Like a squirrel whose forgotten acorns sprout and become trees, I once tucked an idea away in the depths of my twenty-three-year-old mind, only to discover that it had grown into an oak while I wasn’t watching.
The idea dropped in my lap about twenty-five years ago, during my first year as a teacher out on Fishers Island. One of my students decided to take me exploring. We crossed over the old Fort Wright parade grounds, encountering the skeletal remains of rabbits, raccoons, and possibly even sheep, heading through the grass and brush to a small hill in the relatively flat landscape. Vines grew over scrap metal and old, rusted out cars.
“You’re gonna love this,” Kevin said to me, looking back over his shoulder with a grin. And was he ever right!
It was the remains of the enormous gun pits and bunkers of the hundred-year-old Fort Wright. Small lime stalactites clung to dank corridor ceilings, leached from the cement by a century of rainwater. Crumbled stairways led down to dark rooms filled with damp leaves and dirt. Steel ladders led from level to level, with no rails around the openings in the floors and ceilings—just gaping holes.
It was like a visit to another time and place. And it got me thinking.
Wouldn’t this be an amazing setting for a children’s book?
I loved it. I was mesmerized by it. I visited it many times during my years on the island, and each time I felt transported from the everyday world to another place altogether. And each time I said to myself: this would be a great setting for a story.
I messed around with the idea a little, but I wasn’t really serious about my writing back then. I was just playing around. And then life got busy, and I had two kids, and we moved off of Fishers and got even busier.
But that little acorn was planted in my brain, lying forgotten in the dark. . . just waiting. . .
Until this fall, when I put aside the young adult novel I’d been revising to write something which would honor my brother.
And suddenly that seed burst to life, like it had just been waiting for the right conditions to shoot up and throw itself into full leaf. Here I am! Your portal to a new world! Betcha forgot you’d planted me, huh?
I felt like I’d smacked right into the trunk of that tree and fallen back on my rear, looking up in wonder.
Story ideas are like that. Seeds planted ages ago, from bits of overheard conversation, scraps of family history, old hopes and dreams. Any of them can sprout at any time—if the conditions are right. And one of the ways to improve conditions for a writer is to keep a journal.
I’ve kept journals since I was in fifth grade. I can peek through them and find a whole forest of acorns raining down on me. So when I had an opportunity to meet with Eileen Robinson, editor of Move books and a former executive editor at Scholastic, I loved her suggestion that I write a journal from Cara’s point of view as I completed my Sepia revision.
With that in mind, I decided today that Cara needed to write about a visit to Fort Mansfield, at the very end of Napatree Point. Fort Mansfield was built at the same time as Fort Wright, but much of the fort was washed away by the Hurricane of 1938. The combination of Fort Wright and Fort Mansfield create the opening images of Sepia.
I walked the mile-long beach out to the point, pushed through the brambles, and climbed onto a gun emplacement. Well, I got Cara’s fear of falling down all right, I thought as I edged my way over and around the bunkers. But what a view!
I’m posting several pics of this morning’s field trip here. You’ll find some of the gaping holes, the crumbling stairs, and the drop-offs that Cara worries about in these photos. But I hope that you’ll also find acorns here. Maybe the vistas remind you of something you’d like to write about, or the overgrowth of vines sparks a different memory. Maybe it’s a fear, or a dream. Write it down! Go out on a field trip of your own! The more acorns we plant, the bigger our forests grow, full of ideas. . . full of stories.
