How Finnigan Became: Part 2

Tony was working on a story for one of the sailing magazines and Karen was suffering from a bout of writer’s block. She thought creating a character and giving that character a name might result in the character revealing the story. Deciding on the right name was something akin to picking out a name for the baby you’re expecting. From nowhere, Althea Burnside popped into her head. And Althea did indeed begin to tell her story. Joel Finnigan was a significant part of it. But Joel didn’t speak to her the same way Althea did. Also, Karen likes to write haiku; so her prose tends to be spare as well. Tony, on the other hand, has the gift of the Irish storyteller, and a great fascination for history as well. Tony read what had become a novella and felt Joel speaking to him. “You really need more than two pages on World War II,” Karen remembers him saying. And so the collaboration began and Becoming Finnigan became.

Next time, we'll talk about Althea.

Becoming Finnigan is available as an e-book on kindle and nook and in paperback from www.amazon.com

 

How Finnigan Became

Where do you get your ideas?

It's a pretty sure bet that anyone who has ever tried playing the old subject and verb game has been asked that question more than once.

The answer is almost always the same:  damned if I know.

In our case, both individually and collaboratively, we don't get the ideas; the ideas get us.  From then on, it's a case of bolting the various pieces together and getting the engine to run.  The ideas come from what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Universal Soul:  the stories are swirling around out there in the universe and the writers are merely the channels they select to make their grand entrance.

Becoming Finnigan is a perfect example of that.  The boy/girl game is one of the staples of literature simply because it's one of the staples of life.  The great events of what Henry Luce called the American Century - the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and the upheavals of politics in America are the beams and joists that we used to knock together the stage on which this eternal drama was played.

Next time, we'll talk more about how the story of Joel Finnigan and Althea Burnside emerged.

Becoming Finnigan is available in e-book and paperback from www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com

 

Becoming Finnigan

After many years of writing together and separately for newspapers and magazines, our first novel Becoming Finnigan is being published by High Tide Publications this month.   It’s about life and love in the American Century, the choices we make, the impact we have on each other’s lives and the ability of love to survive in spite of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Through the process of writing and publishing, we’ve learned that there is a lot more to being a writer than writing.  And we’d like to share that with you.

 Karen and Tony Muldoon