Turning a Memoir into a Novel

Imagine a can of Coca-Cola sitting in the middle of a table. Around the table you gather all the members of your immediate family and a few friends. There are age differences in those people, and gender differences, too. Some of the people sit at the table. Some of the people stand. One person kneels on the floor.

Everyone has a different look at the can of Coca-Cola. Everyone has a different perspective. Everyone has a different opinion. None of the perspectives are particularly right or wrong - just different looks at the same thing.

For 40 years, I tried to write my book - Brookwood Road - as a first-person Memoir, telling the stories of my childhood, growing up with my brothers on our family hog farm in north Georgia. Every time I sat down to write the book, I got frustrated and gave up.

Why?

Because, I could hear the choir of voices.
"That's not how that happened."
"You left out this part."
"You fabricated all of that."

The voices represented the perspectives of lots of other people looking at the same place, time, events and lives. We were all seeing the same thing - just a lot of different perspectives. And, my perspective was especially complicated because it was through the lens of a boy between the ages of 7-14. Here I was, an adult, reaching back 40 years in time to stories I remembered as a child, which might have been a far different perspective than many others looking at the those same events.

I asked myself, 'How do I clear away all of that fog and clatter to get the book written?'
I will take away all of the other perspectives. I'll write my Memoir as a Novel and admit up front - "Some of these stories are true, some of these stories are based in truth, and some of these stories should have been true."

Writing the book as a Novel shifted it from first-person story telling to third-person story telling. Writing in third person helped me move everyone away from the table and push back from the table myself. It suddenly became very easy to write the book, substituting the Wilcox family in place of the Vaughan family. Now, I could take a simple 400-word story, and expand it to 2,500 words. I removed all of the barriers and all of the rules. Now, I could keep a central nugget of truth, but paint a big and bold picture around that nugget of truth. I could make the book conversational, knowing the conversations were certainly fabricated. (Let's face it, I didn't record my life on tape). I could invent some new characters, or take a handful of characters and merge them into one character. (Dr. Frankenstein, I presume?) I could include family history, but not have to worry about 100 percent accuracy. It was liberating and a lot of fun.

On top of it all, I could escape the "first person" writing style that reminds me of watching someone's home movies. I hate watching another person's home movies. And, I get bored with writing or reading, "I did this" or "I said that."

So, that's why I wrote it as a Novel.
Now, you may be wondering what's true and what's not true. Questions? Let me hear them at sharketing411@gmail.com.

Blessings,

No Idle Promise

Around 1944, my grandfather, R.C. Vaughan, moved his family just a very few miles to be an independent poultry farmer. My daddy was about five. As more and more farmers became chicken growers, my grandfather saw big business getting involved. So, he began shifting into the hatchery business. Then, he slowly abandoned chicken farming altogether to raise hogs. It was no small hog operation. On about 40 acres, he had more than 600 head. With my grandmother, Kathryn, as his partner, my daddy working alongside them, and hiring several others, the hog farm expanded to include Vaughan Sausage Company, which produced pork products (including my Granny's sausage), and distributed those products to stores within about a 20-mile radius of the farm. At its full operation, the farm milled its own feed, raised the hogs, moved the hogs to slaughter, and then moved the pork products under the Vaughan Sausage Company label.

It was into this environment that I was born in 1959. My middle brother, Tim, was born in 1961. My youngest brother, Russ, was born in 1964.

In August 1973, our family - me, my daddy, my mama, and my two brothers - moved from the farm. It was a necessary move. But, my daddy was leaving behind the only home he had ever really known there on Brookwood Road. My brothers and I were certainly leaving the only home we had ever known. While we were excited about the new-ness of the move, there was a sadness, too. I promised my daddy, on the day of the move, that I would one day write the stories of my childhood - of our family life - along Brookwood Road.

That promise wasn't an idle one. Even at 14, I was already a writer. For a few years I had been writing short stories, and reading them to my grade school classes. Sometimes I was even asked to read them over the school intercom. I wrote a book in the fifth grade, hand-written on notebook paper and bound together with staples. Believe it or not, I still have some of those hand-written stories. In addition to the stories, I had also written some feature stories for the weekly newspaper serving our community.

So, in 1973, at 14, when I promised my daddy that I would one day write this book, well, it was not the idle promise of a teenage boy. He knew I could write. And, he responded to my promise by saying, "I think that would be great."

For the past 40 years, the memory of that promise has been ahead of me, but just out of reach. And, now, it's written. My daddy died in 2014 about three months before it was published. But, he knew I had writing it, was able to contribute to it, and was able to hear me read some of the chapters. If and as you read it, you won't be reading just any old book. You will be reading one of the most intimately personal projects of my life.

Brookwood Road: Memories Of A Home is available in hardback, paperback and Kindle versions. Ordering information and appropriate online links are available at www.brookwoodroad.com.

Welcome

Welcome.

I am going to use this blog to serve a few purposes.

• Explain what I learned on the journey of independent publishing. This will be a reference point for my future projects, but might also help other writers, too.
• Answer questions about my book, Brookwood Road.
• Explain some of my thought processes behind the writing of the book.

All of those purposes may weave together.

I hope you will order the book, read it, and ask questions.

I hope you will review it for me as well, and post a review to both amazon.com and goodreads.com.

Thank you.