Where Do You Find Your Stories?

 I'm TA #3 to weigh in on my most frequently asked question as an author. Even though I teach both adults and children, the question is the same from both groups. And that is...

"Where do get your ideas?"

99% of my stories come from my own family. As a writer, I couldn't be luckier to have the family I do. We're all storytellers, both sides of the family. Even my father-in-law loved to share tales about his life and family history. It's not that my relatives were famous or did anything historic. They just liked to tell stories about their childhoods and their own ancestors. I was that rare kid who loved to listen to them. Thanks to the Rodmans, Smiths and Downings, I have enough raw material to keep me going forever.

Once I've answered question #1, the second most asked question is "So do the people you write about recognize themselves in your stories?" The answer for every writer should be "no." There is a disclaimer in the front pages of every novel that says "This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental." There is a good reason for this. No one wants to get hauled into court for defamation of character, especially not if the complainants are your cousins or in-laws. The storytellers of my childhood are no longer alive, but their children and grandchildren are. 

My ideas, the story seeds, come from real life. They come from events that happened to real people in real cities. However, once I start writing, the characters are no longer my parents or aunts or uncles. They have different names, appearances and personality traits. Halfway through a first draft they become people who are very real, but a product of my own imagination. The geographic location stays real; location is as important as the characters and action. However, the neighborhoods and schools are composites. I draw maps for these fictional neighborhoods so I can keep the locations straight in my head.

I think I've done a pretty good job in turning real people into fictional people. When I began writing in elementary school, my mom typed my stories for magazine and contest submissions. Every time there was a mother in the story, she would ask "Is that mom supposed to be me? I'm not like that at all." In those early stories the mother was never even remotely based on Mom. If the character was the least bit unpleasant, Mom would take it very, very personally, never convinced I wasn't writing about her. But I wasn't. 

Fast forward thirty years. Yankee Girl is published. Although the parents in the book are relatively minor characters, they are, straight on, my parents. The narrator is Alice Ann Moxley, who is pretty much eleven-year-old me. My parents loved the book. I kept waiting for Mom to say something about the mother character. (My dad would never say anything, one way or the other.) 

Crickets. 

Almost two years later, Mom called me late at night. My parents never called after 8pm, not even if someone was dying. This had to be important. 

I only managed to get out a "hello" before Mom barged right on.

"Is the mom in Yankee Girl me?"

Uh oh. Busted. Gulp. "Yeah."

After a moment, Mom continued.

"I was re-reading it tonight, and I realized that you were writing about yourself and all your worries at that time...and I didn't know about any of it. And neither did the mother in the book. Was I that clueless?"

That led to a long discussion about how terribly stressed and worried our whole family was at that time, each of us keeping our fears to ourselves so as not to upset anyone else. It wasn't a matter of being clueless; it was everyone trying to be strong and pretending that whatever was happening in the wider world, our family was safe. (We really weren't.) 

Looking back, it's funny that the one time I wrote clearly recognizable characters (to me at least), those people didn't realize it until years later.

Surprise Soup was based on my husband's childhood as a bratty little brother. By the time the book came out his character was a bratty little bear. I had to tell him it was him. My Best Friend and First Grade Stinks were based on things that happened to my daughter. She completely disavows both books. She remembers things much differently. And so she should, because while something she said or did was the story seed, the events, characters and outcomes of the story are very different.

That's how it should be. After all, it's fiction.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

"Just the Facts, M'am"--fiction vs non-fiction on Poetry Friday

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Howdy, Campers, and Happy Poetry Friday! (the link to this week's PF host is below.)

First: welcome, welcome to our newest TeachingAuthor, Carla!  I am in awe of your writer's journey, Carla, because when I learned that we would be discussing non-fiction, my legs trembled and my palms grew cold and damp.  Unlike you and Mary Ann, in her wonderful first salvo on this topic, I am not, by nature, a researcher.  I am NOT a "Just the facts, M'am."

Jack Webb as Joe Friday in Dragnet, from Wikipedia

But... is this really true?

Well...I DO tell my students that real details bring fiction to life, and have them listen to the following short audioclip from StoryCorps.  Talk about bringing a subject to life! The details Laura Greenberg shares with her daughter are priceless--not to mention hilarious.

Still, I struggled to write poems for The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science (Pomelo Books).  By "struggled" I mean I read science articles and wrote tons of stinky poems about rocks, astronauts, materials science, the expiration dates on seed packages,electricity, science experiments...and on and on and on.

But...I dread gettting facts wrong--my worst nightmare. (Confession: writing these blog posts scares the bejeebers out of me.)

In fiction, I can fly my fairy-self to Planet Bodiddley and make up all the materials science by myself.  But if I have to convey facts?  And then somehow bake them into a tasty poetry pie?  I get tied up in knots.  My writing becomes stiff as a board.  I'm afraid of...

But finally I stumbled on this fascinating fact, in a review of The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman:"The water coming out of your kitchen tap is four billion years old and might well have been sipped by a Tyrannosaurus rex."

Wow. Think of the water you drink.  Think of the water you take a BATH in!!!! Ten versions of "Space Bathtub" later (with considerable coaching from the ever-patient anthologists, Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell) this fact became a poem for kindergartners:

OLD WATER
by April Halprin Wayland

I am having a soak in the tub.
Mom is giving my neck a strong scrub.

Water sloshes against the sides.
H2O's seeping into my eyes.

The wet stuff running down my face?
She says it came from outer space!

The water washing between my toes
was born a billion years ago.

from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science
(c) 2014 April Halprin Wayland, all rights reserved

If you're a K-5th grade teacher, this science/poetry anthology is so immediately useful, you'll cry with relief when you open it. Trust me. For details, and to watch under-two minute videos of poets (Bobbi Katz, Kristy Dempsey, Mary Lee Hahn, Susan Blackaby, Buffy Silverman, Linda Sue Park and me) reciting our science poems from this anthology, go to Renee LaTulippe's No Water River.  Again, trust me. (A little foreshadowing: Pomelo Books' newest anthology, Celebrations! comes just in time for Poetry Month this year--stay tuned!)

Here's a terrific vimeo of "Old Water" produced by Christopher Alello:

And thank you, Linda Baie, fabulous friend of TeachingAuthors, for hosting Poetry Friday today!

posted safely and scientifically by April Halprin Wayland wearing safety goggles

Getting It Right

    First off, a big Teaching Authors welcome to our latest TA, Carla McClafferty. Not only did Carla and I meet and bond some fifteen years ago at an SCBWI retreat in Arkansas, we once shared an editor. Greetings, old friend, and welcome aboard. For the next couple of posts we are going to be talking about your genre, non-fiction, and what it shares with fiction.

    I have always wanted to be a Carla-sort of writer, a non-fiction writer. "Write what you love" is one of those things writing teachers (like me) tell their students. I love non-fiction. My "adult" reading consists almost entirely of biographies and history. If I read two adult novels a year, that's a big deal for me.

   So why don't I write non-fiction for children?  The reasons are endless, so I'll boil it down to one.  I just can't stick to the facts.

    Both of my novels, Yankee Girl and Jimmy's Stars began life as memoirs. YG was about my life, JS about my mother's family. Because they both took place in other times and places...Mississippi 1964 and Pittsburgh 1943...I did a boatload of research to make sure I had the details right. For the World War II world of Jimmy's Stars, I made a timeline of what battles occurred where and when between September 1943 and September 1944, and when news of those battles reached the States.  I compiled a radio schedule for the Pittsburgh stations. I studied streetcar routes. I poured over the various rationing schedules for gasoline, food, clothing.

    You would think that Yankee Girl would not require quite so much research, since after all, this was based on my own elementary school years.  I even had my 5th and 6th grade diaries. Still....do you remember what week the Beatles' "I Feel Fine" reached number one on the charts?  Neither did I.  Since the main character is a huge Beatles fan, there is at least one reference to a Beatles' song in every chapter. In addition, this the height of the Civil Rights Movement (the Selma March to Montgomery occurs about three quarters of the way through YG). I had to know exactly what date  this protest or that bombing occurred.  I remembered that these things had happened but that wasn't enough. I had to know exactly when. I spent a dismal five months in the microfilm room of the Jackson Mississippi library, going through a year's worth of newspapers, reliving a sad and scary time.

    By now you are thinking, "Well, with all this research, why didn't she just go ahead an write those memoirs?"  Good question. All I can say is that my mind refuses to march in a straight line . Yes the facts are there, because they are part of the story.  But once I start writing, my "real" character refuses to stick to their own "real" story.  I start thinking "but wouldn't it be more interesting if this happened instead?  Or if her best friend was this kind of person?"  Before I know it, I am off on a completely different story than I had first intended. The only thing that remains the same is the structure of historical fact and detail that makes the story "real" for me (and hopefully for the reader as well.)

    I am just beginning to write contemporary fiction for young people and guess what?  There is no less research involved.  Next month I will have a story in a YA anthology called Things I'll Never Say. 
I live in Georgia.  My main characters live in Georgia.  I have lived here for fourteen years.  Yet, for a 3,000 word story here are just a few story points I needed to find out to make the story real:  price of admission to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, driving times between different towns, the academic school year of Emory University, the most popular spring break towns with Georgia teens...well, you get the point.

    My point?  Getting the details right is one of the ingredients for making a story real.  Editors care about details. I spent weeks nattering back and forth with my Yankee Girl editor over the dates of those Beatles songs.  Readers care.  I had an adult write me that if the mother in Yankee Girl used a steam iron, then she didn't also need to sprinkle her clothes before ironing. I was a little miffed that someone could read a 225 page book and this is what she chose to write me. It never occurred to me look up that sprinkling/steam iron detail.  That's the way my mom always ironed. (I still probably need to look that up.)

    I once read a Big Time Award Winning Book that took place in a state where I had lived and knew very well.  This author had placed four major cities within an hours drive of each other. In reality, they were in different corners of the state and hours away from each other.  Whatever affection I had for the book died right then. Good grief, anybody could look at an atlas (this was pre-Internet) and see where those cities were.  I later read an interview by the author and discovered that she had never visited that state (or apparently done any research) but she "knew" somebody who "used" to live there. That was one of those moments when you want to scream and throw the book across the room.

   That was the moment when I decided that for me, getting the details "right." Facts are front and center of a non-fiction, but they are no less important in fiction.

     Now about that steam iron....

  Posted by Mary Ann Rodman