I’ve always put a little bit of myself into my writing. It’s hard not to do that because a writer usually refers to his or her own experiences when writing. You kind of have to. But everybody has their limit. Madison Kleigh and the Onyx Stone, Mind Child, and Beyond Blue Take Me Home to Earth all have bits and pieces of me scattered throughout them. I limited them to small experiences pulled from my past. It’s what gives a writer’s writing life. But to really make your story come alive, you have to pull out the big guns. And that is much more difficult.
I recently took a Master Class with Neil Gaiman and one of the things he said was, “If you’re going to write… you have to be willing to do the equivalent of walking down a street naked. You have to be able to show too much of yourself. You have to be just a little bit more honest than you’re comfortable with…”
I am currently starting a new book, Madison Kleigh and the Secret of Youth. In the book, Madison’s father and grandfather plan a trip to Brazil to learn the fate of her long lost grandmother. Madison loves the outdoors, often spending the night in her tent setup in her backyard so, she begs to go. In her mind, this trip is going to be a fun adventure but it turns into a very lonely experience. With her father off training for his next space mission and her grandfather chasing down information about his wife, she is left with only the village children who don’t understand her ways or her language. They treat her poorly and tease her, leaving her by herself. She faces the most lonely time of her life.
I’ve never told anybody this, but when I was about thirteen, Madison’s age in the book, my father and I were homeless. We had sold everything we owned and we lived in a tent in a campground for one summer. My father would go out looking for work and I would stay in the tent alone all day. When I was a kid I spent most of my time romping through the woods, catching turtles and frogs and fishing. Staying in a tent all summer seemed like it would be the best life I could possibly have. But, there I was, just me with nobody to share the experience with and it was an extremely lonely time. I remember days when it would rain and I would sit in my tent, trying to stay warm. There was no electric, no telephone, no television, no nothing. I was abandoned. I wondered what my mother and my brother and sisters were doing, my aunts and uncles and cousins, my grandmother. I wondered if they were watching TV or playing games with each other as the rain splattered outside their windows- the same rain that splashed in the mud in front of my tent. I wondered if they ever thought of me sitting in that damp tent all alone but most of all, I wondered why they didn’t come to see me. The loneliness was crushing.
I’m going to use my tent experience in the next Madison Kleigh book. It’s my version of walking down a street naked. Madison is me when I was thirteen. And when you finish reading that part of the book, you will know just what I went through and what I did every day. Through my character, Madison Kleigh, You will feel what I felt, but you won’t know it was me. And that will bring the story to life. Like Neil Gaiman taught me, I am going to be a bit more honest than I’m comfortable with.
It was a lonely time, but I got through it. And Madison is going to get through it. And anybody going through a lonely time can get through it. And that is what the next Madison Kleigh book is going to be about.
A lot of people are struggling with this #COVID19 lock down. But like me in that tent, like Madison in the jungle, we will get through it.
Story and photo by Jeffrey David Montanye
#JeffreyDMontanye #MadisonKleigh #SelfPublishing
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