All tagged writing

What Would Happen If Your Culture Was Disappeared and Erased?

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

Once upon a time, the Comanche people ruled the Texas Panhandle. Then they were disappeared and erased—saw both genocide and “cultural genocide.” Tammie’s Destiny, Volume 6 of my historical romance series, tells the coming-of-age story and forbidden love between an adolescent Comanche girl from a reservation in New Mexico and a young man from a Texas millionaire ranching family. The tale’s background is the generational hatred between Texans and Native Americans, seemingly making such a relationship impossible.

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Jim Crow is Always Watching!

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

As I said, Jim Crow was not real for me. I grew up in Amarillo’s white ghetto, totally unaware of how “coloreds” lived their lives in N-town on the other side of the tracks. I had no idea of the unofficial brutal system that completely controlled their lives, and of the horrific consequences for even the slightest violation of Jim Crow’s unwritten laws: disappearance, lynching, indefinite imprisonment, beatings, castration, gang-rape, black-listing from employment, burning down of houses, and more—much more. Even today, I find it hard to believe that this was happening in the city and the region where I grew up. … But I’m not a black, so “they didn’t come for me.”

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Memories

Sara Stratton
being an author

I’m different. I don’t want my memories to die with me. When someone I have known dies, part of my sorrow is that most of their memories have died with them. Most people don’t leave behind, when they leave this world, long diaries or extended memoirs or annotated albums of photographs or audio-videos or carefully-crafted CDs of their lives. And after a few years, even what memories they have left behind are stored in a box and stuck in a closet somewhere, and forgotten. Their memories died with them, in effect. I don’t want that to happen in my case.

So I write novels—historical novels, which are really my own history; romantic fantasies, which are the romances I lived or wish I had lived; tragedies, which entail the sad things that have happened to me or to my loved ones during my life.

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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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Do You Get Writer's Block? (I Don't & Here's Why!)

Sara Stratton
being an author

“Writer’s block?” someone asked me. “Do you ever have writer’s block?” 

“What’s that?” I answered.

If I were in my 20’s or 30’s, I’m sure I would have it. But in my 70’s? … I don’t have time. … There’s so little time and I have so many stories to tell! Furthermore, every time I meet a “character,” by which I mean a really interesting person, by which I mean a person who starts telling me his or her life story and it sounds like a novel, I immediately start imagining a new novel, based on that person’s life story.

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Why I Write Historical Fiction

Sara Stratton
being an author

Through the stories I tell in my novels, which are centered in-and-around the fictitious town of Mackenzie, I narrate the history of Amarillo, Texas and the Texas Panhandle, but using the genre of historical novel, rather than using so-called objective history. Each character embodies a different part of the region’s society, culture and history, during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.

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Writing About Forbidden Themes

Sara Stratton
being an author

In writing my stories, I have to keep in mind that certain themes are forbidden.

I’m not talking about pornographic material or sex scenes that might be too explicit for some readers. And I’m not talking about political correctness in my choice of words for describing different ethnicities and groups of people. I’m talking about certain cultural and historical themes, which in some countries, government censors would not allow, and which in this county, could cause my book to get “black listed” among certain groups of readers.

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WHAT’S THE BEST THING ABOUT BEING A WRITER?

Sara Stratton
being an author

I’ve reached the age—my seventies—at which I hope I have something worth telling. I’ve seen a lot, done a lot, been a lot of places and met a lot of people. Hopefully, I have learned from all my experiences, and so I have something worth telling people. And my way of telling people is through my novels.

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