BLINDSIDED
The making of a Novel
I have written 16 books that vary
from Civil War stories to Suspense, Crime fiction, and Westerns. Even though
they vary widely in subject matter, they have one characteristic in common. All
of them contain romance as a subplot because love is a part of life as I know
it. Until I started writing Blindsided, I had never written a story that could
be classified as Romance. I saw the opportunity as a challenge. I wanted to
write a realistic young adult romance, so the reader would say; “I’ve been
there and done that.” Here is how I went about preparing myself to write
Blindsided.
High school is an emotional,
often traumatic time in the life of most young people. There can be many
negative experiences such as bullying, fierce competition, anger, and other raw
feelings that leave us emotionally crushed. Important decisions that shape the
rest of our lives have to be made, and many of them aren’t made easily. To
write this type of story effectively, you have to get in the mood emotionally.
The best way is for the author to reacquaint himself with the sights, sounds
and the smells of a typical high school. I read sections of high school
textbooks to bring back the feeling of what it is like to cram for a test. I
did a lot of research on the things taught, not because I wanted to include all
of those details in my novel, but because I wanted to return to the years when
I was a teenager. I dug a football out of our utility room and bounced it in my
hand. And then I thought of music. No one knows when music was invented, but it
is thought to be a representation of our body’s natural rhythms. Play a rock
song that has 150 beats per minute and you will feel your heart speed up. As I
wrote and rewrote sections of Blindsided, I found music that represented the
things that were happening in the story. I found a couple of love songs, the
kind they played at the senior prom and listened to them over and over again.
Another important scene in the story happened during football practice. I found
several fight songs and played them over and again. I watched videos made at
football games where the excitement was building, and coaches and players had
furious expressions as they glanced at the clock on the scoreboard. In the
videos, cheerleaders danced along the sidelines with emotions that varied from
ecstasy to agony, and I remembered what it was like. You experience a lot of
emotions during your high school years, some of them so raw that your mind
veers quickly away to something more pleasant. Occasionally, an event can slip
up on you, and you find yourself, well . . . blindsided. It is what this novel
is all about. I hope you will get a copy when it becomes available and read it.
I also hope you enjoy reading the story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
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