All tagged why write

Colleen and the Statue - The Movie

Sara Stratton
being an author, historical fiction

If I had to pick one of my novels to submit as a movie script, it would be Colleen and the Statue. The movie’s opening scene would be the novel’s Chapter 20, when Sgt. Nicholas Ruff, U.S.A. comes for his family in August 1865, after witnessing Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In war movies, the most emotional scene is when the soldier everyone thought had died, returns. Usually, this happens at the end. I would put it at the beginning, to set my story’s emotional tone. I would show Sgt. Ruff first slowly riding through his hometown in Nacogdoches County, Texas, accompanied by a platoon of Yankee cavalry, then going past the Ruff plantation’s Big House, and finally going out to the cabins where he had grown up as a slave. Along the way, I would zoom in on the faces of the spectators, to show their varied reactions to the totally unexpected return.

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A Pilot of the Flying Tigers - Character Development for Nadya

Sara Stratton
being an author, historical fiction

The first chapter of my latest novel, Nadya: The Restoration of a Flying Tiger, is autobiographical. The little boy, “Jimmy Dade,” is me. The man, “Howie Hill,” is one of the Smyer brothers—embarrassingly I don’t remember his first name … maybe “Paul.” I remember so well the day I met him. It was the first time I realized what war does to a warrior. Like Chennault, he was a hero, but no book has been written about him, and he hasn’t even merited a footnote. As far as I know, no one in Amarillo remembers him or knows anything about him. His mother, his father and his brothers are long deceased. The Air Force undoubtedly didn’t know that he had died and so it furnished no marker for his grave, wherever it might be. Again embarrassingly, I forgot to put “Flying Tiger Smyer” in my novel’s Acknowledgements, even though he was the reason I wrote the book.

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The Hardest Topic to Write About (Racism)

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

My novels all necessarily involve racism as an underlying theme. They take place in Texas—which is part of the South—during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when white folks like me were being forced by the Civil Rights Movement to confront racism head-on, instead of pretending that segregation, discrimination and racial animus either did not exist, or were no big deal.

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