Eliana, a 7th grader from Iroquois Middle School in Niskayuna, NY asks
How did you get the idea to make this a novel in verse or was it your idea from the very beginning to do it like that?
It wasn’t my plan to write in verse at all! In fact, I’d only read two verse novels before attempting to write May B. — not what experts advise aspiring authors to do. As I began drafting the story, I was frustrated with what I was writing. My ideas were really far from the words on the page. I returned to my research and noticed patterns in the way frontier women spoke to one another:
- No flowery language
- No overly emotional statements. Wonderful things, terrible things, everyday things were all handled in the same controlled way
- Everything was stark and stripped bare — just the basics, as far as communication goes
I felt like I’d been struck by lightning. Trying to mirror their style, I discovered May’s voice and the most honest way to tell her story. The solution was verse.
Have you ever read Island of The Blue Dolphins? I noticed some similarities between that book and May B. For example, a girl trapped in a place and trying to survive when everyone else has abandoned her happens in both books and far from only those two. How did you get the idea of doing a survival story in the past?
It’s funny you mention Island of the Blue Dolphins. It was one of my editor’s favorite books when she was a girl. When she told me my book was something she would have loved as child, I knew we would work well together. She was wonderful at helping me focus on the survival aspect of things, including details she was sure kids would want to know (how much food May had, for example). As for telling a survival story in the past, I knew I wanted to tell a pioneer story with a strong character like Laura Ingalls, but I also was interested in telling a survival story, like Hatchet and Blue Dolphins. So much of what I read while researching included every day survival situations (prairie fires, roaming wolves), the blending of the two ideas felt natural.
Because of the time period there is a lot of information that people might not know about. For example, I was put in the embarrassing position of having to ask my mom what a “buffalo chip” was. How did you do the research for the information on this time period? I see you visited museums and talked to experts. How did that help?
Sorry about your embarrassing moment. Buffalo chips aren’t snacks, that’s for sure! Most of my research came from books. I have to confess I’ve never been to western Kansas and had to rely on connections I found over the Internet (a reader and museum director) to verify what I’d created was accurate. I even watched a 30-second loop of the short-grass prairie on YouTube! It was important for me to be familiar with things like plant and animal life, if it was possible for grasshoppers to survive a Kansas frost, or how high short-grass grows (up to twelve inches). So much of what I learned didn’t directly make it into the book but helped shape the story and May’s world.
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Blue Dolphins was my FAV book growing up too. How cool to be compared!