A Shipwreck Story

 

Last week I promised to tell you more about my current work in progress. But first I’ll give you a little personal background.

As I also mentioned last week, the first time I crossed the Atlantic Ocean was on the Nova Scotia in September 1957. (The photo at the head of this post shows Mama, my brothers, and I in our cabin back in the days before selfies would have allowed Daddy to be in the picture, too.) I was six years old at the time and was afraid of many things, but I don’t remember worrying that the ship would sink.

That might have been different if I had heard about the shipwreck of the Andrea Doria just over a year earlier. My parents were well-informed about world events, but one of them might have said something like this to the other: “There is no reason to mention the Andrea Doria  to the children. The chances of shipwreck are extremely small, but Kathryn would be terrified if she knew about it.”

As an adult, I’ve always been fascinated by the story of the Titanic At one point I considered writing a book about a protagonist traveling on that fateful voyage. One of my criteria for a historical novel is that there must be enough first-person accounts to make the book emotionally as well as historically accurate. The story of the Titanic has that.

Unfortunately, though, it has been overdone. One of my favorite contemporary authors of children’s historicals recently published a children’s novel that, in my opinion, isn’t up to her usual standards. It felt like she was trying too hard to create something that hadn’t been done before.

I looked around for other shipwrecks that might make a good story and chose the sinking of the Andrea Doria. It also has plenty of eyewitness accounts reported in books about the event, mostly taken from newspaper interviews or interviews conducted by the authors. Equally important, I found only one children’s book about it. There may be more, but a search on the Titanic brings up dozens.

Since my current work in progress is about a girl traveling on the Andrea Doria’s last voyage. I thought this would be a good time to reprint a former series of posts involving other fascinating shipwrecks involving passenger vessels. The others took place in the same decade, forty years before the Andrea Doria sunk, but I’ll start there anyway.

So stay tuned for next week’s post on the sinking of the Andrea Doria.

Look Around You

 

Between Holy Week/Easter, taxes, and camera club responsibilities, it’s been a busy two weeks. So rather than getting farther behind on my writing, I decided to reprint a 2/28/18 post from the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog. Here it is with minor changes and a parenthetical.

Look Around You

Story ideas can pop up anytime, anywhere. You just have to look around you.

I took this photo when visiting the Grand Canyon in 2014. The situation it portrays could be the foundation for anything from a sweet story about a man and his pet raven to a tale of horror centered around a rabid raven loose in a popular tourist spot.

Or maybe you are at a restaurant for a Conference Committee meeting when a drama unfolds outside, which happened on Saturday. I had my back to the window but the reactions of the Committee members sitting across from me told me that something interesting was going on. Later, one of the Committee members described the events occurring in the parking lot—events that started as a pet drama and escalated into a family one. I’ll let her or other Committee members write that story, but it could well be the prompt for a funny or tragic or heart-wrenching one. [As I said, I didn’t actually see it, and I may not remember it correctly after all these years. But I think it started with two cars parked next to each other and the drivers arguing over who got to take the pet dog, and it ended with close to a full-blown fight while the children stood around crying. If I were telling the story, it would probably center around pet custody.]

Then there was the time when my mother and I were returning from a writers’ conference in New Mexico. We had boarded the plane and were waiting for the doors to close when a flight attendant put out a plea for someone to give up his or her seat. My mother and I just wanted to get home, so neither of us was interested, and the airline was only looking for one seat, anyway. The flight attendant kept increasing the incentives as she got more and more desperate. Finally, an older woman jumped up and said, “I’ll take it.” But it was what happened next that made the situation interesting. Apparently she was traveling with two younger women (presumably her daughters), and they argued with her all the way to the door. In the end, she left and they stayed. I went home and wrote a story about a self-sufficient woman who stood up to her over-protective daughters and got to finish the vacation she hadn’t been able to fully enjoy while they were along.

So if you need an idea for a story, just look around you.

Writer's Block or Idea Overload?

 

After six years of heavy use, my primary laptop had slowed down considerably, especially when it came to starting up and loading programs. So after taking it in for service and still not being happy with the speed, I replaced it with a new one. I love my ASUS Vivobox, and, contrary to some people’s experiences, I have had no problems with Windows 11.

But even the best laptop can’t keep up with my brain.

Last Monday, June 13, The Wall Street Journal published an article about a Tokyo café for people with writer’s block. Apparently the owner helps them set writing goals, and being in the presence of other writers in the same situation provides additional incentive. It’s a fascinating concept, but not one I’ll be making use of.

Writer’s block has never been my problem. I’m more likely to be cursed with idea overload.

I wake up in the middle of the night with ideas running through my head, and I can’t go to sleep until I’ve gone into the office and written them down. And I currently have three manuscripts and a series of devotions in progress. Right now I am doing one devotion a day while writing the first draft of Across the Isthmus. But when I finish that, should I do the second draft of Around the Horn or the third draft of Lonely Rock?

If you invent a laptop that can keep up with the computer God gave me, I’ll be your first customer.

For now, my new one will have to do.

Why Couldn't I Write It?

As I mentioned in my last post, I had intended to write a story about a girl living in the Pullman District of Chicago during  the Pullman strike of 1894, but I just couldn’t get the plot to flesh out. So what went wrong?

When writing historical fiction, research information about both facts and experiences is necessary to create a realistic story. I love memoirs, letters, and “as told to” accounts because they give you the color and emotional content that makes history come alive. Facts about the Pullman District and the Pullman strike were both easy to come by, but lived experiences have eluded me.

It isn’t as if I haven’t tried. There are newspaper and magazine articles and a propaganda booklet about all the wonderful amenities provided to residents, but I couldn’t find anything that provided insight into their daily thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

Have I given up on the idea? Not entirely. I’ll take the Historic Pullman House Tour in October and continue looking for better resources. But if this story doesn’t want to be written, I’ll just move on to the next one—again.

When the Ideas Flow

My older brother has Parkinson’s Disease, and back in March he fell and ended up in a nursing home with much of his memory gone. At the time, I had three ideas for as yet unwritten middle-grade historicals and was almost ready to start one about a girl living in Chicago’s Pullman District during the 1894 Pullman strike.

As I have written in previous posts, Donald’s situation made me realize that I should work on my memoirs before anything happened to my own memory. So I set the Pullman novel aside for a while.

I’m just about finished with the part of my memoirs that covers my early years, and the latter years are better documented and less likely to be lost to my children if they don’t get written up right away. As a result, I had begun working on the outline for the Pullman book. I had the setting and the basic character arc but was having trouble coming up with the plot. I couldn’t even seem to force it.

The book after that was to be about a girl living and working on the Erie Canal. My anticipated timing had me beginning it sometime this winter, but that isn’t a great time for a research trip to New York, and I had already planned the trip for August.

There was no reason to postpone it, so Roland and I went as planned. We just returned, and the ideas have been flowing like the canal itself. Actually, the canal is rather sluggish, so that may not be a good analogy. But the ideas for the Erie Canal book started flowing even though I wasn’t ready for them yet. By the time I returned I had the story setting, the protagonist’s character arc, most of the important characters, some of the backstory, and a well-developed plot.

It became clear to me that I’m meant to write the Erie Canal book next. If I had a contract for the Pullman book, I would be agonizing about it right now. But because I have the flexibility to pick and choose my projects as circumstances dictate, I can put that one aside until later and work on Muddy Waters first.

I wouldn’t turn down a three-book contract, but sometimes there are advantages to not being sought-after.

__________

The image at the head of this post shows a painting by Edward Lamson Henry called “Round the Bend” portraying passenger travel along the Erie Canal around 1836. Almost every museum along the canal had a copy. The date the painting was created is unknown, but E.L. Henry died in 1919 and the image is in the public domain.

Shut down the boiler; I want to get off the boat!

I always have a list of possible subjects for my next book, and the one after that, and the one after that . . .

That’s fine, and even good, as long as those subjects know when to stay silent. But it’s bad when they decide to speak up at the wrong time.

After writing several books, I’ve come up with the routine that works best for me. It goes something like this (WIP stands for work in progress):

1. Write the first draft of WIP #1.
2. Put the first draft of WIP #1 aside to breathe while I catch up on various projects and/or research WIP #2.
3. Do additional research for WIP #1, if necessary.
4. Write the second draft of WIP #1.
5. Make minor edits to WIP #1 and give it to my beta readers.
6. Research and/or write the first draft of WIP #2.
7. Go over beta reader comments on WIP #1 and rework it (the third draft).
8. Polish WIP #1 and send it to a freelance editor.
9. Write the first or second draft of WIP #2 (depending on how much I got done in step 6) and do additional research, if necessary.
10. Make the edits in WIP #1 and submit it to publishers and/or agents.
11. Continue the process with WIPs #2 and #3.

That’s the way it’s supposed to happen, although research can occur at any stage. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to keep the WIPs in their places. I begin to get excited about WIP #2 while I am working on a step dedicated to WIP #1. Right now, I am in the middle of Step 4 for my book about the Great Chicago Fire, and that’s what I should be concentrating on. But the other day my Great Courses lecture finished before my walk did, and I started thinking about ideas for fleshing out a story about a riverboat disaster, which was one of the subjects on my list for future books. And once ideas start flowing, I have to write them down or I’ll lose them.

But now I need to shut down the riverboat’s boiler and get back to the Great Chicago Fire.

_____

The photograph was taken around 1860 and the author is unknown. It shows the riverboat America traveling down the Mississippi River on its way to Angola Prison in Louisiana. The photo is in the public domain because of its age, and you can find more information about it at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:River_Boat_America_with_Convicts_for_Angola.jpg.