In looking for a story to tell, I like to put a character in a difficult situation and see how clever he or she is about solving the problems that arise. What could be more difficult, more physically challenging, than the task the Stampeders of 1898 set themselves—not just to find gold but, they discovered once they were well on their way, to walk, climb, scramble across the toughest terrain in North America in weather that ran the gamut from bone-chilling blizzards to blistering heat. Could a thirteen-year-old boy manage this, I wondered?
Amazingly the Klondike Trail, which included climbing the nearly vertical Chilkoot Pass in the depths of winter, was traveled not just by strong, young men but also by women, at least one of whom, Martha Black, was pregnant at the time. So, I decided, a thirteen-year-old boy might just make it to gold country. I didn’t climb the Chilkoot myself but I read so many interesting and detailed accounts by some of the original Stampeders that I felt as though I had. This is the kind of research I find most useful for writing a story set in the past—reading the journals, letters and diaries of people who actually lived the experience. After that, it’s all up to my imagination—a writer’s most powerful tool.
Excerpts from the Junior Library Guild Resource Catalogue, 2002
In October of 2009 I was asked to write a blog about how and why I write. Here are some of the questions and my answers for that blog:
1. Why YA Fiction? What's the draw?
I write historical fiction, which I discovered as a reader when I was about ten, but which I really fell in love with when I was twelve and read Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease and Mara, Daughter of the Nile by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. Both books, despite their totally different settings, combined adventure and mystery in a way that made history seem heartstoppingly exciting. Both books also explored the ethics and morality of their characters' actions, an aspect of storytelling that, I think, begins to intrigue young readers as they enter their teen years. I started writing my own stories about then, when I was 12 to 14, and right from the beginning they were stories set in the past. The past is a country that I found intriguing then and which I continue to find engrossing. It didn't occur to me that writing would ever be anything more than a hobby until I was through university, had been teaching school for a number of years and was raising my own children. Because at the time, my life on every front involved children, it seemed natural to write for that audience. And because I had never lost my love of historical fiction my logical audience seemed to be Young Adult. Also, I often feel that I have never gotten beyond being that twelve-year-old in love with Cue For Treason and I'm really writing for the reader that was me all those years ago.
2. Have you ever based a character on a real-life person? If so, why? Was it simply to immortalize them or was there more to it than that?
If you can, tell us the name of that person, please! We're all curious here! Everyone I've ever met has become grist for this writer's mill and, just as the millstones grind fine, my imagination grinds those observations fine until a bit of this person and a bit of that person is combined to make a character. And a lot of that combining is done subconsciously. Even though I like to think I'm a careful planner, almost always the next character needed just walks out of the depths and is suddenly there. In Gold Rush Fever, my protagonist, Tim, is wandering along a riverfront street in Dawson feeling sorry for himself and furious with his brother who has rushed off leaving him to look after their baggage. He can hardly take in all the bustle of the little street stalls around him until suddenly he smells pancakes cooking and there at a stall is a girl pouring batter into a frying pan. I had no idea this girl was about to walk into the story but there she was telling Tim to hurry up and get his money out and making sarcastic remarks about city folk who are completely useless out in the gold fields. I had to scramble around to find a suitable name for her (Flora) but as she waved her spatula around like a flyswatter I realized she was just what I needed to perk up my protagonist and make a few sparks fly in the story. I don't know who she was in real life but I have met a number of Floras - always ordering people around, often being annoying, but sometimes being just the catalyst one needs - so I think I was immortalizing the busybodies I have known.
3. What character did you have the most fun creating and why?
I have the most fun creating some of the secondary characters. Even though I spend most of my time with the protagonist and have to find ways to make his/her interior life as compelling as the action I'm throwing them into, it's the supporting characters I can really play with. I can exaggerate their eccentricities whether they are sharp-tongued, mawkishly sweet or just odd. For example, in Gold Rush Fever, when my protagonist, Tim, is about to try climbing a treacherous mountain pass on his way to the gold fields, he runs into an old man on the same trek. From the moment I named him Ned Mumby (secondary characters can have odd names as well as odd personalities) I could hear his drawling voice. "She's some steep, all right," he says surveying the snow-covered rocky climb, and from the moment I heard that I that I knew not only was he going to be Tim's mentor but also that he would be both lovable and comic.