I am coming to the end of a first draft of a novel set in 1919 Denver. I wasn't around then so I've done a lot of research to get a feel for the time and place. I know the Denver of the 1950s and '60 when I spent my childhood in various Denver south side neighborhoods. I know Denver from 1978-88 when I lived and worked there as a young man. My soon-to-be wife and I lived in apartments in Aurora, SE Denver near Evans and Monaco, and City Park South. We rented a house in Cherry Creek North (before the first wave of 1980s gentrification) and bought a house in Platt Park where I walked to my job at Gates Rubber Company.
None of this really matters when writing a book set two generations earlier. Nobody alive in 1919 could envision the Denver of 2019 unless he or she is 100-plus and in possession of their faculties. My Uncle Bill was in his 90s when he passed. He was born in Denver in 1924 and told some great stories of the city in its pre-WWII days and after. Most were true, I suspect. My parents told good stories of their youth and young married life.
World War I was my grandparents' war. Each generation gets to have one (or several). My grandfather Shay was a cavalry officer with the Iowa National Guard. He served on the Mexican border with Pershing and later followed the general to France. He didn't know my grandmother then but she served as an army nurse in various base hospitals near the front. My sister Eileen unearthed her war diary and transformed it into a family book project. While trying to put some context to Grandma's story, I developed a fascination with the teens and twenties of the last century. Not only the war and flu pandemic but what came after. Prohibition. Women's suffrage. Labor unrest. The First Red Scare (Bolsheviks!). The rise of the KKK. The heyday of U.S. railroads. Automobiles taking over the streets. Passenger travel in aeroplanes and zeppelins The tens of millions of deaths by war and disease gave everyone an acute sense of mortality. They also seemed to put Americans in motion. Unmoored from farms and small towns, they left to find work in cities as industry boomed. Cities were where the action was.
All four of my grandparents arrived in Colorado in 1919. A farm boy from Iowa, a nurse from Baltimore, a farm girl and small town postmistress from Ohio, and an Irish immigrant from Chicago. They were all in their twenties. In my book, I decided to place four young people in Denver in 1919 and see what happened. That was 450 pages ago. I have changed the storyline several times as my characters come alive and muscle me out of the way. This is what writers hope for and what all writers dread, especially those who outline their books. There's a good reason for outlining. If you have a multi-book contract, it keeps you on track. You may have a story in mind but are uneasy about its end. For some, that structure makes sense.
For me, I like to get the story started and see where it goes from there. I have no book contract although will entertain offers. It's exciting not to know where the story is going. Thing is, I have written my final chapter three times when it looked as if I knew where it was headed. It's chapter 38. I'm not writing chapter 36 and 37 to link things up. I may revise the final chapter again. I like the art of revision. It's a puzzle.
That's enough about the book. The old belief among writers is that it's bad luck to discuss a book while writing it. The fear is that you'll get tired of talking about it, that it will lose some of the magic that goes with making up a story. As for my book, all you know is that it's a novel featuring four or more characters who all end up in Denver in 1919. My hope is that you will buy the published book just to find out what happens.
Stay tuned...
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