An American Family Portrait
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SHOW NOTES:
In this series of podcast episodes, I take a look at some of my memories of writing the American Family Portrait series. Today’s episode: A middle-aged man attempts to write poetry from the point of view of a 15-year-old girl.
- One of the challenges every author faces is creating believable characters of different time periods, ages, races, cultures, gender and species.
- The scariest challenge for me is writing from the point of view of a woman.
- The Pride and the Passion, my novel set in South Africa, is the first book I wrote entirely from the point of view of a woman.
- In The Colonists, I have a 15-year-old female character who is a poet, Anne Pierpont. After several failed attempts at writing poetry from her point of view, I turned to two experts for help:
- Judith Deem Dupree graciously agreed to let me use one of her poems that fit Anne Pierpont’s character perfectly. You can read it in The Colonists, page 377.
- My daughter, Elizabeth, a teenager at the time, wrote a love poem from Anne Pierpont’s point of view and did an excellent job. You can read her poem on page 417.
- I credited both Judith and Elizabeth for their poems in the Acknowledgement section of The Colonists. If you don’t read the Acknowledgments in novels, you should. It gives you a personal insight into the character of the author and the writing of the novel.
CLICK HERE to start reading the American Family Portrait series in minutes!
Other episodes in this series:
VIDEO
- Why I Write Christian Historical Fiction
- The Incredible Power of Historical Fiction
- The Making of The Puritans
- The Making of The Colonists
AUDIO
- Sports on Sundays: Keeping the Sabbath in the Days of The Puritans
- My 13-year Odyssey to Getting Published
- John Winthrop: The Forgotten Founding Father
Jack’s Next Post
AUDIO: The real-life story of a stolen 300-year-old Bible
