The evolution of a novel

Candlewood Lake (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many years ago, a friend lost his wife and all four of his children in a house fire. The fire started at night. My friend and one of his sons made it out alive, but the boy died a few days later. This tragic event haunted me for years. One weekend, I sat down and wrote a 5000 word story. In the story a nine-year-old boy loses his mother in a house fire.

I had never written a book before this, and knew little about writing fiction. After passing the book by my writing partner, I became convinced it needed a major rewrite. I put it aside while I thought about just what I wanted to do with the book.

In the year or so after I finished the story, I enrolled in and completed the Institute of Children's Literature course, signed up for an online writing group, and studied the craft of fiction.  Then I rewrote the novel. I completed the first draft and signed up for a course on editing.  After reading the first assignment, I decided to use chapter three rather than either of the first two. Why? Because it was more interesting.

Yup, the first two chapters were back story. After consulting with both my fellow students and the instructor, I removed them. They dealt with the fire itself and its immediate aftermath, and 'd done a fair amount of research for those chapters, to say nothing of the time I'd spent writing them. I saved them saved them in a folder on my computer before  I could bring myself to cut them out.

The story is set in a semi-rural community outside a small town in Connecticut where my main character's grandmother lives. The house, the community, and the town, are modeled on the house my father owned in Birch Groves. Birch Groves, on Candlewood  Lake, is a few miles outside New Milford.  The grandmother was inspired by my own sons' grandmother. My mental picture of the house that burned down is taken from her home in New Jersey.

I need to be able to picture something to write about it, so I needed to be able to see the layout of the homes, where the furniture was placed, what the trees around the house were, the roads, the lake. As I wrote the story, I pictured my characters moving around in my father's house, wandering up the same roads I had walked down so often as a child, and riding the bus to school.

My friend endured a tragic loss, one from which, in some ways, he never recovered. None of us can rewrite the past, but by writing my story, I was able to move on in my own life.

Dealing with Tragedy

Boston Marathon Finish Line.1910. Author: Unknown. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am a resident of Boston, MA, and have been since just after the blizzard of 1976. The recent, tragic, bombing at the Boston Marathon this past Monday reminds us all of the fragility of life.

It takes some time to process an incident like this, and I am still sorting things out.  I'll probably end up writing about it, since that's one of the ways I deal with grief.

Many years ago, a friend lost his wife and all four of his children in a house fire. He had been working on some renovations. Something caught fire during the night, and he alone survived.

I fell into fiction writing around 2005. Before that I'd only written poetry. The first few stories I wrote were for children, in part because I could make them shorter. Length intimidated me, especially as I tend to be terse. In any case, a few months after I started writing fiction, I sat down and wrote a 5000 word story about a boy who loses his mother in a house fire. Several years, many revisions, online classes, a writing partner, and the ICL course in writing for children, I had a publishable manuscript, The Angry Little Boy, which will be published by 4RV later this year.

The book was my way of coping with my friend's loss. While the boy in my book loses his mother, he and his father come through. We all pray the victims of Monday's bombing will do the same.

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