On Bibliographies for Creative Writing

First I want to thank you all for your kind words at the passing of my brother-in-law.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the requirement in my class to do an annotated bibliography for a creative reading and my bewilderment about how that would go down and concern that we may have to do that in all of the writing classes in this program.

I met with my professor this week.  She said it's just an exercise for this class because we need to be able to do bibliographies in general.  Most of the people in my class, Intro to Graduate Studies, are not on the Creative Writing track.  She's just letting the "creative" people read a creative piece at the mini-conference instead of making us do a research paper.  She said this would generally not be required in the writing workshop classes, which is good.

I decided to use a chapter in my last novel where I need to do a little research on mental illness and the meds my MC would be taking.  The novel is almost done, and I'd probably feel relatively comfortable reading it to a crowd of students and professors.  The chapter I picked was funny in my mind - it's a dark comedy, so it's a dark kind of funny. 

This morning I read that section of the novel because I have to commit to the project tomorrow with some amount of detail. 

When I read it, I cried. In the scene right before the funny part I wanted to use, the husband of my MC's best friend talks about his wife dying.  She had died the day before in the MC's apartment.  The reason she's taking the meds is because she's overcome with grief.  There's no getting around talking about death.

There's no way in hell I'm reading that section.

I panicked for a few minutes and then decided to use the first ten pages of my new WIP, which is historical fiction and lends itself to research.  I'll use this research opportunity to decide on the exact setting and whether it will take place in a real coal town or one I make up.  I was planning on visiting the county where the story is set at the end of March anyway.  It will be more work than I intended to do for this project since the opening chapter isn't close to being done, but it will definitely be less painful.

On Writing Historical Fiction

My half-done NaNo novel is historical fiction.  It's set in a coal town in Virginia in the Appalachian Mountains in 1933. 

I suspected it was going to turn into a dark comedy because that's how my mind is skewed.  But I wrote the first half straight - with quirky characters but no funny, at least no laugh-out-loud-because-that-is-so-wrong funny.  I was surprised how much I loved writing it and how easily it poured out of me. 

Maybe historical fiction will be my genre for the long haul.  Or maybe I'll be one of those split-personality authors and write one genre with a pen name and another with my real name. 

The funny thing is that this novel, which is the last in the series but the first one I'm writing, might be mistaken for Christian fiction.  The whole of the series put together isn't - the overall theme is the struggle to find hope and carry on when there is no chance the characters' lives will get better.   Many of my characters lean on religion because there's nothing else to lean on, and there's no effect of this reliance except in the last novel and the first - where the ministers leave their pulpits and actually help people. 

But I digress....

As I mentioned in my last post, I decided to stop mid-novel instead of pushing through to 50K words this month.  One of my many reasons/excuses is I have more research to do for the middle section.  I need to figure out if and precisely how a car would make it over the mountain ridge from nort-central Tennessee to Virginia in 1933 and how long that would take.  I think they would need to travel north through Kentucky to a gap in the mountains, cross over, and then go south along the mountain ridge on the other side.  The US interstate highway system was in its infancy during that time.  I'm having a hard time finding a historical map of roads in 1933.  I may need to make it up based on my best guess, but I'd kind of like to get it right.

Because I'm a little sick of all of my Me, Me, Me! posts lately, I think my next few posts will be about things I learned while I was doing research. 

Today I must clean up my work area, which was completely trashed by my NaNoWriMo writing frenzy.  Tomorrow I will jump back in.

Central Kentucky Asylum for the Insane and Other Research

I hope to get back into writing mode this week.  *Fingers crossed*

While not writing over the last few weeks, I've been plotting and outlining several stories.  Maybe that counts.  In one of the novels, which I outlined during a parent orientation, the main character does some time in a mental institution in Kentucky in 1940 just before they stopped doing electroshock therapy.

I found several pictures of the mental hospital, Central Kentucky Asylum for the Insane, which has since been demolished if my sources are correct.  The site with the best picture, the one I wanted to post, says the information is copyrighted and that consent must be obtained to reproduce it.  And it lists no email address or phone number that I can find to request this information. 

It looks like the picture that I so desperately want to post here was taken from a book that's out of print.  I hope the web site (that won't allow me to reproduce the picture) got permission from the author.  There are three used copies of the book available on Amazon for just under $100, which seems a bit pricey. 

Here's the link if you want to see the picture and/or read the background information.  http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyjeffer/CentralState/CentralStateHospital.html

The story will not be an ode to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Only one chapter will be set in the mental hospital, although the character will be plagued with mental illness throughout the second half of the book.  How she and her family cope with it will be the fun part to write I think.

Mostly the stories I intend to write in this series are about how people in rural Appalachia survived during a period where things were unbelievably difficult.  The more research I do, the more I realize how easy I have it.  And the more I see how I actually have a lot of things in common with my ancestors. 

As I dig through the history of this time period (1830's through 1940's) and region, I think I'll post some of my research here.  Hopefully I'm not the only one that finds it to be intriguing.