Why I Write

Over the past few weeks, as I see the world changing, becoming a more uncertain and unsafe place, I’ve thought long and hard about why I write, if it matters that I write. 

I’ve thought about that first novella of mine that came out in 2013, Tales from the Fountain Pen, and why I wrote it. Why I wrote down the few stories my mother was able to tell me from her experiences during the German occupation of her country, my country, during her teen years. 

For a long time I just thought they would make a good addition to the stories about WWII that are already out there, slice-of-life stories, but now I realize their true importance: These stories get played out again and again and again. History keeps repeating itself, at a faster and faster clip. Humans don’t learn it seems. 

Over the years a number of strangers have entrusted me with their stories. Stories of childhoods spent in war, stories of survival and of extraordinary kindness by strangers during difficult times. These people tell me their stories because I’m an outsider here too and often the only one who will listen to their history. They’ve often been told to not dwell on the past, they’re in America now … but their stories matter.

I will never forget, when growing up in the Netherlands in 70s and 80s, going to the open air market in the city square on Tuesdays after school, and the feeling of shock and horror in the pit of my stomach at seeing the Nazi concentration camp number tattoos on the wrists of some of the stall holders. The haunted look in their eyes. It made the generic history lessons from school seem far more real, and far more recent. 

  

My mother was not comfortable talking about those years. The few stories I got her to tell me - of which 4 or 5 made it into Tales from the Fountain Pen, fictionalized - were painful for her to relive. But they are true and they continue to matter. 

Those of you who’ve read “Sophie’s Choice” by William Styron, might not know that the choices Sophie has to make were not unique to her. Those choices were made by other women, women put in impossible positions and who’d experienced unspeakable abuse. Some of these were women my mother knew as friends, in-laws, neighbors, during and after those war years. 

But these impossible choices women are forced to make continue today and with travel bans and fear mongering they will only happen more frequently; emotionally and spiritually shredding people.

So why do I write? Why do I keep writing? Because I’ve been entrusted with people’s stories, because no matter where I set my books and short stories, these are the people who inform the characters in those stories. Looking back, I see now how I weave them into what I write, even if it’s a minor character in a subplot, or a chance encounter for the main character. The stories are there; resisting, questioning, informing. 

I have experienced the darkness of human fear and cruelty, I’ve listened to and held the hands of others who’ve suffered far more than I can ever imagine even with my fertile writer’s mind, and I feel compelled to weave all that into my writing. Sure, I write fiction, but that is a valid way to teach, to slip information in, to make a reader think about the world around them.

I understand now that writing is my way of protesting, of standing up and speaking up. I will write the other Fountain Pen stories my mother told me, I will continue to work on the sequel to “Out in the Dark” under pen name Nicola (Nicky) Adams, and I will continue to pitch my WWII trilogy for teens and the SciFi novella I just completed. All of them have stories that matter and in some way reflect the world we now find ourselves in. My books and stories are my voice speaking for others. 

The Lost Customer

Or the Missing Readers

I recently had the opportunity to talk to some of the kids who used to be on the high school robotics team I mentored. They’re now in college and I thought they might be interested in my YA novel Out in the Dark.

They were interested, but just don’t have the time to read. Which got me thinking about the marketing of Young Adult (protagonist between age 15 - 17) and New Adult (protagonist between age 17 -21) novels. In high school this audience still has time to read for pleasure, but in college that time drops to next to zero.

That’s a very sizable chunk of an author’s audience that drops away, and I suspect book publishers as much as authors are trying to figure out how to get them back, or not lose them to begin with.  

Marketing via Twitter is an option as that was very successful in building an audience for the Hunger Games series quite a few years back, but you can’t just tweet ‘hey, get at this awesome book’ anymore. There needs to be a value-add to lure the savvy young consumer.

For a while short promo films, called book-trailers, highlighting a book’s story, or a single scene, were popular - similar to movie promos - but I don’t hear much about those anymore. Probably because they’re expensive and time consuming to make, even if you use friends as actors and can borrow some of the equipment.

What about audio books? A busy student might just have time to unwind after a stressful day of learning and navigating campus with an audio book.

Audio books are a great way to reach that audience, but that really only works for the big publishers who can afford the upfront cost of creating an audio recording of a book. Small, independent publishers just don’t have the means to pursue that avenue, which means many good books have trouble reaching their audience.

But perhaps authors can pool their talents. The publishing industry isn’t done changing and growing yet and there is plenty of room left for innovation and new ways of doing things. As an example: An author friend in England ditched his publisher and formed a cooperative with a group of authors to publish and market their books collectively under their own banner.

In fact, let me try something different too, on Twitter; serializing a novel in 140-character bite-sized nibbles.  

@Nicky_Adams_Pen

Final Free Tutorial on Writing a Memoir or Biography (3)

Now that you have the pieces gathered together for the first chapter it’s time to start writing.

Put the pictures that apply to the first chapter in order, add in your notes on the location, whether from a personal visit or online searches and virtual walk-arounds. 

Decide in what kind of style you’d like to write it. It’s your book, your family story, and you can tell it in any way you like. Let me give you a few ideas:

We’ll take a town in the Netherlands as our ancestral location. 

1. Conversational style: Walking along the cobble stone streets that lead to the market and center of town, just below the Gothic cathedral, I see for the first time where my grandfather had his market stall. To this day, every Tuesday there’s a market that sets up, and fresh produce, flowers, breads and meats are hawked by boisterous merchants.  
2. Factual style: My grandfather was born on the cusp on 1900. He came from a family of merchants that set up their wares, mostly copper pots and household goods at a market stall in the center of Breda, the Netherlands. On other days of the week they would take a horse and cart and sell door to door. By the 1920s they had a shop just off main street.
3. Historically rich style: Breda, a town in the south of the Netherlands, not far from the Belgian border has a rich history spanning many centuries. It’s rich architecture and well-preserved historical details speak to a past that was anything but boring. It’s also where my grandfather was born into a merchant family. 

So you see, you can start your story any way you like. 

And as always, I am available to offer guidance on your family history project, or to hold a presentation for your group. I also take on a few full memoir/family history writing projects each year; from shoe box of pictures to printed book.

Contact me at: elynnh2write (at) gmail.com

www.elynnhwriting.com

Or feel free to leave a comment below. 

Free Tutorial on Writing a Memoir or Biography (2)

Tutorial 2

Setting the Scene

So, you know grandfather was born in the Czech Republic (for example), though at the time it might have been called something else. You’d love to go visit and do some first-hand research so that when you write the family story it will seem more real. But travel that far is just not in your budget. Not to worry, there are other resources available that can help you set the scene.

Often effectively setting  a scene relies only on a few details, and an impression. You want to spark a feeling in your reader as read your family story, similar to the feeling you get when you look at the pictures you have.

1.  Google Maps and Google Earth both let you virtually wander through the streets of just about any town. If you’re lucky enough to have a picture in that box with a street sign on it, you can often find that exact spot. It will look different but will still make it feel very real.
2. Next, try local tourism office websites. These days many offer an English version, if you’re Czech isn’t quite up to it, or you can ask google to translate the site for you. Machine translation does a reasonable job, at least good enough to give you the gist of what you’re looking for.
3. Finally, local museums and historical societies can fill in a lot of blanks on the era your ancestor lived in. If the information you're looking for is not readily available on their site, a quick email to a curator there might get you want you need. 

Even a good travel guidebook found at the library can get you started on setting that first scene.

And as always, I am available to offer guidance on your family history project, or to hold a presentation for your group. I also take on a few full memoir/family history writing projects each year; from shoe box of pictures to printed book.

Contact me at: elynnh2write (at) gmail.com

www.elynnhwriting.com

Or feel free to leave a comment below. 

Free Tutorial on Writing a Memoir or Biography (1)

Mining your family history for stories

Tutorial 1

So, you there you are with a shoe box full of old photos and some stories you might remember your parents or grandparents telling you. How do you preserve that history for your kids and future generations?

Over the next few weeks I’ll offer you three free tutorials to get you started writing your family stories. These are the steps I took to successfully write Tales from the Fountain Pen which was picked up by a publisher.

Step 1: Take out the photos and put them in some kind of chronological order. If you’re having trouble, go online to research clothing, cars (if any), etc., from that era. It doesn’t have to be precise.

Step 2: Find the earliest photo, that will be the starting point for your story.

Step 3: Start creating a chart, using the pictures as your guide. Fill in rough estimates of dates, places and events as they come up in the pictures and your memory. Write down keywords you remember and impressions you get from the pictures. These will all be helpful once you start writing.

These first three steps should keep you busy for a while. As you go through them pretty you’ll start to see a pattern emerging that will let you get started on writing that family memoir.

Of course these steps can apply to any kind of writing where all you have to work with are visual cues from pictures or objects.

As always, I am available to assist. I take on a few full memoir writing projects each year (from shoebox of pictures to printed and bound book), but I am also available as a developmental editor to guide you through the process of creating a book yourself including guiding you through the CreateSpace process to get that printed book, and lastly, I’m available for consultations on your project. 
Contact me at: elynnh2write (at) gmail.com.  
Or visit my website: www.elynnhwriting.com
And as always, leave comments below.

Next up: Tutorial 2: How to set the scene

Writing that Grabs You!

Ghostwriting – Developmental Editing – Helping You Put Your Best Words Forward

I finally have time and room in my schedule to delve into an area I like and to expand my business to include this. Aside from my novels which will always be my deepest passion, helping other writers and people who want to have a book or biography out there, is something I very much enjoy.  

Though I’m not quite on the bestseller list, yet. I do have many years of professional writing, and book writing, under my belt and much I can share with others.

So many of you at all levels in your life and career have unique stories that you’d love to see in print. But there’s no time or you don’t know where to begin … why not work with a professional?

As those of you who have been following my blog know, I love digging into history and people’s biographies (under my real name, and as Nicola Adams I dive headfirst into paranormal). If it’s a mystery, I’ll dig till I find the facts. If there are old immigration records or birth records that need to be scoured … I’m there. What if the information about your family is in an old shoebox gathering dust and in a language your family has long since stopped using? I’m on it.

That’s just one service I can offer you as a Ghostwriter.

As a Developmental Editor I can offer you help in writing your story, that article, or that coffee table book about a subject you’re passionate about. I can help you dig deep and find out exactly what it is you want to say, and how you can say it in a way that grabs people. Through targeted questions I help you uncover your story.

Send me a message and let’s talk about that book or article you’ve been wanting to write.

elynnh2write (at) gmail.com

Banned in Ballard?

I realize “Banned Book” week has come and gone, but it took me a while to realize how relevant it actually was to me (aside from the fact that I've read a large number of the books on that list).

You see, I suspect that my latest YA novel, Out in the Dark under pen name Nicola Adams, was in fact banned (or censured) from a bookstore in Seattle.

   

It hadn’t occurred to me that a book about a multi-state car-chase (in a 1966 Pontiac GTO), Remote Viewing, and a teenager trying to rescue his psychic warrior father from a rogue government group was considered ban-worthy.

But, that appears to be exactly what happened. When I contacted the bookstore in question I was curtly told that my book did not fit their programming.

I tried, respectfully, to open a dialogue on the “how and why” of their programming but was shut down.

I guess that means my book was really banned.

Imagine that. It sure surprised me.

Get yourself a copy and let me know what you think. The book is available in both ebook and paperback – almost! – everywhere books are sold.

Thank you!

PS: Makes me wonder how the sequel will be received!