Write in Your Own Backyard . . . or Not! by Jodi Lea Stewart

"Jump the Fence" to Authentically Write About Different Cultures and Time Eras

Don't Come into My Backyard 

“Write in your own backyard!” seemed to be the cry of the masses when I was shifting from being a non-fiction business writer, journalist, and essayist to a fiction writer eight years ago. Yet, my heart and mind wanted to write an adventure-mystery novel featuring a Navajo protagonist. I had great and wondrous adventure ideas dancing in my head for my fictional main character, Silki Begay.

Wishing to be culturally correct and totally respectful, I actually contacted various people of that culture asking their advice. I didn’t want to step on any toes, you see. My next-door neighbor, at the time, was a Navajo lady who had been Miss Navajo Nation in 1965. She said she was honored that I was doing it. That spurred me on, but I wanted more opinions. That’s when things turned in another direction.

For example, if I had listened to one group of ladies, I never would have written my Silki, the Girl of Many Scarves: SUMMER OF THE ANCIENT novel. They were insulted that I, a non-Native person, would write a contemporary novel about a Native family living on the Navajo Rez. I explained to them that I grew up on a ranch in Arizona next door to the Navajo Nation and close to the Apache Rez. I went to school with Hispanics and Natives. I didn’t see what the big deal was. Those memories were, after all, part of my own childhood backyard.

Still, they dampened my enthusiasm so much that I was about to scrap the whole project. At a writing seminar around that time, I talked about my dilemma and how I would most likely give up writing novels about a different culture since, according to the ladies I had talked to, it was inappropriate to do so. Then, I read aloud the first chapter of my first novel to that group.

What a life changer that was!

The participants practically begged me to continue writing that novel, and they assured me that with my deep concern for the Navajos, there was no way I’d be disrespectful. I was so heartened, I didn’t write one novel featuring a Navajo protagonist, I wrote three! I finished the last novel in that trilogy this year.

Historical Fiction Isn't Exactly Our Own Backyard Either

Now, really, I wasn’t even born in 1934, let alone living in a sharecropper family. So, if following the “get in your own backyard and write there” adage was all the advice I heeded, how could I pull off a mystery involving a sharecropper family with twelve kids set in 1934 Oklahoma for my novel Blackberry Road?

I couldn’t, but again, research and story gathering over the years from my actual family that had lived that way for real saved the day. I’m a firm believer that a person can be as realistic as their research and imagination can take them IF they are willing to work hard to get into the flavor of the time period or the culture he or she is writing about. Finding actual people or their descendants who have first-hand *or even second- to third-hand* experience in that era or in a different lifestyle to interview can make all the difference in realistic writing.

My recent blog, "Don’t Let the Stories Die," delves into the importance of collecting first-hand data while it is still available. Click here to read it.

What if I didn’t have those relatives who had lived back in 1934? Would reading a few books have been enough to paint a realistic, believable background?

I say no.

You’ve heard “To whom much is given, much is required”? It’s my opinion the same holds true for different-culture and historical fiction writers. You have a talent for writing, yes? Then do something about it with the hardest, roll-up-your-sleeves work ethic you can conjure.

Tirelessly research the era, region, and culture you are writing about. Talk to anyone and everyone who may have lived then, had friends or relatives living then, or who is an expert about that time in history or in that culture. Listen to narratives, documentaries, and anything else you can find to supplement your ideas to realistically support your plot and characters.

As Sarah Dessen, the American novelist, once said, and whether it's tongue in cheek or not, it's relevant: "I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know." 

She's right. It is hard.

For the Native-American trilogy I mentioned earlier, I filled five notebooks, one of them a four-inch-er, with research. I bought and read books, became familiar with what was important to the Navajo culture, its history, and its landmarks. I will never be able to speak their difficult but beautiful Athabaskan language, but I made myself familiar with many of their words and added a glossary at the back of my novels for further authenticity.

You are not writing in your own backyard when you do this. You are visiting the backyards of countless folks who came before you or who live differently than you.

My current work in progress is set in Holbrook, Arizona, in 1954. Two ladies, a mother and a daughter, are escaping an abusive home situation. Leaving Texas, then Oklahoma, they take the infamous Route 66 highway heading toward Las Vegas. Now, you have to know this is not me, so how do I write a historical story about two people who are not me and have experiences that are not in my own time realm or in my own backyard?

By applying the same work ethic I previously mentioned.

You create your basic plot and research your head off until you have the essential elements of that time period. One of the most crucial elements is being correct with how expressions were used, what kind of small talk was acceptable, what were the general feelings of people toward life and its elements according to certain geographical areas, and what might be too modern or irrelevant to put into a book set in a different time era.

One slip-up there, and you’ve perhaps ruined the book for a reader or a thousand readers. It’s that important. Cheryl Pierson wrote a fantastic blog about this recently, "The Devil's in the Details." Click here to read it. 

Summary

You CAN make someone else’s backyard your own backyard IF you are willing to put in the hard work and time it takes to be true to whatever culture, time era, or place you wish to write about. 

Don't be afraid of it, but be the master of your craft as you go about it.

Blackberry Road, Jodi's fourth novel, is published by Sundown Press and is available on Amazon.

"Trouble sneaks in like an oily twister one afternoon in 1934 Oklahoma, pulling Biddy Woodson into a dark mystery that changes her life forever."

Jodi Lea Stewart was born in Texas to an "Okie" mom and a Texan dad. Her younger years were spent in Texas and Oklahoma; hence, she knows all about biscuits and gravy, blackberry picking, chiggers, and snipe hunting. At the age of eight, she moved to a large cattle ranch in the White Mountains of Arizona. Later, she left her studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson to move to San Francisco, where she learned about peace, love, and exactly what she DIDN'T want to do with her life. Since then, Jodi graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Business Management, raised three children, worked as an electro-mechanical drafter, penned humor columns for a college periodical, wrote regional Western articles, and served as managing editor of a Fortune 500 corporate newsletter. She currently resides in Arizona with her husband, a Standard poodle, one rescue cat, and numerous gigantic, bossy houseplants.

What's next? The Cry of the Cave, a historical novel set in 1954, On the exterior, it’s about a different side of America emerging from the dust of war and prosperity—an underbelly few comprehended even existed. Internally, it’s about a mom and her teenage daughter escaping a personal war, and how they wound up in Holbrook, Arizona, instead of Las Vegas. It’s about a town full of ghosts and tales, treachery and secrets, and how sometimes you have to hold your hands over your eyes and leap, not knowing where you’ll land. 

Don't Let the Stories Die by Jodi Lea Stewart

Story opportunities pop up everywhere. All you have to do is cross the bridge.

Unique Challenges

Historic novel writing presents many unique challenges. Foremost, the writer didn't personally live during that time era, or he/she lived in New York but loved writing about the Old West. 

Slick documentaries and photos often don’t go far enough to immerse the writer or the reader in the “feel” of that particular slot of time. It helps to find journals or other written material to base the needed atmosphere of the novel upon, but the REAL STORIES come from the mouths of those who lived them. 

Blackberry Road, my latest novel, is a snapshot of a hot summer in 1934 Oklahoma. A girl called Biddy narrates a whopping tale of murder and spookiness that begins in May when school is out and ends when the blackberries are turning brown on the vine – about mid- to late-summer. Biddy’s family jumps right out at you like a real family, and why is that?

Because they are, and someone (me) didn’t let their stories die.

Turning 'Real' into Fiction

Collecting family stories, recipes, lore, and copying old handwritten Bible notes over the years created the realistic backdrop for Blackberry Road. Fictional Biddy has twelve brothers and sisters. My mother had eleven. Both Biddys, the fictional and the real, were from sharecropping families living in Oklahoma in the 1930s. 

Dirt poor, but rock solid, those families had to eat, live, and survive everything from snake bites to drought (or flood) to miserable housing conditions.

In my particular case, I was fortunate to mingle and mix with a real sharecropping family because they were my own relatives. You can be sure the stories at our reunions or get-togethers flew around like greased spitballs; and there I was, in the thick of it, laughing and asking questions, my pen flying over the notebook I kept with me at all times.

Most members of the real Blackberry Road family have now passed on, but their lives and experiences will live on forever simply because I didn’t let the stories die. My job as a writer was to make fiction seem like reality and reality seem like fiction. 

You can do the same thing.

No Family Stories to Collect? No Problem!

Don’t despair if you don’t have actual family stories to gather. Story opportunities full of "nuggets" pop up everywhere. All you have to do is cross the bridge, so to speak, and be ready to take notes. 

A chance to record stories “from the horse’s mouth” is as close as that elderly lady you see every day on the bus. Befriend her and see life as it was through her eyes. Maybe it’s a

friend’s uncle who served in the military and lived through stories that seem too fictional to be true but are true just the same.

A person volunteering for a church street choir used to be homeless many years ago – what was that like, and how did he or she escape homelessness? The Vietnamese family down the street who barely made it to the USA in 1971 – how did they do it, and what happened when they got here? 

Your friend tells you she has a grandfather who was a butler in the deep South in the early 1950s. Wow! Can you go see him and make sure his stories don’t die? You don’t know until you try, right?

Living stories are waiting for you to discover, record, and save. Now . . . go write that novel!

~ Three old stories that didn’t die ~

“I remember Mom making my dresses from flour sacks and my bloomers from flannel undershirts. She used innertube rubber for the waist and legs. She made me at least three dresses for the year. When I grew out of them and had to wear them anyway, it was sure pitiful.” ~ the real Biddy

“It was my job to lead my blind grandma to the outhouse, and I would read the Sears and Roebuck catalog to her while I waited. That’s how, when I was ten years old, I got the second doll of my childhood. We read about her in the catalog, and she cost 95-cents. Grandma bought it for me for taking such good care of her. I thought my doll was the most beautiful thing in the world. She had rubber bloomers, and I kept her hung up on a wall. In those days, we didn’t have screens on most of the windows and some grasshoppers got hold of those rubber bloomers and ate them up. I had to kill those varmints for doing that!”

~ the real Biddy

One night, a pretty young woman *we’ll call her Doodles* from our family went to a local dance with her older brothers. A catty and foolish young woman became jealous of Doodles’ beauty. Throughout the evening, the woman heckled her, making verbal innuendos and snide remarks. Doodles ignored her bully, dancing and promenading around the dance floor. Later, as Doodles started home under the full moon with her brothers, the woman hid and threw rocks at her as she passed. It was too much. Doodles marched into the bushes and took the girl to the ground with enough vigor to make all her seven brothers and one of her sisters very proud. During the scuffle, the band scuttled outside in the glittery moonlight and played a lively rendition of Don’t Let the Stars Get In Your Eyes. Needless to say, 16-year-old Doodles had no more trouble from this hateful woman, and this became an energetic and favorite story at all the family reunions for years to come ~ Jodi Lea Stewart

Blackberry Road is available on Amazon.