"I bet it took a long time to write that book," she said to me. Do I count the time "just thinking about it?"
I've read a lot of articles about the manner in which different authors write a book: Some people map out the entire book in a detailed outline before beginning. Organized people. Some folks write the ending of the book first. They work backward from there. And other people write "by the seat of their pants." They are called "pantsers."
While I am not a fan of the term, I guess I'd have to say I'm a "pantser." I had only a vague outline in my head, and I certainly did not know how the story would end when I began writing. It's not much of a strategy and I don't recommend it, but it seemed to work for me.
Before I began to write I spent a lot of time fleshing out the characters in my head. We were living aboard Northern Star, our sailboat, at that time. In my limited experience as a writer, there is something about a fresh breeze and the boat slicing through the water that clears my head enough to envision make-believe characters.
I thought about the main character first, a protagonist. Who was she? (It had to be a "she," since that is the gender with which I have experience). How old was she? What did she worry about? Why? What did she want? What made her afraid, hopeful, sad, laugh? How did she feel about being the subject of a book? (On that point, the protagonist would remain completely moot throughout the writing). Only after I had a pretty good idea about who that person was did I start thinking about the people in her world.
I found it difficult, however, to imagine the other characters without first imagining where they existed in the world. Without having the setting of the book in mind, my characters just couldn't come to life. I couldn't find them. I was forced to set aside thinking about the characters for a time to think about the setting. I thought real hard. No matter how I tried to expand my thinking, I kept returning to the topography of my childhood. Tidy little farms perched atop wooded bluffs in southeast Minnesota. Many friends and family members asked me whether my book was going to be about sailing which, of course, would have necessitated the "where" to be on the water. Nah. I'd blogged about sailing for nearly five years in withwaterbelow.blogspot.com. I didn't think I had much more to say about sailing. I realized after the book was written, however, that the title of Driftless made some folks think that I'd changed my mind and wrote about sailing anyhow.
When was my character alive? Placing her in current day Minnesota just didn't seem right. For one thing, I did not want to write about COVID. And I haven't lived in my childhood landscape for many years. In my head, the way things were on the farm when I was a child is the way things still are, or the way they should be anyhow. A lot of things have changed, but I like remembering farming as it once was. I've always liked historical novels, so I wanted to place my story in the past. I can hardly keep up with the present as it is. Since I've needed to have young people demonstrate how to operate my computer, phone, TV... pretty much anything that has buttons and requires a plug-in, the past seems a safer time period to write about.
With those details settled, I still needed to discover what the story would be about. That was the toughest part of all. What would be the plot? What was going to go on with this person and her friends/family in that time and place? There were a lot of scenes that I wanted to write about, but the scenes that I envisioned were not "theme worthy." They were just background snippets relative to the time and place. Rural Minnesota, dairy farm, playing in the haymow, fieldwork, wooded hills, and valleys, and cold spring-fed creeks. Images from my childhood. But what would really happen in this story?
I scoured my later life experiences for topics. I'd spent my career working with patients...with people that don't typically end up being written about. Chronic illness, congenital disorders, and traumatic injuries have not been popular topics in books but they should be, I decided. All around us and among us are people who live with physical, emotional, and mental illnesses or disabilities. I figured that some of those folks should have a place in my story.
Then one day, while yet living aboard Northern Star, I thought about some of the genealogy research that I'd done in years past. I had explored my maternal and paternal ancestors as far back as I could go. My inability to read Norwegian records was a limiting factor for that side of the family. I enjoyed the genealogical study so much that I went on to research my ancestor's siblings and their families, too. One day I came across a distant relative, a young farmer with a wife and two small children living somewhere in southeastern Minnesota. I found the record of his commitment to Rochester State Hospital, Rochester, Minnesota in the early 1900s. I looked at the next few censuses, hoping to find him living at home again, with his family. As far as I could tell, he never returned home to live.
As a medical social worker, I already knew some of the history behind those enormous state hospitals and other institutions that housed folks with physical and/or mental differences. Those massive institutions were being shut down in the 1950s because that is when psychotropic medications were developed and implemented. Therefore, thousands upon thousands of patients were discharged to community settings—home with family, or foster homes, group homes, or supervised living, but before that? A very different story.
What would it have been like for a child to have a parent sent away to a state hospital to live, perhaps never to be seen again? What would happen to the spouse? What was life like for the patient in the mental hospital?
And that was how the book began. The bones of the plot were unearthed in 2019. Driftless was published in July 2021 as an eBook and the paperback was published in September 2021.
"Oh, ya," I nodded. "It took a while."
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