The Wild Side of Writing
Today’s guest is Deborah Dee Harper, a writer from Tennessee
who graduated from Jerry B. Jenkins Christian Writers Guild where Misstep was a finalist in the 2009 Operation First Novel competition. She will be giving away a copy of Misstep to one of the persons who leave a comment. Read her post here and I’m sure you’ll want to grab one of her books.
I lived in Alaska for a total of five years with my daughter and her Air Force firefighter husband, one year near Fairbanks and the other four in Anchorage. We lived in military housing which lent a measure of added security to our lives as no one was admitted to the base without proper identification. That cut down on the possibility of theft and/or bodily harm by humans, but did nothing to keep out the wild animals, including bears, moose, wolves, and foxes. The base officials did their best to discourage the wildlife from roaming through the housing areas by prohibiting vegetable gardens, installing bear-proof refuse containers, and strictly enforcing the removal of garbage containers no later than the evening of the day it was picked up. Theoretically, that kept them at bay.
In reality, though, how does one stop an 1800-pound moose or a mama bear with her cubs from doing whatever they darned well please? You don’t.
This beauty surprised us one morning when she strolled past our living room window. (The cat was horrified.) I did a particularly dumb thing by going outside to get pictures from another angle, and discovered she wasn’t in the mood to pose. Despite its size (and this one wasn’t as big as some I’ve seen), a moose can move swiftly and with deadly results. Once you’re stomped by a moose, you either die or live the rest of your life respecting their size, speed, and strength. Happily, this moose decided to keep moving and spared me the embarrassment of becoming one with the sidewalk.
The surprising take-away from this experience directly impacted my writing. Up to that point, I’d been cautious about the events I wrote into my novel. Is this too unbelievable? Unrealistic? Will the reader accept this without tossing the book aside? It occurred to me that unbelievable things happen to people all the time. Take the moose outside our window as an example, or the time my daughter and I encountered
a black bear alongside the road and watched him eat dandelions for 45 minutes. How about the evening we discovered a wolf in the woods on base (dangerously close to several homes), or the time the bear wandered down the sidewalk near the commissary and I got in trouble with the base security guards for taking a picture, or spending a half-hour all alone with the mama and baby moose (newly hatched) along the road to the base hospital? And let’s not forget the evening I got out of the car on a lonely gravel road and chased a grizzly bear until I got a picture. When I arrived in Alaska, I could never have predicted these events; they were too inconceivable, outlandish, impossible.
Except they weren’t. Life proved that to me. After that realization, I looked at the outlandish predicaments I put my characters into in Misstep, the first book of my Road’s End series, as far-fetched, but no more far-fetched than the strange things that happen in life. I know that with the proper set-up of characterization and plot, readers can be drawn into the story and accept the unlikely (or even the downright impossible) as truth. And for me, at least, therein lies the fun!
After all, isn’t suspension of disbelief the whole point of fiction? Aren’t we taking our readers on an adventure into the world we’ve created for them? Why not make it a worthwhile journey into the unlikely events that can happen between the covers of a book?
What about you? Do you enjoy reading about the impossible and for a little while, at least, believing without reservation that it can happen?
JIM: Leave a comment and give us your thoughts on the “wild side.” Remember, one commenter will receive a FREE copy of Misstep.
Deborah can be reached at deborahdeetales@gmail.com. Her website is at: http://www.deborahdeeharper.com.
