A Presentation on My Writing

ON MY WRITING HABITS

I’m gathering thoughts for a presentation in February on the subject of my novel What Missing Means. Several ideas I’m working on:

1) Background for writing it.

This novel began as part of its prequel, Dust On the Bible. As such, the characters were already there. To figure out where they came from, I’ll go back to the origin of Dust On the Bible, which began as short stories.

2) Is it autobiography? 

Not consciously, but some critics hold that most good literature is autobiography. I can’t buy-off on that entirely, but writers who share the emotional history of their characters can better bring them to life. But to the point, I’ve come to recognize influences from my childhood that bear on the story.

3) The lure of research.

I've been asked to discuss my writing of the novel. Personally, I prefer to talk about what I’ve learned from my research. The novel takes place in 1945. To get the time period realistically portrayed I dug into biographies, history books, and documents (thank-you Wikipedia) to discover things such as: 1) who was drafted and how; 2) electricity’s arrival in rural homes; 3) ration cards for gas & groceries; 4) when/how bodies of KIA soldiers were sent home; 5) time sequence of cotton crops, when chopped, when hoed.

One reason I like to write historical fiction is the pleasure of digging into history for answers to questions I’d never ask if I weren’t writing. Sometimes the most mundane information is the hardest to find. When I was writing the Westfall antebellum series, I spent days trying to find out if it was common for people to smoke cigarettes in 1857 (No, it wasn't.).

 

Sketch of Fairview School, where I attended grades 1-4.
It could have been the inspiration for Lily's school.