By
Brigid Amos
A writer may use many springboards to dive into her
novel. An historical event, personal memory, or location may be the source from
which flow story and character. My jumping off point is a place where I can
walk dusty streets, take cover in dilapidated buildings, and climb sage covered
hills. In the case of my forthcoming debut novel A Fence Around Her, that place is Bodie, California.
Bodie’s gold mines boomed in the early 1880s and soon
declined. People moved on. Neglect and fires wiped out most of the buildings.
What was left is now a California State Historic Park that draws visitors from
all around the world. On one of my trips, I swear I heard more German than
English spoken on the streets of Bodie.
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| A view of Bodie, California. Photo by Brigid Amos. |
You may wonder how a Nebraska writer became obsessed
with a ghost town in the Eastern Sierra. Before moving to Nebraska, I lived in
Northern California for ten years. I used to watch a TV show on a Sacramento
station hosted by a stocky fellow who traveled around the state reporting on
the lesser known points of interest. I couldn’t tell you now the name of the
show or the host, but I tuned in to get ideas for places to visit. In one
episode, the host went to Bodie, and this is hard to explain, but the story and
images of that lonely ghost town in the desolate, achingly beautiful treeless
hills triggered a feeling deep in my heart. The feeling wasn’t “I want to go to
that place,” but rather, “I have to go to that place.” Even further, though it
puzzled me at the time, I felt I had to write a novel set in that place.
In early June of 1997, I packed up my dog and camping
equipment and drove to Bridgeport, a charming little town in a verdant valley
in Mono County. I set up camp next to Lower Twin Lake, and the next morning, I
went to Bodie. I toured the Standard Stamp Mill, where enormous iron stamps
once pulverized ore into precious dust that yielded gold and silver. I stood in
the ramshackle houses where people had left belongings behind, even plates and
cups on the tables, as if they had decided that they’d had enough of the dying
town and up and left without a second thought. I climbed the bluff and looked
down at the scattered buildings, the last vestiges of a once prosperous mining
district. Finally, I visited the bookstore in the old Miners Hall and stocked
up on books that would serve as reference material for my novel.
I returned to Bodie the next year right before moving
to Nebraska for my doctoral program. Now, so many years later, the novel that sprang
to life in Bodie will soon be published, and though it is many miles away, I
hope that Bodie will be the springboard for many more novels to come!
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Brigid Amos is the author of A Fence Around Her, a Young Adult Historical novel set in 1900 in
the gold mining town of Bodie, California. A
Fence Around Her will soon be released by Clean Reads Publishing.
2 comments:
Brigid - I too get a great deal of inspiration from "place." I mentioned that to someone at the WWA Convention last week and she said, "Oh, I have to start with a character." That may be a good subject for a discussion panel at one of the conferences. Place-versus-Character. I suppose either way is fine so long as the reader is thoroughly engaged.
Karen Casey Fitzjerrell
Karen, I too find it really interesting that writers start out in completely different places (excuse the pun!) The one that I have a hard time with is starting out with a theme, although many writers say that is what they do. I always find that the theme emerges from what I'm writing, rather than the other way around. But I definitely think of the setting first, and then the characters emerge from that setting. To take that analogy one step further, the characters then tell the story.
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