Interview with Jayna Breigh
SUMMARY: Jayna Breigh discusses and how her experience as an attorney feeds her fiction, what it was like writing alongside two other authors, and how forgiveness can bring healing.
You're a lawyer by training, and so is your character, Elise Sinclaire, who finds herself on the wrong end of a document dump from a pharmaceutical giant. How does your skilled experience as an attorney help you craft suspenseful fiction?
The suspense in fiction is very similar to the suspense in a real legal case. People do not know the outcome from the beginning. Who will win? Who will lose? I don’t start the fictional cases in my books with a clear winner or outcome in my mind. As characters come to me, I let them throw curveballs, lie, hide, and surprise me. It works exactly that way in a real legal case. There is no way in advance to know what the evidence is going to show you until you’ve collected it all and evaluated it. As I am writing and the characters and events are unfolding in the cases, I look for realistic ways to throw in plot twists, and sometimes I even surprise myself.
The novella builds around a "Christmas truce" between former fiancés. Where did that framing come from, and did you always know the truce would be the spine of the story?
When brainstorming the first draft of the book, I had to decide what legal concept would be at the heart of the story. Since it was shorter than a full-length novel, I figured out that a second-chance romance was the best way to avoid “insta-love” and to get to the heart of the conflict quickly. I tried to figure out what sounded both Christmassy and legal at the same time. I started playing with legal words like The Christmas Contract, The Mistletoe Trial. Things like that. Along with that, I knew I wanted there to be a kiss under the mistletoe. Finally, I remembered the Christmas ceasefire during World War I. The story locked into place when I put the ceasefire and Christmas together. It gave my two characters, with plenty of history between them, time to work out their differences.
Nana may be the most memorable character in the collection. She’s not the protagonist, but the one who carries the theological weight of the story. How did you build her, and did she come out on the page the way you first imagined her?
In my books, I always try to have one character who is free to speak truth and wisdom without apology to other characters in an accessible and winsome way. Senior citizen characters don’t have to be “cool,” and with age comes the right to be heard with respect. Nana came into my mind and onto the page fully formed. I knew how she would dress, the jokes she would tell, and the trajectory of the insights I wanted her to convey. I made her carry the spiritual arc because words of wisdom and truth sound natural and unforced when presented by someone with gray hair who has earned the right to speak them.
Your novella is described as directly presenting the truth of Christmas and the incarnation. What did you want to say theologically, and how did you weave it in without breaking narrative momentum for a reader who came for the legal thriller?
Simply put, I wanted to say Jesus is God. King of kings, as Handel’s Messiah points out. Years ago, when I practiced law, the office building where I worked piped in Christmas music in the atrium during December. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel echoed off the marble. I remember thinking that Christmas is the one time of the year when you can sneak theology past people and they don’t object. God and sinners reconciled. Rejoice, rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel. Shepherds quake at the sight. These songs float through the air in malls, doctors' offices, and on secular streaming stations. In a Christmas novella, it was easy to weave in the lyrics themselves or allusions to lyrics from Christmas songs by having them play in the background of various settings in the book. It was all hidden in plain sight, leaving the readers to hum along in their minds.
Talk about the writing process, joining up with two other novelists to create The Last Noel. What did you learn from writing alongside Kimberley Woodhouse and Sarah Hamaker? And what surprised you about the process?
There were happy surprises along the way. While we did not coordinate on writing our novellas at all, it worked out that each of us independently landed on the idea of a second-chance romance. We then worked together to approve the cover design and the overall title option presented by Kregel. Again, we were unanimous in our ranking of choices. They are both such great authors to collaborate with, and it was an honor to have my novella included in a collection beside theirs.
Elise's arc turns on forgiveness. She says early on that people should earn it, not have it handed over. What made you want to test that conviction against a Christmas plot, and how did you find the moment she actually changes?
Christmas seemed like the perfect backdrop for the proposition that one’s ultimate fate turns on receiving a forgiveness they did not earn. The journey beginning with Away in a Manger concludes at Easter, where the greatest payment was made for those who have not earned it. Elise needed someone to walk her through the journey of forgiveness, and Nana was that person. Nana loved Elise, but knew Elise was imperfect, just like everyone else. When Elise admitted her fear that Jack would hurt her again, Nana pointed out that Elise would also hurt Jack. That moment held up a mirror, showing Elise she had the power to help bring healing and reconciliation with Jack.
