Caroline Starr Rose

award-winning picture book and middle-grade author

Straight from the Source: J. Kasper Kramer on Writing Historical Fiction

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J. Kasper Kramer is an author and English professor in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She has a master’s degree in creative writing and once upon a time lived in Japan, where she taught at an international school. When she’s not curled up with a book, Kramer loves researching lost fairy tales, playing video games, and fostering kittens.

What typically comes first for you: a character? An era? A story idea? How do you proceed from there?

I think this changes with each book for me. Right now, I’m working on a ghost story set in 1910, and it was actually the location that I found first—a quarantine island in New York City. I often incorporate folklore and fairytales into my novels, so sometimes the first piece of the story comes from there, such as a book I’m revising right now that’s grounded in Polish changeling lore. 

With The Story That Cannot Be Told, I found the era first, while listening to stories from my Romanian friends. I knew the book needed to be set right before the Romanian Revolution. From there, I discovered Ileana and her family, then the journey she’d have to go on. It’s funny, because I actually knew the title right away, but I didn’t know the titular “story” itself till pretty late in the first draft.

At what point do you feel comfortable beginning to draft? How does your research continue once you begin writing?

I often say that I need to “think” about a book for a good year before getting serious about it. I might do some casual research or chat out the ideas with my husband, but I very rarely take any notes or write anything down during this phase. I don’t want anything concrete that I might get attached to while I’m letting the story find its shape.

After that, I’ll start seriously researching—reading books, conducting interviews, collecting photos, and scouring the internet. How long this stage takes depends on how much I already know about the era and location. Once I start drafting, I always continue to research, though. And if I hit a question I don’t have the answer to, I pretty much have to stop writing till I figure it out.

What is your favorite thing about research?

I absolutely adore it when my research takes a book in a direction I hadn’t planned. For instance, while I was working on the first draft of Story, I found myself struggling to find propulsive conflict in the third act. Then, while researching something entirely unrelated, I came across “systemization”—where Ceausescu, the Romanian Communist leader, was destroying villages and sending villagers to go work in the cities. Suddenly, I had a major new conflict for my book.

What’s your least favorite thing about research?

I hate it when I forget if I researched something or not. Sometimes, I’ll be reading through a draft and go, “Wait. Is that right?” And then suddenly I’m down the rabbit hole, trying to skim through my sources to double check a date or recipe or other (often insignificant) piece of information that I already confirmed a long time ago.

Because life isn’t always clear cut, the motives behind our actions don’t always make sense. But stories need to follow a logical path. What sorts of decisions have you had to make about “muddy” historical figures or events in order for your book to work?

At the end of the day, the story I’m telling—about the characters I’ve created—is what matters most. That’s what will keep a reader engaged and result in the most meaningful emotional impact. Often, historical events might steer the plot of my novels, and historical locations, of course, help build setting. When I’m really lucky, all those things line up thematically with the motivations and choices of my characters. When they don’t, it gets complicated. With Story, for instance, there was a lot of confusion in the history books about what exactly happened during the Romanian Revolution in Bucharest. It wasn’t even clear who was fighting whom by the end. Ultimately, I just addressed that confusion up front, which fortunately worked well in a book about the nature of storytelling.

Classroom Connections: Blood Mountain by James Preller

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age range: 9-13
genre: survival; adventure

Preller combines brave characters with vivid descriptions of the perilous mountain, grasping readers’ emotions in the same way as Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet series.
— Booklist

A Junior Library Guild selection

Please tell us about your book.

Kurt Vonnegut famously offered up 8 rules for writing fiction. His 6th rule: “Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them –- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” Without consciously setting out to do so, I cruelly applied that dictum in my middle-grade novel, Blood Mountain.

The glib way to describe the book: “Hatchet meets Misery . . . and there’s a dog.” You have to read that, right? A more detailed description might explain that Blood Mountain is a multiple-perspective story told in very short chapters where two siblings, Grace (13) and Carter (11), find themselves lost in a mountain wilderness. They are accompanied by Sitka, their dog. Nearby lurks a troubled hermit living off the grid, a loner who may or may not be dangerous. The children face a range of challenges and perils, including a mountain lion and a treacherous fall. By the morning of the third day, Grace and Carter separate, giving each character his and her own powerful narrative. The story also follows the actions of the young forest ranger, Makayla, who participates in the search to find them.

What inspired you to write this story?

I published my first book in 1986. Over that period, more than half my life, I’ve discovered that what first inspires a story often gets left in the dust as the research and the writing begins in earnest. New inspirations take hold. Unimagined pathways open up, as long as the writer is still open to the unexpected.

Early on I had the basic setup of siblings lost in the wilderness, along with a vague idea of a hermit, possibly a veteran with PTSD, lurking nearby. At the time, I wasn’t sure what his story would be. I wanted the book to be tense, scary in parts, tightly plotted, riveting, and beautifully written. I held onto the idea that the person who saves you, might turn out to be your worst nightmare. Somewhere along the line my editor suggested a dog. Um, okay! And around this point it dawned on me that I had an awful lot to learn in order to do justice to this story. So I read books. About trees. About survival. About the psychology of getting lost. About veterans with PTSD. About dogs and how they think (I was determined to avoid the Disney-dog cliché; I wanted my dog, Sitka, to be authentic as a dog.) I learned about mountain lions.

Along the way, I told my editor, Liz Szabla, that I might maybe miss the deadline. And I did miss it — by a full year. Liz was cool with it. When it comes to publishing, I believe that all anyone cares about in the end is the finished book. No one reads a disappointing book and thinks, “Well, at least she hit her deadlines!” It just happened that Blood Mountain required extra time for me to think and learn and daydream. I filled a journal with notes, became overwhelmed with ideas and strategies, lost my way, fumbled in thickets. Along the way, I contacted a Forest Ranger, Megan McCone, who proved enormously helpful in terms of making the actions and thoughts of the ranger appropriate and accurate. All of those inspirations fed directly into the final book. Best writing experience ever.

Could you share with readers how you conducted your research or share a few interesting tidbits you learned while researching?

I simply had so much learn. Because “kind of knowing” isn’t good enough. For example, I wanted to introduce the hermit, John, in a powerful and unsettling way. So readers first encounter him with a large knife in his hand, field dressing a squirrel. I had to learn about slingshots and hypothermia and aviation extractions. And about how people who get lost behave –- the mistakes they make, the thought processes they typically go through, and the things they do that determine whether they live or die.

Most interesting, for me, was when I reached out to Eric Lahr at the Department of Environmental Conservation, who put me in contact with Forest Ranger Megan McCone. Megan was enormously helpful across several long phone conversations. She graciously volunteered to read the first draft of the book, making comments throughout. To me, this was not only a great pleasure, Megan helped me bring truth, the verisimilitude of small details, to this made-up story.

What topics does your book touch upon that would make it a perfect fit for the classroom?

Okay, you stumped me. With my book Bystander, that’s a novel that has brought me into middle schools around the country, talking about being a writer, of course, but also the dynamics of bullying and issues that touch on empathy and kindness. It surprised me when I learned that teachers were including it in holocaust units, though in retrospect made perfect sense. With The Courage Test, my characters follow along the Lewis and Clark Trail, so there’s a direct link to American history as their journey mirrors and reflects the experiences of Lewis and Clark.

But Blood Mountain? I’m primarily trying to write an unputdownable book that both boy and girl readers will find wildly gripping and entertaining while, hopefully, resonating on deeper levels, too. Because there’s value in a good story, I believe. Not sure exactly how that fits into the curriculum. But if a reader is seeking a realistic story about a tough, fierce, courageous girl character, I’m sure they’ll be pleased to meet Grace Taylor.

Only the fire sets me dreaming — of all the things I mean to write.

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I absolutely love reading journals and letters. I can’t get enough of delving into another’s thoughts and experiences. And when I’m reading about an author’s creative life, it’s pretty much perfection. A Writer’s Diary has been everything I’ve wanted and needed to read of late. It was a rich, rich book, along the lines of the fabulous Edna St. Vincent Millay biography, Savage Beauty, and my dear L. M. Montgomery’s journals.

Ten years after Virginia Woolf died, her husband, Leonard, extracted from her diaries everything she had to say about writing. He also included entries where she was “obviously using the diary as a method of practising or trying out the art of writing,” passages that reflect “the direct impact upon her mind of scenes and persons, i.e. of the raw material of her art,” and any that commented upon the books she was reading.

So much in the diary felt familiar and real and relevant. She spoke about finding the form of her books. She struggled and fought and triumphed. She faced fame and criticism and had to decide how they’d affect what she brought to the page. One of her constant goals was to “jump the fence”* or “break the mold” as she explored each book’s shape and layers. It’s an intimate read and sometimes a hard one. The last entry comes four days before Virgina took her own life. But it was beautiful and powerful, too.

It might entirely be for my benefit that I type up the quotes that spoke to me in the Diary. But on the off-chance any blog readers might be interested, I’m also sharing them here with you.

October 4, 1922
At forty I’m beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain — how to get the greatest amount of pleasure and work out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant.

October 14, 1922
I am perfectly serious in saying that nothing budges me from my determination to go on, or alters my pleasure; so whatever happens, though the surface may be agitated, the centre is secure.

October 29, 1933
On responding to criticism: I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

February 18, 1934
On writing The Years: I want to raise up the magic world all round me and live strongly and quietly there…

August 2, 1934
I’m worried too with my last chapters. Is it all too shrill and voluble? And then the immense length, and the perpetual ebbs and flows of invention. So divinely happy one day; so jaded the next.

November 2, 1934
…if only for a time I could completely forget myself, my reviews, my fame, my sink in the scale…then I should be what I mostly am: very rapid, excited, amused, intense. Odd, these extravagant ups and downs of reputation…let all praise and blame sink to the bottom or float to the top and let me go my ways indifferent. And care for people. And let fly, in life, on all sides.

November 14, 1934
A note: despair at the badness of the book: can’t think how I ever could write such stuff — and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down — and Lord knows the truth.

August 21, 1935
Another book. Have I the indomitable courage to start on another? Think of the writing and re-writing. Also there will be joys and ecstasies though…Is this worth writing? Perhaps.

August 7, 1939
If I say this, So-and-so will think me sentimental. If that…will think me bourgeois. All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors. Hence their self-consciousness, their restlessness. It would be worthwhile trying to discover what they are at the moment. Did Wordsworth have them? I doubt it. I read “Ruth” before breakfast. Its stillness, its unconsciousness, its lack of distraction, its concentration and the resulting “beauty” struck me. As if the mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

December 29, 1940
I am I: and I must follow that furrow, not copy another. That is the only justification for my writing, living.

 

*This made me wonder: What would she have thought of Fonzie’s shark?!

 

Classroom Connections: Adrian Simcox Does NOT Have a Horse by Marcy Campbell

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age range: 3-5 years
Marcy Campbell’s website

Chloe is stubborn and willful, but she listens and learns and understands. Her first-person narration is realistic, witty and endearing. Chloe wants a series. This heroine is ready for more adventures.
—The New York Times

Affecting…Readers who loved Eleanor Estes’ 1994 book The Hundred Dresses will suspect the painful truth behind the horse-owning boasts of a day-dreamer named Adrian Simcox. And they will understand the misplaced indignation of the narrator, Chloe. Empathetic readers…will be rooting for Chloe’s mother who shows how a decent person behaves with someone who has less of almost everything—except imagination.
—Wall Street Journal

Please tell us about your book.

Adrian Simcox Does NOT Have a Horse is my debut picture book, illustrated by the incredibly talented Corinna Luyken. I was so fortunate to work with Corinna and with the wonderful team at Penguin/Dial on my first book!

The story follows the narrator, Chloe, who is quite sure that her classmate Adrian does not have a horse, even though Adrian tells anyone who will listen that he has the most beautiful horse anywhere. Chloe knows having a horse is expensive, and Adrian’s family can’t afford one, nor would they have any place to keep it. What Adrian does have, however, is a huge imagination, and after Chloe’s mom stealthily organizes a meet-up between the kids, Chloe begins to see that, appreciate it, and even share in Adrian’s imagination. In the end, Chloe learns that it’s sometimes better to be kind than to be right.

What inspired you to write this story?

I did know a boy when I was a kid who said he had a horse, but he said he had a lot of things, and his family seemed to be doing well financially, so there was probably some truth to his boasting. I remember, however, that I thought he was lying about the horse in particular. That childhood memory became one line in a list of picture book ideas I started keeping after having my own kids. “Boy says he has a horse and girl doesn’t believe him.” Also, in the last few years, I’ve put in a lot of time volunteering at my kids’ public elementary school, which has a high percentage of children with economic need, and I believe those experiences helped shape the story beyond just a couple of kids arguing about a horse and toward issues of class and empathy. 

What are some special challenges associated with fictionalizing a true story? 

The only thing I took from real life was the idea of a boy saying he has a horse, when he doesn’t (at least not a real one). Adrian’s imaginary horse is so vivid that it’s very real to him, and eventually to Chloe as well! 

Could you share with readers how the book evolved? 

My first draft of the book was way too long. I’d never tried writing a picture book before, and so someone had to kindly point out to me that I didn’t leave any room for the illustrator in my text. It was a really new experience for me to not describe every little detail, as I had done for years while writing adult fiction. I cut that original draft almost in half, and that’s the draft I sent to Steven Malk at Writers House, who signed me on as a client and quickly sold the book. The text didn’t change very much throughout the production process; however, we (me and my editor Namrata Tripathi, and Corinna, and the art director Lily Malcom) did spend a lot of time thinking about that first spread, in terms of both the text and art. The original version left too much room for misinterpretation, and I’m much happier with it now. For me, the real evolution took place with the addition of Corinna’s art, which gave the book a whole new layer of meaning that went way beyond my expectations. When I first saw Corinna’s sketch of Adrian, and when I saw how she created the horse from negative space, I thought she’d nailed it.  

What topics does your book touch upon that would make it a perfect fit for the classroom?

There are kids in every classroom who really like to police the other kids, calling them out, to teachers and peers, when they do something wrong. These kids, like Chloe, just crave vindication. I hope kids who read the book will see that proving someone wrong might feel good in the moment, but doesn’t often last. Being kind doesn’t cost much, but the rewards for the people, on both the giving and receiving end, can last a long time.

Straight from the Source: Writing Historical Fiction with Kate Hannigan

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Children’s author Kate Hannigan writes fiction and nonfiction from her home in Chicago. Her middle-grade history-mystery The Detective’s Assistant received the Golden Kite Award from SCBWI for best middle-grade novel and was a California Young Reader Medal nominee. Her nonfiction picture book biography A Lady Has the Floor: Belva Lockwood Speaks Out for Women’s Rights (Boyds Mills) received a Society of Midland Authors honor and earned four starred reviews. Kate has a nonfiction graphic novel about the Chicago Fire coming out in June 2020 with First Second’s History Comics series, and five more picture book biographies about fascinating people from history. Visit her online at KateHannigan.com.

What typically comes first for you: a character? An era? A story idea? How do you proceed from there?

I typically start with an interesting person. For my new historical fantasy, Cape: Book 1 in The League of Secret Heroes (Simon & Schuster/Aladdin), I was thinking about Wonder Woman! I asked myself whether she was the only female superhero of early comic books or whether there were others. I couldn’t really name too many — beyond our mighty Amazonian, I had to pause when trying to come up with anyone else! 

I’m happy to report that there were lots of women wearing capes back in the day! So I read as much as I could about them, and they inspired the superhero “mentors” who help guide my young superheroines in Cape.

What I learned when poking around in the history of Wonder Woman was that she made her debut in December 1941, which was the same time as Pearl Harbor’s bombing and the United States’ entry in World War II. So immediately we have these two great threads: women comic book heroes and WWII. The war brought out tremendous action across as aspects of society. But what I found fascinating was learning about some unsung women who were doing remarkable, even heroic things during the war.

How do you conduct your research? 

I am a library junkie, so I’m dashing in and out of our local branch on a weekly basis. I get stack and stacks of books to learn about historical moments and figures. I also try to read letters to get a sense of the language used at the time, what people ate, what music they listened to, what their apartments might have looked like. I rely heavily on books to help me imagine what the era might have been like.

I also like documentaries. If left alone with the TV remote, I’ll burrow into the sofa and get lost in black and white footage. Even through the long Chicago winter, as I exercised indoors, I trudged along on my elliptical machine watching WW II battle documentaries!

But my favorite form of research is talking to people. I think it stems from when I was a little kid and sat at the dinner table listening to my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins sharing stories and laughing late into the night. So when I researched aspects of Cape and the other two books in this series — Mask and Boots, publishing in 2020 and 2021 — I talked to people. I got on a plane and went to meet real people who either had been involved in WWII or who were close to people who had. 

Of anything I’ve done related to this project, what I cherish most is having been able to interview a former WASP pilot. Jane Doyle loved to fly, and when WWII broke out, she answered the call for women fliers to gather at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. Jane was 97 when I met her at a reunion for WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots) in May 2018. She passed away in early 2019. While there are some survivors of WWII still living, we’re losing many. It’s important that we hear as many of their stories as we can, before it’s too late and we lose that physical connection to storyteller and listener.

How long do you typically research before beginning to draft?

I could get lost in research all day. In fact, some days I really DO get lost for the entire day and into the night. For history nerds, there is ridiculous fun to be found in digging through old newspapers, black and white photos, tracking down menus and recipes for old-fashioned meals, examining the hats or shoes of a bygone era.

I spend about a year or more just immersing myself in an era. With a previous historical fiction novel, The Detective’s Assistant (Little, Brown, 2015), I needed to nail down Civil War history, know a good bit about Abraham Lincoln, and understand the role the Pinkertons played in Chicago history. I was writing about America’s first woman detective, Kate Warne, so I read Allan Pinkerton’s accounts of the cases that involved her. It was so much fun, and if I could, I’d still be researching that book, or perhaps a sequel or two! 

With Cape, again I spent a year or so trying to learn all I could about WWII history and the women of the era who broke barriers as computer programmers, code-crackers, spies, and pilots. And on top of that, I needed to learn all I could about superhero history, like powers, costumes, and backstories. For that, I read some of the books by Trina Robbins, easily the foremost authority on women superheroes. And when she came through Chicago for a lecture, she generously met me for coffee to talk about women superheroes and their history. It was an incredibly exciting experience!

What is your favorite thing about research?

The short answer: knowing stuff. Frankly, it feels bad when someone asks you something, and you don’t know the answer, right? I’ve had that happen all too many times in my life! So I love research because I build layers of knowledge and, over time, feel like I start to know a few things. I’ll never, ever know enough! But at least I’ll walk through life able to make connections from past to present, which hopefully has bearing on the future.

Research is like a Zumba class for your brain. You’re working that muscle, processing facts, making sense of dates and eras and societies and individuals, pushing yourself to find more. So it feels good to do it, and you’re all the better for it. Once you’re done, you want to get back at it again and devour more. And it doesn’t hurt that every now and then, my parents will call me after an episode of Jeopardy and ask me if I’d gotten a certain question right!

What’s your least favorite thing about research?

My least-favorite thing about research is having to leave things out. I might have to cut entire sections of a chapter full of fascinating details because I have too much material, or perhaps because what I find interesting might bore the socks off a classroom of kids! Some things that I can’t put into a book for one reason or another I will share with students on school visits or at book events.

What’s your favorite thing about writing historical fiction?

I love writing historical fiction because I love thinking about how the past impacts us. I’ve always been fascinated by the connection between generations and what might carry on from one family member down the line to another. I want kids to take a little time and think about that, too. I am keenly aware that one of my grandmothers was an immigrant who cleaned houses and worked as a nanny. She had dreams for her kids and, I imagine, her grandkids. That impacts how I treat others. I want kids to think about their place on the continuum — about who fought for the rights we enjoy, who sacrificed for our benefit, who was present at significant touchpoints in history. Maybe by reading historical fiction they’ll think about how they themselves fit in and how they will make their own mark on history, too. 


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