Getting It Down

Every November I mean to take part in National Novel Writing Month (otherwise known as NaNoWriMo), but I have never managed to do so. For many people, November’s not a good month to take on such a big commitment because of preparing for the holidays while in my case there’s always a pile of freelance work to be done as well. Nevertheless, whatever the time of year, I’m greatly in favour of setting yourself a deadline during which time the writing of your novel becomes your highest priority after the basics like sleeping, eating, and earning your living. It’s all too easy to let novel writing slide down your list of priorities till it almost falls off the bottom of your to-do list. 

Naturally no one in their right mind would expect to be able to turn out a publishable, full-length novel (NaNoWriMo defines full-length as at least 50,000 words) in a mere 30 days. So the concept might more accurately be called Putting Together a Rough First Draft month or Thoroughly Revising an Existing Draft month. This is not to quibble – both of those tasks are hugely necessary and need concentrated effort.

The beauty of NaNoWriMo is that it provides a collective deadline complete with support, encouragement, and online feedback.  It has a few rules but most are flexible and even meant to be broken. It’s all about getting the words from out of your head and onto the paper/screen. About kickstarting yourself into creativity. And about the first rule of writing - applying the seat of the pants to the chair.  

Telling Caroline

In honor of this day 51 years ago, here is a re-post of my essay that appeared in American Heritage Magazine in July 2006 in the My Brush with History column:

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 When I was growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in the early 1960s, the Kennedys were a vivid presence in our household. My father had AProfiles of Courage@ on the bookshelf by his special chair, and Jackie Kennedy=s outfits were featured in all my mother=s fashion magazines. Even I - a first-grader - had a Jackie and Caroline paper doll set that I played with all the time. I was fascinated by Caroline because we were almost exactly the same age - she was born a mere five days before me in late 1957.

In August 1963, my family went on vacation to Cape Cod. On the first Sunday of the vacation, my father took a detour from the route we usually took to the beach and pulled into a little parking lot just off a two-lane rural road. Another family was already parked there, and I couldn=t understand why. It seemed an unlikely place to stop. There was nothing to see but the hedge bordering the road, and nothing to hear but the faint sound of waves in the distance.

I was bored. I didn=t understand why we weren=t hightailing it straight to the beach on that fine summer morning instead of stewing in a hot car. Be patient, my father said, something exciting is going to happen, but that was hard to believe. My mother was sitting sideways in the passenger seat, using the flip-down visor mirror to put on her lipstick. My little brother dozed in his car seat. My dad was chatting with the father of the other family, leaning against the side of their car. I tried counting birds flying overhead but hardly any went by. I got out of the car and drifted around the make-shift parking lot, a mere patch of gravel carved out of a field. I began to run round the lot in ever-decreasing circles to see how dizzy I could make myself, round and round. Suddenly I realized I could heard the gathering growl of what sounded like motorbikes in the distance. Intrigued, I glanced up, still running, and caught the toe of my sneaker on something and pitched forward heavily onto the gravel. 

I can distinctly remember the sharp pain in my knees and my howl of shock and outrage. At that exact second, my father shouted, AHe=s coming!@ and my mother hooked me under the armpits and swung me like a sack to the verge of the road. Along the narrow country lane came two motorcycle outriders and then a long black limo and to my astonishment I saw at the limo=s window the unmistakable face of the President of the United States.

When John F. Kennedy caught sight of me, a tearful five-year-old with bloody knees, he said something to his driver and the long, low car slowed to a crawl. The President turned back to the window and smiled and waved - at me. AWave, wave,@ my mother urged me, her own hands still trapped under my armpits, and I did, mesmerized by the President=s dazzling sympathetic smile. At the same time, I could feel trickles of blood oozing down my legs into the elastic of my knee-socks. As the car passed us, we all piled into the road, still waving. The President turned around to look out of the limo=s back window and kept right on waving and smiling and waving and smiling until a bend in the road took him out of our sight.

Forty years later I call still feel the shock of being caught in the spotlight of that famous gaze. For days afterwards, with crisscrossed Band-Aids like a badge of honor on each knee, I basked in the glory of that moment.

What I did not know till later was that the Kennedys= newborn son Patrick had died only two days earlier. Kennedy had been to Holy Mass alone that morning as Jackie was still in the hospital at Otis Air Force Base, recovering from her ordeal. Later that day, the President took Caroline to the hospital to visit her mother for the first time since the baby=s birth and death. In the press the next day, Caroline was pictured clutching a bunch of daisies and pressing her lips to the back of her daddy=s hand. 

Three months later, I came home from school one afternoon and found my father sitting in front of the television set in tears.  I had seen his car in the garage and come running in, full of joy to have him home from work so early, but he had gotten up from his chair and gone into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He hadn=t even said hello. My mother hastened to reassure me that he wasn=t mad at me, he was just upset because something very bad had happened to President Kennedy. It took a few minutes before I fully understood that the President was dead, but when it did, my first terrible thought was that someone, somehow was going to have to break the news to Caroline.  

Fire from the Sky

When World War I began, the planet was only 12 years into its romance with aircraft. It was still a novelty for the people of Europe to look up to the sky and see anything but birds.

In a scene from my novel, Albion’s Millennium, eight-year-old May is staying with her sister who is in service at a house in Sussex. It is early summer in 1914, and there have been rumored sightings of German airships above the British coast: 

            May looked upwards, shielding her eyes from the light pouring from the open French windows. She could see there were gradations of darkness up there, different layers of night like overlapping curtains, some denser than others, and behind these shifting layers an occasional gleam of glassy, star-pocked sky.  

            She heard a lady guest say, “How exciting. The Times said they’ve been taking civilian passengers up. I can’t see anything, can you?”

            The second she stopped speaking, her husband shouted, “Look!” and pointed to the sky. Something had moved out from behind a cloud - a long slim shadow, barely visible against the greyness. A sinister, looming presence, so indistinct it could almost have been an illusion of the retina, an image left behind on a closed eyelid. But as May craned her neck, she saw it steal very slowly across a gap between two night clouds, so high that she could hear no engine noise. Beside her, she heard Tessie’s awestruck whisper, “How can there be people up there in that thing?”

                       

During the war, aerial bombing was in its infancy, but there were several raids by German airships and fighter planes on the mainland UK, particularly from 1916 onwards. The British government instituted a rudimentary warning system consisting of maroons and whistles and (absurdly) policemen cycling round the streets wearing sandwich boards, while the end of a raid was signaled by boy scouts playing bugles.  

Here is an extract from Virginia Woolf’s diary describing a night raid near her home in Richmond, west of London:

Thursday December 6, 1917: Last night... nothing was further from our minds than air raids; a bitter night, no moon up till eleven. At 5 however, I was wakened by L. [her husband Leonard Woolf] to a most instant sense of guns [anti-aircraft guns firing from nearby]: as if one’s faculties jumped up fully dressed. We took clothes, quilts, a watch & a torch, the guns sounding nearer as we went down stairs to sit with the servants [Lottie the maid and Nellie the cook] on the black horsehair chest wrapped in quilts in the kitchen passage. Lottie having said she felt bad passed on to a general rattle of jokes & comments which almost silenced the guns. They fired quickly, apparently towards Barnes. Slowly the sounds got more distant, & finally ceased; we unwrapped ourselves & went back to bed. In ten minutes there could be no more question of staying there: guns apparently up at Kew.  Up we jumped, more hastily this time, since I remember leaving my watch, & trailing cloak & stockings behind me. Servants apparently calm & even jocose. In fact one talks through the noise, rather bored by having to talk at 5am than anything else. Guns at one point so loud that the whistle of the shell going up followed the explosion. One window did, I think, rattle. Then silence. Cocoa was brewed for us, & off we went again. Having trained one’s ears to listen one can’t get them not to for a time; & as it was after 6, carts were rolling out of stables, motor cars throbbing, & then prolonged ghostly whistlings, which meant, I suppose, Belgian work people being recalled to the munitions factory. At last in the distance I heard bugles; L. was by this time asleep, but the dutiful boy scouts came down our road [blowing the bugles] & wakened him carefully; it struck me how sentimental the suggestion of the sound was, & how thousands of old ladies were offering up their thanksgivings at the sound, & connecting him (a boy scout with small angel wings) with some joyful vision – And then I too went to sleep: but the servants sat up with their heads out of the window in the bitter cold-frost white on the roofs-until the bugle sounded, when they went back to the kitchen and sat there till breakfast.”

Twenty-two years later when German flying machines once again dropped bombs on Britain, this was no longer something new and inconceivable. This time the British people were all too prepared for the fire that rained down from the sky.