Day 21 NaBloPoMo at yeah write guest blogger: yeah write guest editor Deb Quinn
Most of the history I know, I learned from novels. Occasionally this fact has gotten me into trouble at cocktail parties and whatnot, when I blather on about such-and-such thing happening and people look at me in disbelief. Whaddaya mean Elizabeth I never met Mary, Queen of Scots face to face? There was a whole series of books, now sadly out of print, by a woman named Sally Watson, whose books about adventurous girls in 17th and 18th centuries I adored. These girls did things like run away from home and join the Globe Theater (way before “Shakespeare in Love” was even a gleam in Tom Stoppard’s eye) or sail with the pirate Anne Bonney through the waters of the Caribbean, or foil a Papist plot to blow up Elizabeth I. Yes, there were always romances in these books, but what mattered were the adventures; I spent hours lost in the past and somehow, when I would emerge blinking into my life as a Midwestern middle-schooler, my life seemed unbelievably dull by comparison. (Okay, truth be told, my life was dull, by anybody’s measure, but that’s not really the point of this whole thing I’m writing).
I’d always wanted to write novels, but my attempts never measured up to what Sally Watson could do. My father would point out that novels needed conflict, or a problem, or at very least more than just pages and pages about what people looked like and what they wore. I think that may have been my earliest introduction to the “so what” problem that even a novelist has to confront: you’ve got a character and she looks like this and is wearing that and does this thing and then…so what? What’s gonna happen? God, I hate that question. What’s going to happen? Where are you going with all this stuff that you’re hurling onto the page? I like to think that I’m pretty good at the set-up; I can even establish the various obstacles and problems facing a character or set of characters. But then…then something has to happen, the action has to drive forward somehow, and that’s almost always where I get stuck. And stuck. And stuck.
Those are the days of endless freewriting and outlining and summarizing and huge piles of paper (sorry trees). My husband laughs at me because my early writing stages (and much of the revision process) happen on a yellow legal pad (yellow paper is so much less intimidating than stark white), with pencils and different color pens–all of which have to be of a certain type in order for magic to strike. You know, the magic: when the idea fairy comes down and whacks you on the head so that suddenly everything makes sense; the previously pixillated picture suddenly sharpens (I have an alliteration addiction, sorry). Unfortunately, however, if that bitch of an idea fairy is busy elsewhere, then you can only keep writing in hopes that something will unlock.
So I went through all that –the writing and re-writing and yelling at myself, the page, my computer, the missing idea fairy. But eventually, I got to the other side. I’d written the entire novel. YA Historical fiction, of course, with the kind of girl heroine I used to like to read about, and a romance. And a time-travel adventure, just for good measure. I even have a tag line, a teaser that I hope will get you (and eighty gazillion of your best friends) to read it: “What if you fell in love with a guy who’d been dead for four hundred years? Not a vampire, not a ghost, but a real person, alive and well… and living in a village that disappeared almost five hundred years ago? And what if it were your job to save his life? ”
The Time Locket will be coming soon to an e-reader near you. Screw the idea fairy; I did it myself.
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