A Dream-Inspired Dream
Being an author was never part of the plan, never part of the dream. I had always enjoyed creative writing in school, plenty of poems fill my personal journals, but I never felt I had any particular talent for it. Life never takes you where you expect to go, though, does it?
I was inspired by an intern who liked my professional writing. Flattered by his enthusiasm for my work, I found myself itching to write a novel but not sure what I would write. Searching through the filing cabinet of ideas in my mind from over the years, I realized that the story I most wanted to tell was that of Savannah and Jonathan from The Enlightened Series.
Their journey began as as dream I once had. I was walking through a forest when a man approached me from behind and held a knife to my throat. Unlike in Witness to the Revolution, the man spoke German, testing me to see if I was a Hessian spy. For the rest, well… you will just have to read chapter two to get the idea, though I woke before the scene ended.
The dream stayed with me, tucked away in that proverbial filing cabinet for years.
One day, I saw the pilot episode for a book-turned-television series I had never heard of called Outlander. As I watched the main character get sucked back in time, I thought, “Oh, cool! That idea works,” remembering Savannah and Jonathan. Then, back into the filing cabinet they went for another several years.
Once I decided to write their story, several dilemmas began to hold me back. Firstly, although I had some knowledge of the Revolutionary War already, I was nowhere near an expert. It made me fearful of potential criticism for being historically inaccurate. Thus began the dreaded writer’s block.
So, I chose a time in the War - 1778 - where the sides had come to a draw and a location where there was constant skirmishes but no major battles. Plus, by writing the story in first person from the perspective of someone from the twenty-first century, it was completely realistic if Savannah was wrong (well, me - the author, really) about how she interpreted life in the eighteenth! This freed me up to write about fictional people without fear of being corrected. (Though, the more I wrote and researched, the bolder I became with my writing. In the second book, all but two of the new characters (including the dog!) are real.)
Then, came the Outlander Problem - how to differentiate the story of Savannah and Jonathan from the popular book and television series? That is where the magic began. Literally. And I am so grateful! By incorporating an entire magical universe shifting behind the Revolutionary War, the book series was able to explore themes more honestly due to the separation that only fantasy can bring.
The biggest idea I wanted to explore was that there were no true “good guys” versus “bad guys.” Only people serving the cause they felt was right, using means that they justified were necessary to reach their goals. Somewhere along the way, the so-called “good guys” will make bad decisions that have lasting repercussions. The “bad guys” will do what is right. It is only by reaching the end of the series that the reader (and the characters!) will come to decide whether those decisions were the “right” ones when all is said and done.
May 23, 2021
