Our guest author today
is Andrew Joyce. He left high school at seventeen to hitchhike throughout the
US, Canada, and Mexico. He wouldn’t return from his journey until decades later
when he decided to become a writer. Joyce has written five books, including a
two-volume collection of one hundred and fifty short stories comprised of his
hitching adventures called BEDTIME
STORIES FOR GROWN-UPS (as yet unpublished), and his latest novel, YELLOW HAIR. He now lives aboard a boat
in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with his dog, Danny, where he is busy working on
his next book, tentatively entitled, MICK REILLY.
How important is
research when writing a book?
I
would say that it’s very important. In my first book, which takes place in the
last half of the 19th century, I made two mistakes. I had the date
of an event off by one year and I had my hero loading the wrong caliber
cartridge into his Winchester rifle. I would have gone blissfully throughout
life not knowing how I had erred if not for my astute fans. Both mistakes were
quickly pointed out to me in reviews of the book. One guy said he would have
given me five stars if not for the wrong caliber bullet mistake. I had to
settle for only four stars. Lesson learned!
How did that
change the way you approached your next book?
My
second book was a western and the protagonist was a woman. The research took
about three months. I had to know everything from women’s undergarments of the
late 19th century to prison conditions for women in those days. (I
sent my heroine to jail.) That kind of research was easy. Thank God for the
internet. But then I had to do some real research. Molly (my protagonist) built
up her cattle ranch to one of the largest in Montana, but she and her neighbors
had nowhere to sell their beef. So Molly decided to drive her and her
neighbors’ cattle to Abilene where she could get a good price. She put together
the second largest herd on record (12,000 head) and took off for Abilene.
That’s
when I had to really go to work. I wanted my readers to taste the dust on the
trail. I wanted them to feel the cold water at river crossing. I wanted them to
know about the dangers of the trail, from rustlers to Indians to cattle
stampedes.
This
is how I learned about all those things and more. First of all, I found old
movies that were authentic in nature. I watched them to get a feel for the
trail. Then I read books by great authors who had written about cattle drives
to soak up even more of the atmosphere of a cattle drive. That was all well and
good, but it still did not put me in the long days of breathing dust and being
always fearful of a stampede.
That’s
when I went looking for diaries written by real cowboys while they were on the
trail. After that, I found obscure self-published books written by those cowboys.
Then it was onto newspaper articles written at the time about large cattle
drives. That’s how I had Molly herd the second
largest cattle drive. I discovered that the largest was 15,000 head, driven
from Texas to California in 1882.
Are historical
facts all that is needed to be researched? What about geography, indigenous
people, weather patterns, and the like?
My
next book took place in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. Here new
elements were added such as wolves and the extreme weather as adversaries.
Dogsledding was also involved. I have seen snow only three times in my life and
I have never dogsledded. I knew even less about wolves. I had to learn about
those things. I had no idea what it was like to travel across a wilderness on a
dogsled at seventy degrees below zero. I also had to acquire knowledge about
the dogs themselves, especially the lead dog. I learned about all that by doing
the same things I did for my second book. The old diaries were the most
helpful. As to the gold rush, there was plenty of material in the form of
self-published books by some of the participants. Some were never even
published, but I found copies of them in the archives of universities and
historical societies. Again, newspaper stories printed at the time were very
useful. Concerning wolves . . . I read everything I could get my hands on about
wolves—their habits, the pack hierarchy, the alpha male, and the different jobs
or tasks the males and females have while hunting.
Did you do
anything differently for your current book, Yellow
Hair?
The
book is about the Sioux Nation from 1805 to 1890 and I had to know both points
of view, the white man’s and the Sioux’s. Getting to know the whites’ take on
things was easy. There are many, many books (non-fiction) that were written at
the time. I even found a book written by Custer detailing his strategy for
wiping out the Sioux entirely. That was hard reading. And, again, there were
universities and historical societies whose archives were a great help.
As
to the Sioux’s point of view, there are a few books that were dictated to
newspapermen years later by the Indians that took part in the various battles
that I weave into my story. I found a lot of material from Native American
participants of the Little Big Horn, written twenty to thirty years after the
fact.
But
I wanted to immerse myself in the Sioux culture and I wanted to give them
dignity by using their language wherever possible. I also wanted to introduce
them by their Sioux names. So, I had to learn the Lakota language. And that
wasn’t easy. There is a consortium that will teach you, but they wanted only
serious students. You have to know a smattering of the language before they
will even deign to let you in. I had to take a test to prove that I knew some
Lakota. I failed the first time and had to go back to my Lakota dictionary and
do some more studying. I got in on my second try.
In conclusion,
how would you sum up your thoughts on doing research for a book?
It’s
time-consuming and sometimes frustrating. But it is also a blast. Every new
discovery is like finding the mother-lode.
Any last
thoughts?
Only
that I would like to thank you for having me over, and by the way, the three
books I alluded to above are:
