Getting Ideas

I'm all excited about this weekend because my friend and I are attending the SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) "Spring Mingle" conference in Decatur, Georgia. Children's books have not exactly been my focus, but then neither has anything else. I just write whatever I want to at any given time. SO, I do have a children's picture book which I will have critiqued at the conference (I'll tell you about that next week!). But today I wanted to talk about something else.

The question I get asked most often is "Where do you get ideas for your books?" The answer is "just about everywhere." I wanted to share where I got inspiration for my first book today. The Welsh Harp was published in 2012, but I actually got the idea and wrote it (the rough draft at least) in the mid-1980's.

Two events came together to give me an incentive to write the book. First, I decided to take a correspondence course in "Writing for Children and Teenagers" through the Institute of Children's Literature. At the time I was still teaching full time and I worked through the course in about eighteen months, including two summer breaks. Anyway, the last assignment (#10) was to plan a book-length project--not write it, just plan out the chapters, etc. The second event was that during the time I was working on the course, Bill (my husband) had received a copy of a 250-page, hand-written, family history handed down after his Aunt Ellen had died a few years earlier. He decided to type the history into the computer and have copies made and bound for him and his brother. When I looked at the history I was captivated by his Aunt Ellen's precise descriptions of the family's immigration from the Rhondda Valley in Wales to the mining towns of Eastern Kentucky in 1902.

 I knew of course that I could not write the history, because Aunt Ellen had already done that. So I got the idea to write a novel, using many of the facts she had given about their experiences. Having just been studying about how to write for children and teenagers, it seemed natural to focus on the children, using his aunt (who was twelve when they came over) as a model for the central character. Since one of the things I remembered most about Aunt Ellen's home was the huge harp in the corner of her living room, it became a central image in the story and a large part of the story plot. I eventually decided to use the photograph of that harp as the image on the cover.