Carolyn Meyer

For the past month or so I've had a fine time revisiting the publishing milestones in my life, and so far I'm only up to about 1990 with 22 years and as many books to go. Between blog entries and daily tweets and Facebook posts (and messing around in the kitchen), most of my working day has been taken up with revisions of VICTORIA REBELS. It's ready to go back to the editor, and I'm pretty sure there will be another round--there always is. There are undoubtedly writers who do things perfectly the first time, but I'm definitely not one of them. Kirsten Hamilton, a writer friend of mine, says she wants a BRILLIANT editor, one who will hold her feet to the fire, and I wholeheartedly agree. So far I've been very lucky to get that kind of editing.

My first draft (which I thought was pretty darn good when I sent it months ago) was heavy on detail of Victoria's life, but it needed focusing. That meant heavy cutting in the first half and expanding in the second half, sharpening the personalities of the characters, and figuring out what to do with a lot of historical background that--to me, at least--makes the story so much richer. We writers of historical fiction are often accused of "info-dumping," and I'm guilty as charged. Young readers often don't have the general background to get what's going on without some help. The trick is to smuggle in the necessary information without getting caught. Sometimes I'm better at it than other times. (Hint: Dialogue is usually not a good place for it.)

So off she goes tomorrow, my DEAR, DEAR Victoria, as she would say. I have my fingers crossed that it's going in the right direction. Wish me luck, dear readers.

Not just one new chapter began when we moved to Texas--a whole lot of ideas started popping up!

At first I was beset by homesickness for Albuquerque. We drove the 600 miles back "home" as often as our schedule allowed, a long drive across the Texas Panhandle and the eastern plains of New Mexico. One day we stopped in a Dairy Queen in the little town of Quanah, where in addition to a Blizzard I picked up a brochure on the local history. Quanah, I read, was the name of a Comanche chief; his father was a chief, and his mother was a white woman named Cynthia Ann Parker. She had been kidnapped from the Parker family compound in East Texas at the age of 9, had grown up with the Comanches, learned their language and customs, and married Peta Nacoma when she came of age. She had 3 children, including Quanah and a daughter named Topsannah. When Topsannah was an infant, a group of Texas Rangers seized mother and child and took them back to civilization. Cynthia Ann had been kidnapped a second time!

I was fascinated by this story, and set to work learning more about her and figuring out a way to tell the story myself--this would be my first attempt at writing historical fiction. WHERE THE BROKEN HEART STILL BEATS was published in 1992; it will be reissued in April with a lovely new cover. Click on the title listed under Selected Works to see it.

I was in a dismal state in the spring after my move to Albuquerque. I had no ideas, my writing was going nowhere, until someone recommended that I get out and walk. I did--about 2 miles a day. (That was 27 years ago; I now walk 3 miles almost every morning: that's about 750 miles a year X 27 years = more than 20,000 miles.) I began to feel more optimistic. Then an editor suggested that I make a trip to South Africa, which was then in turmoil and beginning to resist apartheit. I did my research, made a few informal contacts, flew to South Africa, rented a car, and began. It was a life-changing experience. VOICES OF SOUTH AFRICA: GROWING UP IN A TROUBLED LAND was published in 1986, about the same time I took off for Northern Ireland. Another VOICES book, and then a trip to Japan, where language and culture were challenges.

It would be awhile before i got back to writing fiction, but when I did, it was with a strong tilt to historical novels. My husband and I had left Albuquerque for a new home in Texas, and a new chapter began.

My first novel for young readers was C. C. POINDEXTER, about a misfit. I felt I had a lot of experience in that department. Then I wrote EULALIA'S ISLAND based on that summer on St. Lucia, where my 13-year-old son John befriended a local kid named Eulalia. When I found the diaries my dad kept when he was in college and in love with a girl named Peg (I had his photo albums too, so I knew what she looked like), I wrote from the point of view of a young girl in the 1920s who had found her brother's diary: THE SUMMER I LEARNED ABOUT LIFE.

Meanwhile, I kept my hand in the non-fiction area, because I had found that I really liked doing research. In the late 1970's I drove across the country to a writers' colony in Taos, New Mexico. I had visited California, but I had never been in the Southwest, and the experience was life-changing. After a few months, I decided to relocate.

I bought a tiny house in Santa Fe, loaded up a U-Haul, and drove across the country to my new home. Everyone thought I was crazy, and probably I was. Nevertheless, I settled in. When I met the girl next door who showed up in the middle of the city on her horse, I started my next novel, THE LUCK OF TEXAS McCOY. (Research for that project involved learning to actually ride a horse.) I was still associated with the Institute of Children's Literature, working my way through a batch of student assignments that arrived every week . Money was always tight; one summer I got a job producing a weekly half-hour TV show called "ArtScene" that paid me the princely sum of $100 a week and left me exhausted with no time to write.

Burned out with Santa Fe after five years of struggle, I moved to Albuquerque, hoping to get freelance work or a part-time job. At one point I considered film school in Los Angeles with the goal of becoming a screen writer. But then life took another sharp curve. (To be continued)

Time--that was always the issue, and I never had enough. Nevertheless, I managed to keep writing books for kids--one of my favorites in the early days was THE BREAD BOOK, but there were also how-to books about embroidery, carpentry, knitting and macrame, Christmas crafts, jewelry-making, even Bible stories. I was recruited by the Institute of Children's Literature to teach correspondence courses, and I wrote a monthly column on children's books and occasional articles for McCALL'S, a women's magazine popular in the '60s and '70s.

My kids were growing up, and my how-to books eventually gave way to more complex non-fiction projects. That's when I discovered that I enjoyed doing research and that I was good at it. I also discovered that I loved to travel: a summer in the Caribbean resulted in a book about coconuts; I roamed around the Eastern US, interviewing craftsmen; later I traveled to a remote Yup'ik village in Alaska and wrote about the people I met there, then back to Pennsylvania to spend time among the Amish.

Working on non-fiction taught me a lot, but still I dreamed of writing novels....

I'll get back to my occasional series On Becoming A Writer in the next week or so, but today, the last day of 2011, I want to deal with a question posed on a recent author questionnaire: What do you fear most? I've been trying to think of an answer that isn't just a shallow brush-off of a deeply philosophical question.

I was once hiking with a group in the Grand Canyon, and when the time came to cross a narrow ledge with a huge drop-off, I froze, absolutely terrified. Couldn't move, forward or backward. Finally somebody had to come and pry me off the rock I was clinging to and talk me across. That was fear of the most basic kind.

On the other hand, I'm not afraid to speak in front of a crowd, and I understand that some people break into a sweat at the thought of it.

But--and this may be an occupational hazard for many writers--I am afraid of running out of good ideas. What if I don't have any creative juices left to figure out an interesting plot, to develop a compelling character, to find the right words for describing a scene or setting up a dialogue?

So here's what I really fear: I'm afraid of getting boring. The antidote, I believe, is just to keep on writing anyway, because if I let the fear win out, I'll stop writing. And then I might as well stop living, too.

And so--onward into the coming year!

Finding time to write was always an issue in my early days. I whipped through housework in the mornings and then flew down to my desk in the basement as soon as the kids began their afternoon naps. The teenage girl next door was hired to play with them for an hour or two after she got home from school. Somehow I managed to get in a couple of hours a day at my typewriter, and I began to get replies from query letters about ideas I had for magazine articles. I decided to start work on a novel.

Then we moved, Baby #3 was born (another boy), and I no longer had a teenaged girl next door. The novel, titled BIRTH DAYS, made the rounds and was rejected by every editor who looked at it, but an agent saw it and suggested I write a children's book--an option I had never considered. Nevertheless, I got the idea of a sewing book for little girls, since I had none of my own, and to my amazement, it was accepted. MISS PATCH'S LEARN-TO-SEW BOOK was published in 1969. Furthermore, my articles were selling fairly well. I felt like a real writer, but the novel was a disappointment.

(To be continued)

My hopes of becoming a writer for TV were dashed early on. After a typing test and an IQ test, I was offered a job by CBS-TV as secretary to a salesman who sold "time" to advertisers for commercial breaks. I considered it a dead end; boys were hired to work in the mailroom and eventually moved into management positions, girls were secretaries who got married. I followed the usual pattern, except that even after Baby #1 was born, I kept on working. The jobs didn't get any more interesting, and child care canceled out my minuscule salary.

After Baby #2 was born, I decided to stay home and write. My goal was to publish brilliant short stories in The New Yorker magazine. Trouble was, The New Yorker didn't understand that my stories were brilliant and rejected everything I sent. Finally I sold a story to a secretarial magazine, was paid $25, and saw my work in print--not print, exactly, but in the shorthand that secretaries used in those long ago days. It was a start. And that began a long, slow slog.

(To be continued.)

I knew from the time I was 8 that I wanted to be a writer, but I had no idea how to make it happen. In junior high I thought I might become a journalist and work for a newspaper. My dad insisted that I learn to type--a very good idea. Then, in high school I got a summer job working for the local radio station, typing up the commercials that would be read on the air. Eventually I was allowed to try my hand at writing the commercials myself, and when Miss Rita, who read the birthday news every day at 1 pm, went on vacation, I filled in for her and called on Miss Rita's advertising accounts. I loved it. At school I was named editor of the yearbook and co-editor of the newspaper, and I was writing stories. The term "nerd" had not yet been coined, but I fit the description. Then I left for college.

The next summer a rural radio station opened miles from where we lived. I was hired at 50 cents an hour to write commercials for advertisers, dealers in farm implements: egg-washers and manure-spreaders. I drove my mother's car to work. She complained that I didn't earn enough to pay for the gas.

At college I continued my life as a nerd, getting mostly A's and having my stories torn to pieces in writing classes. When I graduated and it was time to look for a job, I headed for New York City, bound for a career in that new field: television. But it didn't work out at all the way I planned.

(To be continued.)

I was sitting here at my computer, glumly trying to think of something bright and interesting to write in my Journal, when the following e-mail arrived:

Dear Ms. Meyer: What an amazing writer you are! I am a mom and teacher with a great love of historical fiction. When we travel, we usually do "thematic" travel. For Thanksgiving we are driving from NYC to VA, through Amish Pennsylvania. I am hoping to listen to, or read aloud Gideon's People to my 11 and 13 yr. olds. Do you know where I can find and order the tape or CD? I would appreciate any leads you have. Thank you so much for all you do for our youth.--Suzanne B.

GIDEON'S PEOPLE was published in 1996. I remember exactly when I got the idea for the book: I was visiting Lewistown, Pennsylvania, where I grew up and happened to run into a friend of my late mother's, Stanley Siegel. We went out for lunch together, and at some point I asked him how his Jewish family had ended up in our thoroughly Pennsylvania Dutch small town. He told me the story of his grandfather, an immigrant from Russia in the early 1900's, who had eventually become a peddler in Lancaster County, dealing with Amish farm families whose German dialect was similar to the Yiddish spoken by his grandfather. Stanley's father, who became a lawyer, settled in Lewistown to escape the antisemitism he was encountering in other cities.

Before we finished lunch, I was already thinking, "Now what if somehow a Jewish boy, traveling with his father, ends up staying with an Amish family...." The book was already beginning to take shape in my mind.

Well, that email certainly cheered me up. I rushed to the mirror and said to myself, "What an amazing writer you are!" And what an amazing mom/teacher Suzanne is, to plan such trips for her kids. Thank you, Suzanne, for reminding me of how it all happens. And I'm sorry there's no CD.