What’s Your Question?

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.  ~Jane Goodall

I invited you all to ask me a question about me or my writing last week. And a couple of you took me up on it. Whenever I give a talk about my books, the part I always like best is the Q & A time if I can have a curious group who are willing to ask those questions. When people ask questions, that often leads us down some new trails that can turn out interesting. So if you missed the chance to ask questions last week, then throw in your questions this week and I’ll do another post to answer those sometime in the future.

But here are the questions I got last week. First from Lavon.

I already know that Angel Sister has your mother’s story woven into it. Have you ever written a book that includes a chunk of your own story? (Lavon)

Angel Sister is my mother’s story in many ways even through the actual happenings in the story are fiction. Still as Lavon says, I did weave into the story much of my mother’s background of growing up during the 1930’s and how the Great Depression affected her family. I had fun weaving some of her memories into my story. So the question is whether I’ve ever done that with things from my own life. And I have.

Back when I was hesitating on the brink of deciding if I should give up writing to get a regular day job, I decided to write one more book without worrying about whether I was following publishing trends or not. I’d gone through several years of nothing but rejections for the stories I was writing. So, since they say you should write what you know, I decided to write a story about a young girl growing up in a small town during the 1960s. That wouldn’t exactly be my story, but I did use my hometown as a setting even though I changed the name of the town to Hollyhill.

My character is the daughter of a preacher and that certainly isn’t from my life. And Jocie’s mother deserted her when she was five. Again, certainly nothing from my own story since I had the best mom ever. But I did lift memories of things that happened in my little town and how people lived then. That was a time when everybody knew everybody. And you not only knew them. You knew their parents and grandparents and where they lived. I was able to get that small town feel because I know small towns. Then I also threaded into the stories some of the characters I knew growing up. Not the character as a whole, but bits and pieces that go into some of the minor characters in the story. When one of the characters has a baby in one of the books, I could make that scene work better because of my memories of having my first baby.

Then, when I wrote my Hidden Springs mysteries set in the small town of Hidden Springs, once more my hometown gets to shine once again. This time in a contemporary setting but still in ways frozen in time from how I remembered the town before the big box stores moved in and all the downtown businesses weren’t able to compete and closed down. I let those businesses continue to thrive in Hidden Springs. Makes for a more interesting Main Street.

So while I haven’t actually used my own story, I have used bits and pieces. Every time I have a character who loves exploring nature or wants to be a writer or goes to a small country church or any of a dozen other scenarios, then perhaps a bit of my own story slips in.

I also wonder how with your busy life you set aside the time to write. Is it every afternoon for a set number of hours? Does everyone honor your set aside “office time”? (Jean )

This is a great question, Jean, and the answer is one many writers besides me has to try to find the best answer to. I do sometimes find it difficult to find that writing time with everything else  that’s happening. Way back when I wrote my first novels while my kids were young, I stole whatever moments I could. I wrote a lot of my first novel while Captain Kangaroo was entertaining my youngest son. Then once all the kids were in school, I tried to make those school hours my working time. The kids have long been grown up and off on their own, but somehow I still have to work sometimes to carve out those writing hours. There is always something to distract us or something more fun to do than the hard work of pulling a story out of your head, word by word.

I love to write, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard work, creating a story from beginning to end. So I do try to work most days. If I’ve got a deadline looming or need to do various publicity things, I just treat it like a daily job with the need for plenty of overtime. I probably should set aside some specific hours and say these are writing hours but I tend to spend the whole day working. I do think my best hours are in the afternoon.

My husband is the only one home now and he does try to give me working time.  But there are always interruptions. In order to write that story, I have to step into my imaginary world and let the real world sort of fade into the background. That sometimes takes time to fully enter the fictional scene. Then if a phone call or a crash from somewhere in the house or a dog’s nose in my lap or any of a dozen other things bounces me out of the story, I have to start anew to get back into the story scene.  And sometimes it’s hard for writers to consider their writing as the same as someone else having a job where they have a set time to start and a set time to go home from work. My biggest problem is thinking I can do it all. That may be a problem many of you have too, no matter what you do.

I found this quote somewhere years ago, but it is a good reminder.

“I’ve learned the Lord didn’t do it all in one day…so what makes me think I can?”

So thanks for your questions, Lavon and Jean. And if any of the rest of you have a question, keep in mind that the Q & A time is my favorite part. 🙂

If you could ask anybody, living or dead, a question, who would it be and what would you ask?