Speech by Laura Malone Elliott at the VEMA Potomac Regional Conference
The following is the speech Ms. Elliott delivered to the VEMA Potomac Regional Conference in March, 2005:
Thank you for the kind invitation to speak. Knowing that there would be some "repeat listeners" among you, I'd asked for topic suggestions to focus this chat. Your organizer paid me the wonderful-and rather daunting-compliment of leaving it entirely up to me.
Now, I have to tell you that having that wide a horizon can either coax a ship to spread sails into steady head-winds and race to unknown, promised land, or it can leave it stalled, in still waters. I admit to having a sinking feeling about today&133;.But, I remembered that, in all truth, I would not be here, standing in front of you, talking about my writing fiction, had it not been for a similar, wonderfully challenging, open-ended assignment from my editor, once upon a long time ago, at the Washingtonian magazine.
Without that assignment, I'm not sure I ever would have written a novel. And what joy I would have missed.
My first YA novel, Under a War-torn Sky, tells the story of a young, B-24 bomber pilot, downed behind Nazi lines in France. That book was born of a factual, December story for the Washingtonian magazine.
I began working for the magazine in 1983, fresh out of grad school. I wasn't in the vanguard of women who had to fight stereotypes held by cigar-chewing newsmen. But I came close behind. When I lucked into a job at the magazine-after a lot of "stringing" for North Carolina papers and helping one of its contributing editors research a biography of the Reagans-I started with photocopying and fact-checking some gentlemen's "hard-hitting" stories. Mostly, these established male staffers wrote about politics and the powerful. So to get my own by-line, I needed to look for a hole in the magazine's fare, "a beat," and I found one-what was then termed "women's issues"-health, mental health, child development, family relations, education. I was blessed to have an editor who gave me space-both figuratively and literally as in magazine pages-to explore and grow.
I ended up writing about victims of domestic violence, rape, cancer, depression, child victims of broken homes, divorces. "Victims" who became leaders; "victims" who found themselves in horrible, wrenching crises who then reached down deep into their core to find courage, resilience, commitment. They walked themselves and their families out of darkness into light. Talk about survivors. Through telling their stories, I learned to see kindness, mercy, generosity, self-recognition, and dogged one-foot-in-front-of-the-other stubbornness as the greatest acts of bravery. I looked to ordinary people for extraordinary acts.
After about 10 years of doing what we now tend to categorize as "human interest" stories, my editor trusted me with this kind of direction: "Laura, I need a good, heartwarming Christmas story for the December issue."
He then gave me one of his biggest compliments, saying that the hardest thing to do in writing was to either make people laugh, or make people cry. And I was good at making people cry!
Well, my mind went blank. I hope my mouth didn't actually drop open in an unspoken, "duhhhhhh." He smiled reassuringly and sent me on my way. I called all my sources. They went blank. I kept coming up with hackneyed ideas and dismissing them, until, thankfully, it hit me that one of the most moving stories I'd ever heard was that of my father, who'd been missing in action for months and presumed dead, walking up the driveway of his farm the week before Christmas. He was so gaunt, so unexpected, that at first only the family dog recognized him.
(I always tell students, that if they are lucky enough to have grandparents or elderly friends to interview them. Turn on the tape-recorder and let them talk, because people who survived WWII, the Depression, the civil rights movement, have such compelling, inspiring stories-better than anything we could dream up. And they are wonderful springboards to fiction. Say the journalistic term for this is "saving string" and students will feel they're doing it for professional reasons rather than family obligation.)
I instinctively saw the magazine piece and eventually the novel, Under a War-torn Sky, as a homecoming story, a resolution of a father and son's troubled relationship, an odyssey of a young boy becoming a man, finding his way through a tortured land to home. It is as much a story of the French citizens-old men, women, young children-who found the courage to help him along the way as it is my protagonist's. This, more than a war story of battles and bloodshed.
It was one of those golden egg stories. I received dozens of letters. The article was optioned for a movie, which, like most of those things, never materialized, but it was fun to think about. I was also approached by an agent to expand the piece into a non-fiction book. Certainly, the story deserved telling. Five thousand British and American airmen survived because of the French and their escape routes. Their sacrifice was enormous. It's estimated that for each flyer saved, one Resistance worker died.
A friend, the talented illustrator Henry Cole, is the one who told me I should fictionalize the story for children. Children are beginning to forget the courage and devotion of that generation, he said. They need a good story to know it. What a gate he opened for me.
From the moment I started Under a War-torn Sky I was enraptured with the genre. I tell journalism colleagues now, who still look at me askew, that writing for young minds is a glorious thing because teenagers want truth, they want reality, but they want it wrapped in hope, in the hope that they can make a difference with their dedication, with their energy, with their new ideas. So, I could write about the Nazis' racism and brutality, the tragedy of the French people who died standing against them, and the fear of those American boys who'd dropped out of the sky not as a testament to the "evil" in man but instead as a celebration of the flicker of humanity that remained amid such carnage.
But let me come back down to earth. Writing a novel is less an art, less an idealistic joy, than it is a craft. You're working with words, yes-- hopefully, good, pithy ones-but those words are still just building blocks that have to be fitted together snuggly or the tower falls or simply never rises. I had the basic beams of my novel, from the magazine article, but I needed much research and brand new thought as well.
Columnist and novelist Anna Quindlen has joked that readers seem to assume newspaper reporters just make everything up while fans of fiction suspect that a novel's plot is really just a thinly disguised version of the writer's life. I get this all the time from your students-sweet questions like this one about the cover of the novel (which includes portraits of a pilot, an older Frenchman, and a pretty young woman): "Is this a picture of your Mom?" Or the teacher who proclaimed, "She looks just like you," and became rather indignant when I tried to explain that this was just a model the illustrator had hired and that, in any case, neither of the characters of Patsy or Claudette, were my mother.
Under a War-torn Sky's protagonist is Henry Forester, whose personality, relationship with his father, and homecoming is, indeed, modeled on my father's true experiences. Everything else, though, came out of my imagination, from reading memoirs of Resistance survivors and flyers. I interviewed people of that "greatest generation," watched WWII movies to get the lingo and swagger of those 1940s guys, listened to big band music, read flying manuals and battle reports, even purchased culinary guides to France so that when Henry ate, the food was correct, indigenous to the region, and therefore available during the war. (In the Vercors, for instance, natives serve walnut wine and blue cheese. Such food provided me a wonderful chance to illustrate how unsophisticated and unprepared for foreign delicacies Henry would have been.)
Historical fiction, after all, requires the setting and the details of day-to-day life to be absolutely accurate to bring the story and time alive. Mark Twain, that droll wit who wrote both "truthful" journalism and "made-up" fiction, said this about the two: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't. Fiction," said Twain, "has to make sense."
This is where you, libraries, and technology can save the writer. And I've found it to be especially true as I've gone backwards in time for my subject matter.
Let me tell you about my most recent novel, Annie, Between the States, and the one I am working on currently, tentatively called Liberty Call.
First: Annie, Between the States tells the story of 15-year-old Annie Sinclair, a Northern Virginia resident, during the Civil War. The idea of the novel came, again, from "saving string." I did grow up in Fairfax County, when the area was still quite rural. I knew a lot of ancient ladies, who loved to converse over lemonade, sitting under shade trees. They were proud of local history and were good story tellers, sharing poignant anecdotes about the Civil War they'd heard from their parents who'd lived through it. So, I cut my writers' teeth on the stories of Fairfax City resident, Antonia Ford, who had been accused of being a Confederate spy and actually married the Union officer who escorted her to prison. (The ladies thought that terribly romantic.) And on stories of Confederate ranger John S. Mosby, the Gray Ghost.
If you're not familiar with it, the legend of how Mosby and 28 of his rangers rode, undetected, from Middleburg through multiple Federal picket lines straight into General Stoughton's bedroom in a Union encampment in the city of Fairfax, it is pretty amazing. The Confederate partisan awoke the general-who was a little groggy from an evening of champagne, reportedly enjoyed at Antonia's house. "Do you know Mosby," he asked and the Federal general responded, "Yes, have you captured the devil?" Mosby told Stoughton no, that the devil had caught him.
Out Mosby rode into the night, carrying off the captured General, two of his captains, 30 soldiers, a telegraph operator, and 58 horses-without firing a single shot. Of the event, President Lincoln quipped that generals were replaceable, but that he greatly regretted the loss of so many good horses. Mosby so unnerved the Federals that ten planks on both sides of the Chain Bridge were removed every night to prevent him from getting into Washington and perhaps making off with President Lincoln himself.
Pretty good material, right?
So, with those real-life stories as a starting point, I began researching. Researching is the fun part, the treasure hunt in writing. Keep in mind that good writing, good paragraphs are written by piling detail upon detail, like making a drip castle at the beach. That takes finding "revealing" details that illuminate character, events, or themes. Research, for me then, is the catalyst of my imagination. Even dry statistics can lead me to themes.
For instance: Despite the fact that Virginia was one of the last states to leave the Union and had the most inhabitants voting against secession (including, ironically, Mosby, who also was the only Confederate officer NEVER to surrender), Virginia withstood the overwhelming portion of the war's battles-123 of 384 pivotal ones. This meant constant upheaval for Virginians. The state was the feedbag, hospital, gateway, camp, and burial ground for two opposing armies that staggered back and forth across its land. Warrenton changed hands 67 times, Winchester, 72.
My novel, then, needed to be about civilians, what is was like to live in the war's battlefields, to survive constant invasion and skirmishes in their cornfields and front lawns. Annie needed to be "between states," caught in the middle-the middle of battles, the middle of divided and heartbreaking loyalties, the middle of disturbing ethical questions.
To "show rather than tell" those themes, requires a plot and good, tangible, empathetic, thick characters. Let's go back to Mr. Twain. Remember what he said: "Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities."
I wanted to incorporate lots of local history. I needed the controversial, calculating, Shakespeare-loving Mosby riding through my novel's pages. I also wanted to work in J.E.B. Stuart, the bodacious commander of the Confederate cavalry.
Some of you have seen this time-line poster board covered with twelve pages of notes. I love to show it to students because it's that dirty word: OUTLINE.
For my character to legitimately interact with those two real-life figures, Mosby and Stuart, and the Union forces pursuing them, I needed to map their exact whereabouts for the four years of the war. Mosby is in red, Stuart in blue, Union forces in black. I had to complete this before I could decide where to locate Annie's house.
Sticking to possibilities, right?
Little things I found expanded and enriched characters, even created some. I read a woman's account of trying to save the life of a boy by sticking her finger into a severed artery in his neck. She prayed with him before letting go, as there was nothing the doctors of that day could do to save him. That heart-wrenching anecdote started Annie's mother. I read that soldiers were often saved by bullets glancing off letters, Bibles, books they carried in their pockets. Sticking a volume of Keats into the breast pocket of Union officer Thomas Walker saved him and provided a neutralizing introduction to Annie, a poetry lover.
One of the true-life Northern Virginia women that inspired Annie was Laura Ratcliffe, who was an informant for both Mosby and Stuart. Stuart was the quintessential cavalier, with bright blue eyes and a convivial, flirtatious manner. When he served in the Union Army, out west, he wrote poetry in his journal into which he pressed wildflowers and bird feathers. He courted his wife on horseback rides for a mere two months, saying "I came, I saw, I was conquered." During the Civil War, he traveled with a banjo and bones player. He wore golden spurs that a female admirer from Baltimore sent him. He hosted balls in Maryland as Confederate troops moved toward Antietam and Union women attended in droves. Women literally swooned when they saw him and Stuart played on that. Some might say exploited it.
I decided to work that into a subplot or tension, when I was in the Virginia Room of the Fairfax City Library, doing research. I found a historical review from the 1960s, profiling Laura Ratcliffe. This Centreville native was the recipient of some decent poetry that JEB Stuart wrote to and about her.
Looking at Laura Ratcliffe's pretty, young face, I knew I had to make Annie the subject of some of Stuart's playful attentions. And in saying playful, I mean innocent, meant solely to enhance the romance of the war, to build the image of cavalry riders as dashing knights. But Annie, as any young girl would, hoped it was more. It provided me an undercurrent of a young girl having a crush on a public figure, a terribly handsome and charismatic man. This is a dilemma any teenage girl can recognize. It also provides the complicating twist in her friendship with two other girls, a jealousy, that again our teenage girls experience. I make it part of Annie's growth, that she must come to recognize that Stuart might be using her, his compliments designed to inspire a patriotism that perhaps is foolhardy and promoting a "cause" that is wrong. Much of Annie's actions are prompted by a brave, steadfast loyalty to her family, her farm, her brothers, her country which she-as so many did from Robert E Lee on down-identified as Virginia. The largest quandary Annie faces, ultimately, is choosing her own course, her own values, when thousands upon thousands of soldiers and politicians did not.
She must come to see the human being encased in the uniform of her enemy. To understand, as she finally says: "There is good and bad on both sides, kind and evil on both sides, thievery, lechery, and mercy on both sides, according to the morals and personality of the individual." It's one of the biggest battles we have with teenagers, isn't it? Seeing the gray in between the black and white.
I could give you dozens of examples within Annie, Between the States of characters, situations, events that sprouted after hoeing what felt like miles of research. I detail some of them on my website, and in an article for www.harperteacher.com.
But right now I'll just add one about the Internet since this is a focus for you. Annie is taken to Federal prison, after riding out into the night to save two abducted slave women. (A plot element, by the way, that grew from one line in a report about a Mosby turncoat, Charles Binns, giving testimony in Federal trials.)
The Internet is our friend if you know how to recognize a legitimate site versus a propagandistic or superficial one. I know that this is something you help your students with all the time. UNC has a digitization project "documenting the American South, beginnings to 1920." In it I found the entire text of a first-person account of Old Capitol Prison, by "a lady who enjoyed the hospitalities of the government for a season." Such rich details about the building, the vermin, the food, the damp coldness, even things like the wallpaper, how she was so afraid of the mice that she horded candle stubs and matches in case she needed to scare them off in the night.
I am now glued to the internet for Liberty Call. Again, here's a book that comes from a wonderfully open-ended suggestion by my HarperCollins editor, Katherine Tegen, during a cab ride. We had discussed Annie and other projects. And just before she was to get out of the taxi, she said, "Your next book should be a boy book again and there's not as much written about the Revolution."
I am very fortunate to have had editors who recognize a need and then trust me to answer it! Katherine's belief in me has made it possible to take this sometimes scary voyage away from the familiar waters of journalism to an exciting new world of fiction.
So, I started reading. Reading about Virginia-because Virginia is my "beat." As Willa Cather said, you write about the ground beneath your feet. I've discovered some little-known and ironic facts that have become the defining skeleton of my story:
For example: There were a lot more indentured servants in Virginia than most of us realize. Indentured servants willing sold themselves and their labor for four years in exchange for the price of Atlantic passage. From England to Virginia the cost could be as little as seven pounds. Some of them, young boys in particular, did not come willingly. The term "kid-nap" was coined during colonial days. A bank failure had brought hordes of people to London, looking for jobs. Many vagrant boys were simply rounded up and put onto boats heading to America. Scores of poor families embarked together, hoping to start anew, and found that they were to be separated, their indentureships sold to different people. These boats were mostly cargo ships, so the hole in which they made the six-week passage was dank and disease-ridden. If a family member died past the halfway mark, a child might be responsible for paying off their passage as well.
There was a brief, but rather pivotal battle in Dec. 1775 at Great Bridge, just outside Norfolk, that some historians equate in importance to Concord. At that battle fought many run-away slaves enlisted in Lord Dunmore's Royal Ethiopian Regiment. They mocked Patrick Henry's slogan, "Liberty or death," which militiamen wore on their shirts, with a sash that read: "Liberty to Slaves." But the only slaves Lord Dunmore accepted into his ranks were those who'd left patriot owners. Those owned by loyalists were returned.
Fighting against them were several future leaders of our country, such as a nineteen-year-old John Marshall, our first Supreme Court Chief Justice. William and Mary student James Madison was one of a handful of students who stormed the governor's palace and made off with all his guns and swords.
I have the general plot outline. Following the same process I did with Annie, I've got to deal with possibilities, as Twain called it, legitimate probabilities that make sense. How do I get my 14-year-old boy, Nathanial Dunn, (his name picked, by the way, by my 11-year-old son from a 1774 list of indentured passengers on the Planter) into Williamsburg, then into the 2nd Virginia regiment, to march to Great Bridge?
It's a real rubric cube. I'll give you just one square of it: I've spent hours on www.pastportal.com reading run-away ads in the Virginia Gazettes of 1770-1775, to find a tradesman who really would have employed an indentured servant. I discovered people like a surgeon who would buy teeth, teach sword-play, or repair harpsichords. Jack-of-all trades to be sure! The search has been worth it: I've found a really salty person to use, someone who got into a lot of arguments with his competitors, printed in the Virginia Gazette. And the wonderful thing is his house stands next to the homes of several patriots, who can now legitimately appear in my pages.
So&133;these open ended assignments aren't really so daunting if you head to the library!
I'd like to end with an anecdote about how you all constantly inspire me. I won't use the name of this individual, she can identify herself later if she so desires. Anyway, the story comes from a school visit I did recently. School visits have been an unforeseen and enriching outgrowth of writing. I always learn something from you or your students. If I ever finish Liberty Call, my next project is to write a sequel to Under a War-torn Sky. Because your students kept asking me what happened to Pierre, to Claudette, to Madame Gaulloise. So, Henry is going back to find out.
Anyway, I was recounting to this current librarian an anecdote about a librarian in my youth who had helped turn me from tomboy to reader by handing me a book about Virginia Dare, an English settler saved and raised by Native Americans. With that book, that lady introduced me to the tantalizing idea that a young girl could face adversity, prevail, and perhaps even be a bit heroic.
The current-day librarian's eyes glistened as I spoke. She then told me about a rambunctious, just-couldn't-sit-still, look-at-me attention grabber in her school, who has suddenly found purpose in his personality because of something she said to him. One day this winter he made a dramatic entrance, with news of his weekend goings-on. "You," she told the boy with pointed awe, "are a story-teller." Well, his eyes got big, his back straightened up, he's now completely in love with this lady.
She's given him perhaps the best open-ended, undefined assignment there is: be a storyteller. Watch, listen, resonate to the actions of those around you. Ask those "how-come" questions like Alice in Flying South. How come people are the way they are? How come things happened that way? Be a story teller. Look at the world around you and find meaning in it and, in that process, find meaning in yourself.
I thank you all for what do, every day, wittingly and unwittingly, to inspire the young minds that will carry our world forward.
Return to Laura Malone Elliott's feature.
Added 04/01/05
To stay up to date on new books by this author, consider subscribing to The Children's Literature Comprehensive Database. For your free trial, click here.
If you’re interested in reviewing children's and young adult books, then send a resume and writing sample to marilyn@childrenslit.com.