When Mail Makes You Cry
Last week, I received an email from a reader of the Glasswright series. It made me cry (in the best of all possible ways). Here, edited a bit for privacy and length and preservation of Glasswright story plot, is the email (posted with permission):
Thank-you for writing about child soldiers in your books. And thank-you for your amazingly honest, guilt-ridden, and yet enduring character of Rani Trader. My name is [redacted], and I am an aid worker in Africa. When I am unemployed, I am a writer and a prolific reader. I want to thank-you for a set of characters that I could relate to, that were contained within the pages of a story that could also help take my mind off the stress. And for Crestman.... [H]e was the most accurate, enduring hope of mine, that he could be something normal.... [T]hank-you for drawing such an accurate portrait of young man struggling to come to grips with his future and his surrvival. It helped ME.
... Rani and Crestman were my coping mechanism through [redacted place name], for they reminded me of people I knew and of myself, when I got back into the REAL world. You drew some REAL, POWERFUL characters. Monny too.... I knew a Monny.
We had a man/boy/child soldier in the camp that we called Crestman, and your book helped me to relate to my relationship to him later on when I went home, and Rani's guilt about what happened to him helped me relate with mine. How Rani kept going with the name CRESTMAN ringing in her ears made me do the same. It's funny how we attach ourselves to stories. I am going back to my troop of boys in October, and I intend to offer them up your story (the second book) to see what they will do with it. Words are best for the healing process. I think they will appreciate it.
They've-I've been asked to draw pictures to express the experiences, but I think your story helped/will help more. To thank you for including child soldiers in your saga so that others might know and feel more acutely the tragedy of their existence, I'd like to send you a picture of our Crestman.
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Mindy here again. The aid worker included a beautiful drawing, a self-portrait of a tortured, conflicted child.
When I created Crestman, I did a lot of non-fiction reading, about child-soldiers in Africa - about how they lost their families, their homes, their roots, their souls. It is truly gratifying - if terrifying - to find that I got at least *some* of it right.
Mindy, grateful, once again, for how easy life has been
* * *
Mindy here again. The aid worker included a beautiful drawing, a self-portrait of a tortured, conflicted child.
When I created Crestman, I did a lot of non-fiction reading, about child-soldiers in Africa - about how they lost their families, their homes, their roots, their souls. It is truly gratifying - if terrifying - to find that I got at least *some* of it right.
Mindy, grateful, once again, for how easy life has been
(Anonymous)
(Anonymous)
Admittedly, there were a few occasions where I wanted to throw the book across the room – in as much that the situations presented were ones that drew me in enough to get upset about what the characters were doing. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Good authors will make decisions with their characters that make you go – buah? Sometimes. It’s part of the charm and draw of the books. As your reader stated, your characters feel real, with the way we get to see decisions that the characters are faced with and how they struggle with doing what’s right for them, from their point of view. It makes them easy to sympathize with and be drawn into their story.
I’m glad to see you have LJ and that you are working on something else. GIRL’s GUIDE sounds like it’s been fun endeavor for you so far. I look forward to reading more about it, and when it’s finally out in the markets.
Um, I'm glad you clarified the TBAR point (threw book across room) - in my experience, that's usually a bad thing! (And yes, my characters make bad choices sometimes - but based on what they know and who they are, those are the only reasonable choices, to them!