Recently, I heard from author Linda Collison in response to a Writing It Real e-mailing. Linda and I had met years ago during a visit my husband and I made to the Big Island in Hawaii. She and her husband were friends of the couple who owned the bed and breakfast we stayed at. Linda was a trained nurse and firefighting volunteer, an important job in her desert-like geography north of Kona. In between sailing trips, she had been publishing short stories, poems, essays and articles; her news in her email was that in 2006, she had published her first novel, Star-Crossed, which Knopf acquired for their Young Adult list. In August 2008, Star-Crossed was released in paperback.

I was pleased to read the book and to find out that the impetus for writing it came from a trip Linda took with her husband Bob in 1999. They had signed on aboard the HM Bark Endeavour, a sail-training replica of Captain Cook’s 18th century three-masted ship. Their jobs involved everything from steering the ship to washing dishes. Climbing up the ratlines and out on yardarms high above the deck to make and furl sail, was frightening Linda, reports. Memorizing the names and locations of all the lines needed to work the sails was also a daunting task. Along with Linda, there were a fair number of women among the crew, all of whom did the same work as the men. And that’s what inspired Star-Crossed. Linda was on night watch at the helm of the Endeavor, when she started to wonder what it would have been like for a woman to be a part of a ship’s crew back in the 18th century.

She created seventeen-year-old Patricia Kelley as her story’s protagonist, a girl who is suddenly orphaned when her father dies. Born out of wedlock in Barbados to her father’s Irish servant girl, Patricia Kelley can no longer stay at the secluded English country boarding school her father sent her to, keeping his indiscretion tucked out of sight.

The book starts off in 1769 with Patricia executing the first step in her survival plan to get to the Caribbean island where her father owned a sugar plantation that she believes she is inheriting. She is on a boat of prostitutes rowing out to sailors onboard Canopus, a ship to set sail the next day for Barbados. When the prostitutes board for the night to offer the sailors the pleasure they desire before their journey, Patricia Kelley must escape a man who grabs her and find a place to hide aboard the ship. Her secret as a stowaway is discovered soon after the ship is underway. It is not long before she integrates herself into the ship’s activities. Dressed as a lady by day, she serves as the ship’s physician’s assistant and then donning old pants at night as a disguise, she becomes a regular member of the deckhands’ social gatherings.

 After I read the opening scene and some others in the book that address sex and its place in a young woman’s life (further into the novel there is a scene in which Patricia Kelly consummates a marriage with one of the men she meets on the ship), I wrote to Linda with a question about publishing for the young adult market.

Sheila
I am sure you are asked this a lot, Linda, but I am curious: How did you know that you could include sexual curiosity, information about prostitutes of the times, and wedding night consummation in a novel for young adult readers? Was it hard to find a publisher who felt this was okay? I know this sounds silly to question in a society that has lots of sex on TV and other media younger people watch, but it did strike me from the opening on.

Linda
I didn’t purposefully set out to write a “Young Adult” novel. I was actually clueless about the YA market. I wanted to explore what it might have been like to be a girl, a young woman, coming of age in the 18^th century. A girl aboard a ship, trying to go back to the land of her birth, to claim what she felt was rightfully hers. I wrote in first person, from a young woman’s point of view, because I wanted the intimacy, the intensity of that p.o.v.

When my agent said she wanted to sell Star-Crossed as a YA, I wasn’t at all sure that was the market! But I was thrilled when Knopf wanted to buy it, and publish it as YA. Knopf! Yes!

I believe the glimpses of sex, the portrayal of prostitutes was accepted because none of it was gratuitous or lurid. And it was all thoroughly researched. That’s the way it was, in the 18^th century.

There is no way I could have bowdlerized the manuscript. Plenty of people think they can set out to write a YA novel, as such, but I couldn’t. I’m working on a novel now, a contemporary novel about three teenagers. But I’m not writing a YA novel, per se. I’m just writing the story, exploring the characters. It is whatever it is.

Sheila
I like how you think. I believe that when we have something in us to explore and to write about, we need to write the book we have in us to write and then see what editors and agents want to label it. If we try to meet genre descriptions as we are writing our books, we may short shrift our material by starting to shape it to an idea of the market rather than to the reality of what our material is asking of us to deliver on the page.

I am interested to know how you went about researching for the book you wanted to write. What was your experience?

Linda
I had the time of my life researching Star-Crossed! It began with a slice of living history, as I was working aboard the HM Bark Endeavour, a working replica of Captain Cook’s historic ship. My husband and I worked along with thirty-odd other landsmen, all of who knew little about sailing a three-masted sail-driven 18^th century ship, but who were willing to learn.

I helped sail the Endeavour from Vancouver to Hawaii, three weeks at sea, sleeping in a hammock, standing my watch, climbing aloft to make and furl sail. It was during this three-week stint that I realized that indeed, “girls” can do this kind of work.

When I got off the Endeavour in Kona, Hawaii, my work was cut out for me. For the next five years, I researched the mid-18^th century from a European context. According to my research, the old romantic ballads of women dressing as men and going to sea are based in fact because of the economics of the times. Reading maritime, social, and political history, I learned more about the Seven Years War than I ever imagined (or wanted to know!) I visited maritime museums in England, France, Spain, and America. I went to the Caribbean. I immersed myself in the period, while writing the story from an orphaned teenaged girl’s perspective. And I read 18^th Century novelists to gain insight and absorb voice.

During this time, my husband and I sailed our own small sailboat from Hawaii to Tahiti, and spent the summer on the boat. This gave me a chance to write Star-Crossed in a most appropriate setting.

Sheila
I am really impressed with the way you submerged yourself in your material and the lifestyle that you were writing about. Do you have advice to those who want to write historical and/or sophisticated stories for young adults or other audiences?

Linda
I’m not sure I have any advice — I’m still feeling my way in the dark. I don’t do vampires and I don’t do wizards. All I know is that I imagined a character and put myself in her place. I researched, and I wrote about issues that are important to me. I gave it my all; it took me six years. And I got lucky, finding an agent then an editor who championed Star-Crossed. Timing and luck do play a part in the publishing game.

If I have any advice, it’s to write what you love; the money may (or may not!) follow. But write what you are passionate about.

Sheila
I know it’s been a couple of years since the book came out. I’d love to have an update on how you are doing, how the book is doing, and how having it out in the world has impacted your life.

Linda
I felt validated when the New York Public Library chose Star-Crossed to be among the Books for the Teen Age — 2007. I felt validated when a 7th grade girl in West Virginia wrote an epic poem based on Star-Crossed, which her teacher was thoughtful enough to send to me. I fell validated when readers bother to write and comment on Star-Crossed, or to ask about my next book.

One of my lifelong dreams has been to write and publish novels. While it’s a great feeling of accomplishment to be published, I’ve learned that the greatest joy is in the actual writing, the discovery.

Sheila
Linda, thank you so much for answering the questions and for bringing Star-Crossed into the world. It was a fabulous read and brought to life many aspects of life for women and men in the 18th Century. Though circumstances were different, the human urge to seek a good life against all obstacles and the ways in which people come together, are separated, and reconnect resonate. So do the very real concerns and decisions before Patricia Kelley concerning her survival and her wish for independence.

Your book provided me with a great read. I am going to share with Writing It Real subscribers some of the techniques you use for creating a living, breathing protagonist of her times and vivid sense of place in your novel. I can’t wait to read the next book, whether that is the one you mentioned about the contemporary teens or the two your website promises for a Star-Crossed trilogy.

****

Taking a Lesson from Linda Collison’s Writing: Weaving Character and Place to Make Historic Time Real
When Patricia Kelley stows away on the Canopus, we are introduced to the times and place through her senses:

I spied an open door ahead, near the bow, away from the glow of the wicks. A short door, as if to a dwarf’s cottage. Lifting my skirts, I scrambled for it, ducked inside, and felt my way among damp casks, heaps of hempen sailcloth, and bundles of rough cordage until I reached a place so small I could neither stand nor stoop but had to lie down and wiggle myself in.

A perfect little casket it was, black and airless, but padded with sails. I hunkered into it, losing myself in the stiff folds. A hot panic rose in my chest, the panic of being trapped in a small space, yet I managed to quell it by counting my breaths. After thirty I lost count, but the sound of my own breathing soothed me. Like the whiffle of sugarcane on a balmy night, the memory of a sound from my childhood.

A few days later, Patricia Kelly describes herself and surroundings this way:

Hunger cramps tormented me. I nibbled at the cheese I had brought aboard, tied in a bundle under my petticoat. It tasted salty and smelled as bad as my surroundings. Tang of pitch, moldy flax, the acrid piss of rats. My clothes were damp, my skin itched, my legs twitched. Feeling around my immediate surroundings, I discovered a small cask filled with nails that I emptied into a heap. A perfect chamber pot.

Soon, she sleeps again and wakes to a new motion:

The vessel was pitching and slamming into the waves with such force it seemed it would break apart. The wind shrieked in the rigging, amplified by the wooden hull; it must’ve been blowing a gale. The cats retched, heaving up the vile contents of their stomachs on my bed of sails. I was flung about and became so sick I thought I’d die–indeed, wished for death. Miserable, frightened, I longed for sleep so as not to be awake when the final moment came.

It isn’t long, of course, before she is discovered by the young man who will become her love interest. “Awake? Thought you might sleep to Madeira,” the young bosun’s mate of the merchant ship announces to the young girl, who tells him where she is from and why she has stolen passage. “…But if the Old Man finds out there’s a stowaway on board, he’ll likely put ye off in Madeira,” the young man claims.

When hours later, he comes again with a bundle of clothes, including a pair of pants, for Patricia Kelley to put on so she can get a breath of fresh air on deck, he says, “It’s after midnight. Most of the watch has nodded off and there’s no moon to reveal ye. But just in case the Old Man pops his head up on the quarterdeck, ye’ll be less of a sore thumb. Dressed as a Jack.”

“Jack?” she asks and he replies, “Jack, Johnny–a common sailor….Now step lively, we haven’t got all night.”

Sensory information, ship jargon and historically accurate pronunciations blend; before we know it, we have slid right into Collison’s scenes, alongside her book’s characters.

Later in the ship’s passage, once Patricia Kelley has become the physician’s assistant and is not longer at risk of being left at port, she describes a storm:

Out of the black sky the wind hit, slamming Canopus onto her side. I grabbed for something to save me–t’was the grating over the ventilation hatch that kept me from being flung to the larboard rail. Water flooded the decks, swept over me; I was sure I was drowning. But the boat groaned and righted herself, leaving me clinging to the grating like a clump of seaweed. I choked, snorted, and gasped for breath; my nose, my throat, my chest burned. Above me the flailing legs of sailors dangled from the yard and I wanted to scream “Hold on!” but could not form the words. Miraculously, the men did not fall. They held on, regained their footing on the rope, and continued to work. I felt a fierce admiration, nay, a love, for these rough, stouthearted men.

Another gust of wind hit, bullying the boat, holding her down as if to drown her. But this time the men on the yard were ready and kept their footing as they wrestled the still sail, rolling it, tying the gasket around it, subduing it a last. Canopus recovered, pressed doggedly on. One by one the sailors dropped to the deck, dripping wet, their fingers bleeding, faces ruddy. Canopus now scudded along on a scrap of sail. The wind howled with a vengeance, driving spume like fog across the deck.

It is clear that because they are fully imagined, the details of the wind, the boat, and the sailors have drawn us into Patricia Kelley’s surroundings at the same time that they demonstrate the bonds she has made with the crew.

Much later in Collison’s story, Patricia Kelley and the ship’s physician Aeneas are dealing with a yellow fever epidemic onboard another ship. Here the details draw a very putrid picture, but one necessary for understanding the times and the world Patricia Kelley lives in:

“Nae proper cots,” Aeneas muttered, taking note of the situation. The floor was cluttered with buckets spilling over with black vomit, bloody feces, and rust-colored urine. I squelched a gag and would have escaped topside for fresh air, but the sound of a man crying kept me down in the abyss. I followed Aeneas to a dirty hammock where a young man lay naked but for a rag between his legs.

“Please, sir,” the wretch panted. “Please shoot me, run me through with your blade, throw me into the cool water so the sharks may chew my bones.”

Linda’s training and experience as a nurse, her experience sailing, her research into the years she is writing about, and her desire to fully evoke the life of a young woman aboard a ship in the 1700s merge throughout the book. (For another example of the author’s skill in writing evocative scenes, read another excerpt from the book’s opening.)

Now It’s Your Turn:
List your experience, all you can think of, in the following four areas:

• Educational
• Work related
• Recreational
• Geographical

Notice which of your experiences has an extra charge of energy for you right now. This experience might not be something you have spent the majority of your time doing or experiencing to be what excites you right now.

Next, write a passage in which you evoke yourself in a scene from that experience. Be sure to name what is in the surroundings with terminology particular to the event. Be sure to write about what you are listening to, touching, seeing, smelling and tasting. If there is someone to speak to, write some dialog.

Now, ask yourself if there is something you’d like to investigate about that time and place? Would you like to do your investigation in the times in which you experienced the event or would you like to investigate on behalf of a person who lived awhile ago or even in the future?

Write about what you would need to find out about to do your investigation.

Write about what you need to fully remember to about your experience to make your writing lively and lifelike.

Outline a work plan for how you might research for the story you are imagining–what places will you go, what will you read, what media will you watch, who will you talk to?

If you are still excited about this project–go for it! And read more of Star-Crossed to give yourself a terrific model for how you will draw your main character in his or her distinct situation. Linda Collison’s book and her desire to write it will prove motivating, instructive and inspiring.