Research Changed The Book

In this episode, I describe how I have come to change the title and part of the plot of the fiction novel I am currently writing.

#fiction #foster #abandoned #edwardian #fosterchild #childlabor

Transcript

Welcome And Book Three Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Hello, hope you're all doing well. Today I wanted to talk about uh the third book that I'm writing, uh, what I've called book three. I have uh two books already published. One is called The Overlife, Taylor Schizophrenia, and I am a writer living with schizophrenia. And uh Three Kidnap, Three Siblings, Three Furies, which is about sibling abuse. My third book is a fiction novel based on the life of my grandfather, and being historical in that he was born in 1894 and died unfortunately the year that I was born.

My Grandfather’s Story And Abandonment

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Um I'm having to research back a long way, and I don't want to put too many spoilers in there, but I'm also on ancestry.com tracing uh my grandfather's history back as far as I can in what concerns his ancestors. So his tragedy as a child was that he was abandoned in well he he and his family, so he had two siblings. Um one sibling died, and then there were two siblings who lived. And his mother, so um the father abandoned his uh his mother and the three uh little children in 1900. He just left one day and didn't leave any explanation or any way of getting in contact with him. In 1903, just a few years later, the mother abandoned the children. So my grandfather and his siblings had been abandoned by both parents, and the action happened uh a few years apart. Uh fortunately, they had some friends of the family who took them in. And but a couple of years after that, that friend uh who was a woman got married, and her husband would only take my grandfather because he was old enough to work on a farm, which is where they lived, and the two younger siblings were put into foster care. So, what I want to talk about is the fact that, at least in my case, when I'm writing a novel and I write fiction, I work, of course, on the story, which is um the most important thing, but I also put

Research, AI, And Writing While Learning

SPEAKER_00 3:25

in a lot of time, especially for this novel, because it's a historical novel, on research. And I have been finding AI very useful for pinning down facts, and as well as that, I continue to learn how to be a writer, so I listen to uh audiobooks on writing, um, I read books about writing, and so I keep learning how to be a writer as I'm actually writing. And one uh teacher of fiction writing that I listened to advise that if you're researching, learning, and writing, it's better to do them all at once. In other words, don't leave your book for 50 days uh with nothing being written because you think you have to read a certain research book or collection of research books in order to write. And I have found that very useful. So this week a big surprise happened in where the facts that I can verify were leading me was not to where I expected

The Foster Myth And A Plot Rebuild

SPEAKER_00 5:02

to be. So I had put in the title the word foster for foster children, and I've come to realize that my grandfather actually wasn't fostered, he was flown under the legal radar and put to work on a farm. He was eleven, and the interest in doing so was to make him work as a farmhand. The two younger siblings were put into foster care by a woman who was influential in their life. So I won't say any more than that, or it'll be too confusing. But but I had the word foster in the title of my book, and I realized that the main character um bypassed the foster system completely because he was employed by this farmer who didn't care about the legal issues either. So he was not fostered, and so I had to face the fact that I need to change the title of my book, and I also needed to change uh a lot of the plot. Oh, excuse me, it's my light, uh a lot of the plot, uh, especially uh around his childhood, to fit in what were actually the facts. Now his childhood uh was well, I mean, the childhood after he was abandoned by his father, and up until he was able to escape the farm and um uh get a job independent of it. It was the Edwardian era. Okay, so that is really where the root of the novel is, is what happens to Edwardian children when they're abandoned by their parents or uh used in a way that is not legal, and so on. And although there is still a lot in the book about foster children because the two younger siblings were foster children, they used to call it boarding out in those days, which is another reason that I didn't like the word foster being in the title, because in those days it was called boarding out. So, you know, the book isn't published yet, but I have been doing some promotion, and so um I need to take the bold step to change the title and change a very key part of the plot in the book. Um a part that really shaped my grandfather and what he went on to become. So, you know, what I'm doing is I'm to the people and the newsletters I've written with the original title, I'm just making another newsletter or blog post or whatever on why I had to change the title and why I had to change the plot, and that in itself is quite interesting. And you know, I just want to encourage you that if you're doing a memoir or you're doing uh fiction based on fact, which is my preference,

Follow The Evidence And Change Boldly

SPEAKER_00 9:21

don't be frightened to follow the research or follow your feelings where they lead you. You're not answerable to anybody, and what counts is not what you call a book when you begin your endeavor, but it's how things end up. And don't be frightened to change the title, don't be frightened to adjust the plot uh to what either actually happened or what you can deduce was very close to the truth. So my sources have been family oral history, and which has mostly been correct actually, except they they got it wrong about my grandfather being a foster child, and uh research about the eras where I'm setting the book, and as I said, uh reading about learning to write. So that could take you somewhere where you didn't expect to be. But I think that that's one of the joys of writing is that it's an exciting adventure, and you know, in my book I really have something to say, which is about how Edwardian children who fell on bad times, how they managed to get by, and some of it is pretty shocking. So I hope to make that clear through the environment in which my uh grandfather grew up. So that is what I want to say for this podcast. I know that I have been absent for quite some time and uh haven't done an episode. That's because I've been busy with the book, and um I'm not very good at keeping appointments.

Subscribe, Captions, And Closing

SPEAKER_00 11:47

So uh if you subscribe to my channel, then you get a notification if I've posted uh a new podcast, and um I hope it's of interest to you. If you need the closed captioning, by the way, uh then uh you can watch on YouTube and uh they had their own subtitles with my ums and ahs in there, but uh uh they're pretty good. Okay, so I hope that for all the writers out there that you're that you're really uh enjoying and are moved by what you're writing. Okay, so that's all for today, and I hope to be back in a week. Okay, so uh after having been gone for some time. Okay, so bye bye for now.