A Look Back at Brainstorming for Angel Sister

Working on the narration of my third Rosey Corner novel, Love Comes Home, has me thinking about Rosey Corner again. I did so enjoy getting to know those Merritt sisters plus one and sharing their lives through ten or so years with you readers. I dedicated those stories to my mother and her three sisters. Their stories about growing up in a small rural community during the Great Depression were what lit the fire in my imagination to bring a family of sisters to life in that time period. While the story is fiction, their memories of how it was to grow up in the 1930’s is threaded throughout the novel and I did base the personalities of the sisters on those of my mom and my aunts. Not Lorena, but the older three. Kate was a can do character like my mom. Evie was the older child who struggled when things didn’t go the way she wanted and Tori was somewhat like my mom’s younger sister who married young and loved to fish but could dissolve in tears easily. Of course, as my fictional characters came to life they took on their own personalities and separated from the memories I had of Mom and her sisters. So, while Mom and my aunts inspired the story, they did step back and let my Merritt sisters come to life in their own special way.

Since I’ve been living in Rosey Corner again as I read Love Comes Home for an audio version, I thought it might be fun to go back and look at my very first planning/plotting for my Rosey Corner novels. It always surprises me a bit when I read the plans I started with and how things changed as the story began to flow from my fingers to the computer. That’s the good magic of storytelling. I thought you might find it fun to read the beginning of my idea for Angel Sister, the first Rosey Corner story that led to the others. So, here goes, starting with the first questions I asked myself.

Basic Sisters Plotting

What is my basic theme?  What is my spiritual theme?  What is my story?

I think my basic theme is that life goes on.  No matter what else happens, the world never stops. Life and everyday stuff keep happening. Personal tragedies, world events, both change life that is happening, but it doesn’t stop. The day ends and the day begins. The world keeps rotating. People die and people are born.

At this particular time in history (the 1930’s), depression and hard times are dogging most people. Some have given up. Most are still trying to scrape out a living, put enough food on the table to feed their children and themselves. Find a way to keep going when some familiar ways are closed off. And sometimes the harder times are, the more people turn to the Lord for help. The shadow of war is upon the country but most people didn’t notice it in the mid-thirties. They were too busy trying to survive. Besides many of the men had just come home not that long ago from the 1st World War.  They didn’t expect another war so soon. It was only a little over twenty years between them. One generation fought in the first World War that was the war they thought would end all wars and then their sons fought the WW II. The first World War was a new experience for Americans. They’d been in plenty of wars but none across the waters. And now there are motors and airplanes. And poison gas and bombs or shells.

But my story is not a war story except perhaps the influence war or being in a war has on each individual and that person’s family. We are all changed and shaped by everything that happens to us.  What our parents are like, how they love one another and us, what they have to do to make a living. The good things that happen like loving people and being successful and the bad things that happen like tragic accidents and losing jobs and getting angry and making mistakes.

What is the spiritual part of the story? Learning to depend on the Lord. Trusting in spite of bad things happening. Not blaming God when bad things happen. Not expecting the Lord to be master of a treasure chest of rewards that if we just know how to push the right button will open and spill out on us. People during the depression may have thought the Lord had turned his face from them or perhaps they thought they were being punished for not worshipping enough or allowing bad things to be in the world. Drinking and gambling. Prohibition had ended in 1933 after 14 years. The church people might see that – the end of Prohibition – as a setback. Victor has had problem with alcohol all along. Never made his own but was sometimes given moonshine. There were probably end of time preachers with all that was happening. Dust storms. Severely cold winters. Too hot summers. Tornadoes and hurricanes. All causing deaths in America. And then wars all over Europe with some predicting the US was going to be involved. Others doing what they could to keep U.S. out of conflict.

But what’s happening to my family? To my little town of Rosey Corner. Perhaps we have an unofficial mayor of Rosey Corner. Everybody knows Press Merritt has always been the one to make things happen in Rosey Corner. If Press speaks a word against it, it’s not going to happen. Somehow Victor will have to stand up to Press. Make some sort of stand that will free him from his father’s disapproval. He sort of has a double whammy because of his preacher father-in-law also thinking he’s not man enough for his daughter and not the Christian example he should be. So far I don’t know what that is.

We have a lot of unusual characters. We might not want to overload the story with them but perhaps just use Phoebe and Brigham (Fern and Barclay Lindell in the story.) {Barclay becomes Graham when I start writing.} And in truth all of us are sort of weird characters when you get to know us well. Hopefully loveable characters at any rate. Have to have the weird aunt too. {That was because my mom sort of had a weird aunt.} Aunt Gerdy. Perhaps Barclay will be accused of doing something he didn’t do. Something a gentle soul like him could never do. Fern is half crazy, but Barclay is not. Strange but not crazy or mean. He just moves to a different tune than most other people.

I think Barclay is going to be the reason Victor has to stand up to his father.  Barclay will be accused of doing whatever and it will be up to Victor to clear him or protect him.

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Okay, that was my planning page before I jumped into writing Angel Sister.  If you’ve read the Rosey Corner stories, you’ll know that I didn’t do some of the things I thought about doing in the story. Graham is a great character but he was never accused of doing any kind of wrong. Instead, family secrets were stirred up and came out. I don’t even mention Lorena in my planning here. Or Kate and her sisters. That might be because I already had Kate, Evie, and Tori in mind. As for Lorena, she may have been a gift character who showed up on the church steps and changed the course of the story. She turned out to be a great character and grows so much in all three stories. Maybe someday I’ll get to finish Lorena’s story. I was blessed to be able to write three stories about this family I came to love. With me narrating the last story, Love Comes Home, all of the characters are coming back to life in my imagination. I’m surprised anew about how Fern changes through the story and how love and life keeps flowing through the good and bad that happens to the Merritt family in Rosey Corner.

Did you enjoy a peek back at my beginning thinking as I try to find a jumping off spot for my story? If you’ve read my Rosey  Corner stories, do you see how my plotting changed as the story went along? If you haven’t read them, does this make you interested in maybe giving the stories a try?