Never Thought I'd See You Again

I wrote FIREFLIES and CHURCH SCHOOL BLUES with the insulation of decades between me and the events described. The colorful characters described in the books left my life at the same time that the narratives end, so it is a very odd feeling that suddenly people out of both books are resurfacing in my world.  I changed the names, of course.  There is nothing in the books that resembles slander, and I don't believe I wrote cruelly even about those who did me cruelly, but I have thought of them for so long as story characters that it is a bit unsettling to be reminded that they are and were real people.

I have always viewed life and people as stories.  It is part of how I survived some difficult years.  To see things in terms of plot, conflict and resolution instead of whining about the unfairness of life gives me an advantage as a writer.  What might have destroyed another person has made me richer.  Oh, the stories I can tell!  

  

But back to the reappearance of the characters from my books.  Might one say "YIKES!" ?  

This is the thing about writing from real life.  Perspective varies.  This was emphatically brought home to me when interviewing family members for PRECIOUS JEWELS, A SDA FAMILY SAGA.  People experience things differently depending on their position in the story, or upon the position of the person who passed the story down to them.  I compromised when recreating some of the incidents, basing what I think happened upon other supporting evidence from the time, reconciling disagreeing witnesses into something that made sense and was true to the essence of the characters involved.

But the stories in which I write from personal experience are different.  The power of the narratives is fueled by the intensity of which the narrator experiences them.  In FIREFLIES, I experienced intensely the loss of a friendship.  Writing that narrative, I realized that the child who impacted me so deeply  had no idea what was at stake for me when she eagerly embraced new friendships and moved forward without me, while I stubbornly refused to change, haunting our old secret places alone.  If she told the story, she would tell it differently, and I would probably be a minor character.  But FIREFLIES is my story, my perspective, and I imagine she will be quite startled how I felt if she reads it.

The same for CHURCH SCHOOL BLUES, whose characters are also starting to reappear in my world.  I wrote it as I lived it, but it may not be as they lived it, walking in their shoes, living their own blues.

Pictured: If you knew me then, the picture above is probably what you saw of me.  The notebook is the same one that I carried in the CHURCH SCHOOL BLUES years, scribbling Gothic novels while pretending to take notes in class.