child was an eye-opening experience for me as a writer. Although Little Mei is growing up in 1930s China, on the eve of the Japanese invasion, and her family life is no less tumultuous, I wanted her to have a wondrous innocence about her, and a quirky sense of humor. I wanted her to notice things that other people wouldn’t. I wanted her to be open and trusting and vulnerable, but also incredibly strong. I thought it was going to be so much more difficult than it was: As it turned out, Little Mei has such a distinctive voice, such a unique way of looking at the world, that whenever I wrote from her perspective, it felt effortless; it simply flowed. I never had to stop and wonder: What would this character be feeling right now? Or why does this character actually want this; why are they doing this? (I did, however, try to be careful with the vocabulary she used!)
Young Woman Mei was the greatest challenge.
In the 1950s, Mei is no longer quirky and innocent; she is lost and traumatized. As a character, she is in tremendous pain, and this pain clouds her judgement, her perspective, her every thought. She wants revenge, but she’s never considered what that revenge actually means, or what she might do afterwards. This timeline also contains the majority of the spooky, supernatural happenings in the novel; this is Mei at her most haunted, literally and figuratively. To reflect the fact that she’s largely forgotten who she is, I decided to write her in the third person. (Little Mei and elderly Mei are both written in the first person.) My aim was not only to show how far removed she is from her true self, because she is consumed by pain and hatred, but also to help the reader differentiate more easily between timelines!
Elderly Mei, who is a mother and a grandmother in 2015 Seattle, had to be both a combination of these two previous versions of Mei, but she also had to be more than that. In a way, elderly Mei is more like Little Mei; she knows who she is and she’s comfortable with who she is. She isn’t defined by her own pain, the way that 1950s Mei is. She’s moved on. But if anything, she’s moved on too far. She’s repressed her memories of the past. She refuses to believe that anything that is painful could be worth revisiting. She’s in denial of a large part of her own history, and has strived unsuccessfully to pretend that it doesn’t even exist. So while I wanted elderly Mei to come across as wise, and experienced, and self-aware, I also wanted her to need something, to be missing something, to have her own journey to embark upon.
I’m not sure I will ever write another novel the way I wrote The Hong Kong Widow. I’m not sure there will ever be another protagonist quite like Mei. The structural choices I made for this book presented a unique challenge, and a unique sense of accomplishment at the end. I would love to hear from any readers out there: Which version of Mei did you prefer? Which one spoke to you the most? And why do you think that was?
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