It's natural for some readers of FALLEN TREES to believe the novel is semi-autobiographical, since I was born and raised on a farm in central Kansas and the main character in the book was as well.
But I'm not kidding when I tell people that assumption simply isn't accurate. Any time I tried to inject myself or someone I knew into the story, the muse would simply shut down. I had to 'back away' and stop trying to direct the story or it wouldn't resume.
I've wanted to write novels ever since I was a child and became entranced by the Hardy Boys and Trixie Belden and Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew. I loved how readers could get to know the characters in these stories and then get to learn more in new installments in the series.
I even created my own 'series' --- short mysteries featuring Billy and Joann, siblings in a small town who couldn't resist trying to solve mysteries that they stumbled upon. Mom saved a couple of them and I read one a few months ago. I was impressed with the organization and plotting in stories written when I was maybe 10 years old.
But several attempts to start a novel when I reached adulthood simply went nowhere. I had to resign myself to the reality that the muse would let me know when the time was right...when I would be ready.
That time came when I was driving back to Wichita following some time at the farm, and I saw a grove of trees that had been cut down next to the highway. This grove was so substantial it served as something of an area landmark ---- you knew where you were when you saw them. It struck me how much the landscape changed when those trees were cut down.
And then the muse began to work: What if you had a character coming home to this abrupt change? A story began to unspool before me. By the time I got home I had a couple of chapters already written in my mind. For a while, I tried to figure out the rest of the book before I began writing, but it never seemed smooth in my mind.
Instead, those two chapters ---- eventually a third came into focus ---- nagged at me so much that I simply wrote them to get them onto paper, so to speak. As I wrote, another chapter emerged, then another. I never knew more than a chapter or two ahead what was going to happen in the book. It drove me crazy for a while, but I eventually learned to trust the process.
I've told friends and family that I felt like a stenographer for this book ---- the muse was writing it and I was simply typing it. There were times when I'd be writing and I'd be so tired I would close my eyes and lean my head against the wall in my cozy dining area ---- and my fingers would still be typing away on the story.
There were times when I would think, "What does this have to do with anything?" Then, several chapters later, its value was made clear. "How the heck did
that happen?" I asked myself. But it was part of the journey toward trusting the muse.
I have said many times that even if FALLEN TREES never saw the light of day as a published book it was still valuable because when the opportunity came to write INTO THE DEEP with Robert Rogers in 2005 about the tragic death of his family in a flash flood on the Kansas Turnpike, I didn't flinch. The idea of writing a book didn't intimidate me because I'd already done that.
Writing nonfiction is entirely different than writing fiction, but I still knew how to execute the project. Now that FALLEN TREES has been published and has been getting such strong responses, I am gratified that so many people are enjoying it.
I have some unusual and powerful experiences to share from the writing of FALLEN TREES, but I'll save those for the future.
