After completing my novel, Wildflowers in Winter, I thought I’d written the last about my character Edna Pearson. After all, what more can you write once the character has died. I learned several readers disagreed. Once the idea of writing another book about Edna was planted, there was no turning back. I put aside my other writing projects and focused almost exclusively on writing a prequel. Songs of Spring has been a three-year journey, much longer than I anticipated. My goal was to not only write a prequel about Edna, her older sister, and her family, but also to write about many of the historical events of the early twentieth century.Songs of Spring, like my first book, relied upon stories, tidbits, and historical happenings from diaries left behind by the woman who inspired both books. Every writer has a different experience with their creative process. The advice of putting yourself in your character’s shoes and letting them come to life worked for me. As a historical novel,Songs of Spring is as historically accurate as I could make it. The creativity in the story is not in writing the historical events but in the words chosen to weave the story together. I hope my characters, Edna and Pearl Mooney, two sisters ten years apart in age, who grew up more than a century ago are depicted as real characters for their time. Imagining their dialogue, how they dressed, what they ate, and how they lived their daily lives, took plenty of research in addition to diaries and memories written in cursive decades ago. The more I wrote, the more I felt the sisters come alive for me. I hope my readers feel the same.
By Naomi Wark
Comments