"Pantsing" the Family Vacation

One of the questions I see fairly often on blogs about writing is "Are you a plotter or a pantser?" By that, the questioner is asking whether the writer plans every detail of what will happen in his/her story or if he/she goes "by the seat of the pants" and lets the story go where it will. The same question could be asked of traveling style. Normally, my husband and I are "plotters" when it comes to planning the family vacation, but this year we decided to try "pantsing" it.

We knew we wanted to go to the East Coast since we had a window of only two weeks. We had settled on going to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and our son had requested going back to Washington, DC. We planned to leave immediately after our daughter's concert for band camp (the flute came on the trip with us!) on June 18 and we had to be home by July 1 so our son could get his driver's license. We planned to stay in hotels for most of the trip, but we also wanted to do a couple of nights of tent camping. With those parameters in mind, we stuffed the back of our vehicle with tents, sleeping bags, two suitcases, and numerous duffel bags and headed east.

The first opportunity for spontaneity came when we hit Memphis at suppertime.

We headed to Beale Street to BB King's Blues Club, where we had horrendously fattening and wonderfully delicious Southern fare and were treated to live music by a blues band whose guitarist most certainly wasn't born yet when Elvis died (but who could play the guitar, for sure). The spirit of the spontaneous slid into my husband and me, who mortified our daughter by pretending to dance at the table. Pantsing is fun!

We saw the downside of pantsing a couple of hours later, when we stopped in Jackson, TN, for the night. No rooms were available in our first choice of hotels - seems the Miss Tennessee pageant and a Little League baseball tournament were both in town. We did find a room, however, without too much trouble.

Our next stop was Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We've been there several times, and we've passed by the sign for Laurel Falls several times but never stopped. This time we decided to stop and do the hike. What we didn't know is that it was a 1.3-mile uphill hike! When we were nearly to the falls, someone coming back down told us there was a bear and cub on the trail. By the time we got to the spot, there was no cub, but there was the adult bear, sitting in the path. This was really cool to us since we've been to the Smokies several times and to Yellowstone and never saw a bear in the wild. Pantsing has pleasant surprises!

One of the things we did this time that we hadn't done before was go to some places just because we saw them on the map and thought they sounded interesting. The first of those was the Mountain Farm Museum at the North Carolina entrance to GSM park.

It ended up being one of my favorite stops on the trip, partly because there were so many things that reminded me of my great-grandparents' farm (like the corn-sheller) and partly because it was THE setting for my novel. Several times I had little moments of daydreaming in which I could almost see my characters leaning against the rail fence or carrying wood from the pile under the woodshed. This visit also pointed out to me, though, how far removed my kids are from the way I grew up - my daughter helped feed the two young pigs with one hand pinching her nose shut because of the smell!

Another jewel that we visited just because we found it on the map was Chippokes Plantation State Park in Virginia. We got a private tour of a plantation home circa 1854 (well, ok, no one was there besides our family) and to visit a museum of farm equipment and implements. We also stopped at Seneca Rocks in West Virginia because we would be passing it on the way home, and that was neat. The Seneca Rocks themselves are a huge, impressive outcropping of rocks, but again, the cool part to me was a homestead site that had the home and some gardens with vegetables and herbs people of the 19th century would have grown. Both of those sites are things we would have missed if we had chosen to take the interstates rather than pantsing our way on side roads.

There were some interesting stops that crossed our path quite by accident. While in Asheville, North Carolina, we ate at the most impressive McDonald's restaurant I've ever seen.

Since that is the location of the Biltmore estate (which we didn't visit because it was too expensive for our budget), the McDonald's had a "Biltmore" theme, complete with a tapestry over a faux fireplace, a waterfall wall sculpture, and a player baby grand piano.

Another time, we were driving toward Washington, DC, and we saw a big spire sticking up above the trees.

"What's that?" Jeff asked, and we exited to find out. It was the National Museum of the Marine Corps, which was a great museum with LOTS of history (although it was, of course, oriented toward military history and specifically the Marines' role in that history). When we got to Washington, we visited Arlington National Cemetery - just in time to see a wreath-laying ceremony with the Prince of Belgium. Wow. What dumb luck! Finally, we got to see first-hand what Jeff called an example of political "pork." We drove for several miles on a beautiful 4-lane interstate in West Virginia that began outside a very small town and suddenly dumped us off in what seemed like the middle of nowhere (miles from the next town of any size). That was a weird experience that took us pretty far off the path we had planned, led nowhere, and forced us to find an alternative route back to where we wanted to be. I guess that happens sometimes with pantsing.

As it turns out, we didn't take quite the route we had thought we might take - no swinging up into Delaware and Baltimore. But we got to do all the things we really wanted to do on the trip - play in the ocean and go on a fishing boat (Jeff and the kids did that - I discovered I'm really not a fan of deep water, boats, and long, long bridges, ha ha!), visit Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, see all the relatives in that part of the country, and camp a couple of times. There were some stressful moments, but seems like maybe there weren't as many as when we've had to push to get to a certain location by a certain time (or at least a different kind of stress). After the first night, we had no trouble finding a place to stay. Taking the vehicle off the interstates and on the backroads let us see something of the countryside and the way people live, which I think is just as valuable as any museum. The verdict? I like pantsing some of a vacation and hope we'll do it again sometime. Just as with a story idea, we can take the basic framework, get started, and see where it takes us!

June or JK?

Somehow today, the family conversation turned to my writing. (Honest, I wasn't the one who brought it up!) My husband and daughter wanted to hear the synopsis for a middle-grade novel idea that I've mentioned in the past. My husband thinks (and I agree) that it is an idea that is quite possibly marketable, much more likely to be published than the novel I've been working on for the past seven (!) years. He said I ought to start working on it, and that if I could get interest in it, then I might be more likely to get the first one published too.

The problem is, it's going to take a LOT of research before I can start any writing. This idea is another historical, and as you probably would guess from previous posts, I am a hard-liner about historical accuracy. Plus, this story involves actual historical figures quite prominently, which means it's even more important to be accurate. I love doing the research, but....it takes a LOT of time. A lot.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. When I brought up the amount of time needed to do the research and then the writing and the revision and how hard it is to find any time to write, my husband said, "You can't be June Cleaver and Gilbert Parks and JK Rowling all at once." (Gilbert Parks is one of my teaching colleagues who has been teaching for nearly 50 - yes, you read that right - years. For all his years in the business, he is still one of the most energetic and involved teachers I've ever known.) I understood what he was saying - a person can do one thing really well, or a person can stress over trying to do everything well.

I posted his advice on my Facebook page, and very quickly a number of my friends jumped on to say things like "Yes you can!" and "Why not?" I guess they think Jeff is being a male chauvinist, but realistically, he's right. People who are really successful at something tend to devote the lion's share of their time and energy to that one thing. As just one example, how many hours a day did Michael Phelps spend in the swimming pool?

I think my friends are still buying in to the "Superwoman" concept when they say it's possible to be the perfect wife/mother, the perfect employee, the uber-successful writer at the same time. I guess it depends on what your standard for "perfect" is, but in my life, there's just not enough time in the day to be "perfect" in all those roles. This past school year has been super-stressful -- and all I found time to do was be an employee and a mother/housewife, and I was definitely less than "perfect"! Writing fell by the wayside completely. I did some substantial revision when I chaperoned my son on a trip to Chicago in early March; the next time I was able to do any work on my book was late May. I had to go back and re-read the whole thing just so I could remember who the characters are!

What this boils down to, I guess, is that I really appreciate that my husband understands single-minded pursuit of "perfection" and has given me permission, no, encouraged me to go for it. Now whether he still buys into it when there are no clean socks in the drawers.....ha, ha. The two things I always manage to do are keep the family fed and in clean underwear. Dust bunnies off the floor....well.....they'll just have to wait. I have some research to do....

Rules

(guest post by my daughter - she read this book in about 24 hours)

The book Rules by Cynthia Lord is a really great read that pulls at the heart strings. This book was made for the young adult reading group. The main character is a twelve-year-old girl named Catherine. Catherine's problems keep mounting up; her best friend is in California with her father, her little brother has autism, and her old neighbor is moving away. Then a new problem comes -- she meets a boy who can't talk. Suddenly she finds herself trying to figure out what does normal mean? Will she get a new best friend? Can she help herself to not feel weird around her brother? Find out and read this book. Oh, and don't forget the rules!

I Want to Write Like Her!!!

Because I've so many times held Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond up as a model work of fiction, I decided it might be good if I actually went back and read it instead of relying on my memory. Sometimes, you know, memory isn't completely reliable. But in this case, it was, and re-reading Witch has reinforced my hero-worship of Elizabeth George Speare!

I read differently this time than I did as a teen, having studied the art of fiction writing over the years (I had never heard of "show, don't tell" back then!). One of the things I found myself appreciating this time around was the way Speare developed the romantic relationship between Kit and Nat (oops, sorry for the spoiler if there's actually anyone out there who hasn't read this book). Not until the last chapter, like four pages from the end of the book, does Kit realize what she feels for Nat is love. The reader is aware of how good they are for each other long before Kit is. And maybe it's just me, but there's something so satisfying about watching it develop instead of being told it is developing. For example, I found this section amusing:

"She expected that when they reached South Road Nat would turn back, but to her consternation he strode along beside her, and even when she hesitated at Broad Street he did not take the hint. The happy mood of the afternoon was rapidly dissolving in apprehension. Why on earth had Nat persisted in coming too?"

Well, we know why!

Later, in what would I suppose be the climax of the story (when Kit is at a hearing to determined if she should be tried as a witch), I got the same thrill reading the following passage that I had the first time I read it:

"Every voice was suddenly stilled. Almost paralyzed with dread, Kit turned slowly to face a new accuser. On the threshold of the room stood Nat Eaton, slim, straight-shouldered, without a trace of mockery in his level blue eyes"...(skip a couple of pages)..."In the warm rush of pride that well up in her, Kit forgot her fear. For the first time she dared to look back at Nat Eaton where he stood near the door. Across the room their eyes met, and suddenly it was as though he had thrown a line straight into her reaching hands. She could feel the pull of it, and over its taut span strength flowed into her, warm and sustaining."

She doesn't call it love yet, but as a reader, I'm saying "Yes!" It's just right, in every way.

That's the reaction I want to bring my readers to. They say a person ought to write what he/she would like to read. In that case, I think I need to spend less time on agent blogs and more time really studying what Speare has done, and Janice Holt Giles, and Ann Turnbull, and Lisa Klein. Those are the literary footsteps I want to follow. If I can come close, I'll be happy, even if my work is never published.

(And Ann, if you read this, I'm not sucking up - I mean it!)

A Favorite Summer Memory

It's the first day of summer vacation, and already my daughter has complained - tearfully, even - that no one will do anything with her, and that she doesn't have anyone to play with. "You had sisters to play with," she said. After reminding her she will be going to band camp in about a week and a half, I said, "It's not my responsibility to keep you occupied all day, every day of summer vacation."

That got me to thinking about summer vacations when I was growing up. One of the things we had that Lily doesn't was the library's bookmobile. Once a month (I think), one of the area libraries would send out a truck sort of vehicle to the rural communities, stocked with all kinds of books. We could check out (I think) five books, which wasn't a lot to last a month, but back then, the twelve miles to town for the library is a lot longer than it is now, so we were pleased to have something different to read.

I can still remember some of the books from the bookmobile and even where in the bookmobile they were located. There was the little book called Let's Make Doll Furniture, which told how to use matchboxes, spools, and contact paper to make doll furniture that I thought was really cool. I checked out that book several times, and I think it was in the non-fiction section in the end of the truck above the checkout desk. I think the bookmobile was also my first exposure to Pioneer Breed, which was influential enough that I remembered it and hunted it down 25 years later. It was in the adult fiction section along one of the walls. Finally, the children's books were near the floor, including over the wheel well, which made a great place to sit while trying to make a decision about what books should be included in the five.

One of the other reasons we so enjoyed going to the bookmobile, possibly, was that sometimes we would stop at the local general store for a yellow, banana-flavored popscicle. They cost six cents at the time. Those are still my favorite frozen treat!

Maybe I'll load the kids up tomorrow morning and take them to the library in town. It's not the same as the bookmobile, but maybe Lily can find some literary "friends" to hang out with for a while. And maybe we'll stop at the store for a banana popscicle - they still have them, although they aren't six cents anymore...

A Question of Case

I'm reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond right now (which is as fresh and enjoyable to me now as it was when I read it as a teen), and last night I came across something that raised a question in my mind. Kit (the main character) met Hannah Tupper, an old Quaker woman who lives in the meadow isolated from the rest of the community. Here are a couple of examples of Hannah's dialogue:

"Thee must be hungry," she said, more briskly. "Come, and I'll give thee a bit to eat."

"The answer is in thy heart," she said softly. "Thee can always hear it if thee listens for it."

What I wondered is whether the pronouns have been used properly in this dialogue. (Forgive me some grammar geekiness here...) I always thought "thee" was the objective case for the pronoun, "thou" was the subjective case, and "thy" was the possessive. If that's true, then a sentence might read something like this:

"Thou must be hungry...I'll give thee a bit to put in thy stomach."

In an earlier draft of my novel, I had the protagonist's sister-in-law be Quaker because I thought it would contribute to a subplot about slavery that was in the story at that time (Quakers were leaders in the abolition movement). I tried to be very careful to get the dialogue right, because I thought that would be the type of mistake that would take the reader out of the story. But I never felt entirely confident that it was done correctly, and I also had the problem of trying to figure out what verb should go with "thou." ("Thou have"? "Thou has?" "Thou do"? "Thou does"? ARRRGGGH!!!)

Eventually, I decided it wasn't urgent to the plot that the character be a Quaker. That was an easy way to solve my problem, but I still wonder about it. Just what is the right way to have a Quaker character use pronouns? Just in case it is urgent to have a character be Quaker in some future story!

Once Again, It's the Little Things

When I teach Introduction to Rhetoric and Social Influence, one of the exercises I always do with the class is about censorship of books. I put together a collection of books that have been challenged, find a part that relates to the reason for the challenge, and then have students read that section and say whether or not they would support the challenge. Every time I gather books for the exercise, I find a new book I want to read. This year, it was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.

What interested me about the book was the conflict the main character, Junior (Arnold) Spirit, faced. Junior is a Spokane Indian living on a reservation, but one of his teachers at the reservation school tells Junior he should go to the public school in a town off the reservation. Junior decides to take the risk, even though it means his best friend now hates him for "deserting" the tribe. Junior faces discrimination at the town school, but eventually he makes friends with several of the white students. Throughout the story, though, Junior struggles with being a "border dweller" (another term from Intro to Rhetoric class!) who lives between two cultures. I liked that entire storyline. While I was saddened by the portrayal of the hopelessness and alcoholism of the Indian culture, I liked the way Alexie portrayed the sense of community of the Indians.

But...once again, there were some little things that seemed sloppy to me and took me out of the story several times. One thing happened right in the first chapter. Junior is introducing himself, and he's got all kinds of physical problems, like being born with hydrocephalus and having seizures and being very awkward with big hands and feet. Then he goes on to tell about playing basketball and in fact, becoming a starter on the town school's varsity team and even hitting the shot that leads to his school team destroying the reservation team. That seems unrealistic to me. I've had a couple of students in the past with those kinds of physical problems, and those problems don't just go away in time for a kid to become a star basketball player. Strike one.

Another thing I thought was unrealistic was Junior saying how many times he ended up walking the 22 miles from the school to the reservation because his dad forgot to come pick him up (or was too drunk to do it). I'm not arguing with the fact that a kid could have to find his own way home from school; what seems unrealistic to me is the distance. How long would it take to walk 22 miles? When my husband and I used to do backpacking, the best we accomplished was something like 11 miles in an 8-hour day. Of course, that was carrying a pack, but wouldn't a school kid have a backpack full of books? You should see what my daughter hauls back and forth every day. I don't buy it. Strike two.

The thing that bothered me most, though, came when Junior's grandmother died. Of course, she died in some bizarre way. At her memorial service, a rich guy steps up to return a ceremonial dance dress that he said belongs to Grandmother Spirit. Then Junior's mother steps up to say, "I'm her daughter....." Wait...I thought she was Grandmother Spirit, related to Arnold Spirit. If Indian surnames follow the same rules as Anglo names, that means it would be his father who was related to Grandmother Spirit, not his mother. Maybe the rules are different for Indian marriages, but there's nothing in the book to say that. It reads like a mistake to me. Strike three.

Those three strikes, combined with what I thought was an overdone "voice" for Junior's character, soured me a little on the book. I don't know that this is what was in Sherman Alexie's mind, but no author should take for granted that readers will, without question, overlook sloppy detail work if the issues in the story are "important" enough. It especially bothers me when that happens in a young adult book. YA readers are still forming their perceptions of the world - they may not have the critical thinking skills to ferret out the mistakes and correct them. In my opinion, we do those readers a disservice when we are less than accurate - even with minor details.