Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Good Luck/Bad Luck and Books

Next Friday I'll be talking with a very nice group of Pennsylvania librarians. It's Friday the 13th, so I thought I'd chat about the good luck/bad luck aspect of my work. Let's face it, whenever we think things are going along swimmingly, something bad (annoying) crops up. Our editor leaves the publisher; someone forgets to send your book to a particular and possibly important contact that you had suggested; a publisher moves and doesn't bother to tell you (yes, this happened to me, though I thought it more funny than alarming). *
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I'm happy to say I've had more good than bad luck, so this isn't to complain, but rather celebrate these moments. Here's one I'm fond of. I had finished doing the manuscript for The Boys' War and was having trouble figuring out what to do next. I made several proposals and had them all rejected, so I was feeling a little bummed out. Wasn't sure what to do or how to generate a new idea. So I started reading over the firsthand accounts of soldiers (16 yrs. old and younger) who were already in TBW, hoping that something would inspire me (or at least make me feel as if there might be hope that another idea was 'out there' somewhere). *
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Anyway, I was looking over Lt. John Dooley's memoirs when I came across his section on the Battle of Gettysburg, and specifically a mention of a clump of trees. He was to lead a group of soldiers across the long meadow toward the Union lines during Pickett's Charge. He was told to keep moving toward a prominent clump of trees.*
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That's very nice, I thought. And then went on reading. A day or so later, I was reading John Galway's account of Gettysburg where he was an advance picket, stationed about 100 yards in front of the Union lines in the meadow. Okay, I thought. That's a pretty dangerous place to be, especially with the pre-charge artillery barrage that lasted over an hour and then the actual charge. Then he mentioned he was stationed just in front of a clump of trees.*
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Holy cow, as Phil Rizzuto would say. Is it the same clump of trees? I then whipped out a large map of the battlefield and began plotting exactly where each boy's company had been stationed before and during the battle. For two or three days I plotted their every more, marking their various locations on the map. Which was how I discovered that these two boys had come within 100 or so feet from each other during Pickett's Charge. At one point, Dooley mentions approaching an advanced pickett location and ordering his men to wheel to the right to get around it; Galway mentions seeing the charging Confedates about to overwhelm his position (in which most of his companions had already been killed) when suddenly, and for no reason he could fathem, they turned to his left (their right) to get past his position and how he lay there shooting at them at will.*
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This, of course, was too good to be true, so I checked it over and over again and it always came out as true. So I really dug into their march toward Gettysburg and their near meeting. My idea was to show kids that luck (both good and bad), happenstance, seemingly small decisions by a variety of people, and just plain weird stuff landed these two kids within rifle shot of each other. I contructed the entire book on this notion that a major event in history (the Battle of Gettysburg in this instance) doesn't necessarily happen because important folk decide it will. In the end, I hoped readers would come away appreciating just how close the Battle of Gettysburg was and how a few changed factors might have produced a completely different outcome.*
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Historians now refer to this concept as Historical Continguency (or simply Continguency). It's a way to factor in the many big and small random events that sometimes add up to a major, history changing event. It's also a way to let readers -- kids -- see that an individual might very well sway history by what they do, even if they don't know they are swaying history. *
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I chuckle whenever I think about that clump of trees. I never understood exactly when Dooley mentioned the trees behind him, but I always appreciated that he did and that I was lucky enough to pick up on it and fashioned a book around Dooley's and Galway's march to destiny. Anyone else have a lucky encounter that resulted in a positive (book) outcome? I'd love to hear about them.*
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Oh, and Happy Friday the 13th!

1 comment:

Steve Sheinkin said...

Speaking of lucky encounters, if not my brother-in-law’s fascination with wacky conspiracy theories, I never would have come across the subject for my current project. It’s kind of a long story, but he knew I was researching the race to make the atomic bomb, and he told me that the first a-bomb test was not in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, as most believe, but a year before, at a segregated naval base called Port Chicago, in California. Suffice it to say the theory is crazy, but this random conversation led me to the real story of what happened at Port Chicago, and an exciting new book idea.