Straight from the Source: Alyssa Colman on Writing Historical Fiction

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

For both of my previous books, the characters came to me first. Where Only Storms Grow, however, started with the time period. Early during the pandemic, I read an article about the other time in history when Americans were asked to wear masks: the Dust Bowl. As I read about the catastrophic storms and dust pneumonia that followed, I realized how little I knew about the era and became fascinated. Out of pure curiosity and with no intention of writing a book, I began to read everything I could about the Dust Bowl. 

At the time, I’d also been playing with an idea about a girl with scoliosis like me, but I didn’t know what to do with idea beyond the character. Well, both the era and idea went into the rock tumbler that is my mind and tumbled around until they were shiny and ready to write together.

What kinds of sources do you use? The more specifics here, the better!

 Since I write for kids, the first thing I do is go to my local library and check out what the kids book section has to say about my era or topic of choice. It’s fun and helpful to see what books for this audience highlight — and what they leave out. For the Dust Bowl, I also found Khan Academy’s lessons very helpful. 

One thing I love to do is read old newspapers. For The Gilded Girl and The Tarnished Garden, I poured over old copies of The New York Times and other local papers. For the Dust Bowl, I read newspapers from all over the Great Plains to know what was on people’s minds and how see how the ecological events were understood by the public. I also listened to hours and hours of oral histories from survivors collected through Oklahoma State University’s Dust, Drought and Dreams Gone Dry oral history project. Written first-hand accounts such as Lawrence Svobida’s Farming the Dust Bowl, Caroline Henderson’s Letters from the Dust Bowl, and The Bumpy Road by Quentin F. Veit were all instrumental in creating my world and learning the day-to-day processes required to successfully run a farm and feed a family. The latter book also introduced me to a delightful piece of farming equipment known as “the manure flinger” that sadly did not make it into the final version of the book. 

It’s hard to write historical fiction without a point of view. Most of my stories tend to draw parallels to our present time. I use secondary sources to add context and understand the time period on a deeper level that people living at the time may not have had. Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time helped me to understand why the dust storms happened and how attitudes about solutions differed across the region. For this, I make great use of my local library’s interlibrary loan program. 

I was very fortunate to find receptive historians who gladly answered my questions about scoliosis and the Red Cross’s Dust Bowl field hospitals. A representative from NOAA helped me track down the handwritten field notes from weather station operators in Cimarron County, OK for the exact months of my story. I love that one of the operators doodled snowflakes on his report, which was wishful thinking on his part. 

How long do you typically research before beginning to draft?

Months, at a minimum! I think the Dust Bowl book was in my head for at least two years before I started trying to outline anything. I’m researching a project now and it will be a few months yet before I’m ready to start writing.

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

I know I’m ready to write when I feel like I’m procrastinating by continuing to research. Over the years, I’ve created a system that helps me keep moving and not have a constant start/stop when I need to research small details. If something is big enough to become a plot hole or change a whole element of the story, I will stop and research further. For example, in my outline for STORMS, a character initially broke his arm. As I was writing, I realized this was not dramatic enough to earn the required consequences and he needed to break his leg. I paused to research the treatment he would have received and how long he would have stayed in the hospital—something that has major plot implications for the timeline of the story.

If I hit a small detail snag, I simply write *** in my manuscript, followed by the detail I need in brackets. For example, I might write “I pulled on my dress***[Fabric pattern and color].” Then, I take research days to use Control + Find and search for my *** moments. I go through the manuscript and look up all those tiny details. This way, I don’t get thrown out of my writing groove by five minutes of researching to find out when bobby pins were invented.   

What’s one of the most interesting things you’ve learned while researching?

One dust storm was so powerful it blew clear across the country, darkening skies in DC and New York, and deposited soil on the decks of ships 300 miles off the coast in the Atlantic. 

I also found out that the Pledge of Allegiance was originally written as part of a promotional scheme to sell magazines to kids. It’s true. 

Why is historical fiction important?

When I was a student, I thought history was mostly dead people who had done things, most of which were rather boring. There were lots of dates to remember, battles, and leaders both good and bad. Then, when I was in the 5^th grade, I discovered historical fiction and my first author love became Ann Rinaldi. Her books brought the past to life for me in a way that textbooks never could. The characters in her stories struggled and loved, fought and survived—or they didn’t but their deaths were emotional and not simply dates to be memorized. Through historical fiction, I discovered that things I thought were boring such as crop yields and inheritance law could be dramatic matters of life and death. Historical fiction made history real to me and it made it matter. Clearly, it mattered enough that I grew up to write historical fiction! I hope that my books will pay it forward and usher in a new generation of kids who are excited about history.  

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Alyssa Colman is the author of THE GILDED GIRL, which won the 2021 Northern Lights Book Award for middle grade fantasy. Publishers Weekly called the story “a thoughtful and imaginative exploration of friendship, internal change, and perseverance” in a starred review. Alyssa lives in northern Virginia with her family.