I’ve attached myself to favorite quotes or songs throughout my life. I only need to hear the opening notes of “She Loves You” to be a young teen again or read my favorite quote from Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixlan to be transported to the cross-country trip my husband and I took in a VW bug just after we met.

Lately, my favorite saying is a Taoist proverb: “We can never know whether something will be good or bad. And that’s okay.”

This may seem like a leap but that’s the way I approach writing my novels. I can’t possibly know, until it’s done, whether my efforts will produce anything readable or not.

And that’s okay. I love to write. It’s an eternal itch that I just gotta scratch.

In the world of writers (and in other artistic fields as well), there are creators who meticulously plan each chapter and each plot twist before they begin writing, even to the point of creating biographies for their characters. We call those folks “planners.”

Then there are those who have a character growing inside their heads (and yes, it does feel like that) or are struck by an event or a place, and they just begin, not having the foggiest idea where they will end up.

We call those folks “pantsers,” as in flying by the seat of their.

I am definitely in the pantser category when it comes to writing fiction.

In the past, I’ve tried planning out my books, carefully outlining the plot chapter by chapter. But in spite of my best efforts, that careful outline is put to one side as soon as I start writing. I finally figured out that it’s because I get bored if I know what’s going to happen.

I started my sixth Carding, Vermont novel last October with a character new to the town. My daily noodling (and yes, it is supremely important to write every day so the book doesn’t die) progressed for a while. Then I realized I wanted to take this book back in time, to the middle of the 20th century, to be exact.

So I started again, this time with more enthusiasm.

I have a good feeling about this character, a woman in her early thirties. She’s kind of battered by life. But she’s also steely. I know she was part of the war effort in some way but as I restarted the book, I wasn’t quite sure what she had done. Then serendipity came calling in an email from a friend who knows how much I love books. And in the email was this link: https://www.owlinamerica.com/owl-at-the-library/

The essay is partly about the book that the movie The Monuments Men is based on. I loved that movie but I had never read the book so I decided to get it from the library. That’s where the serendipity began.

It was shelved near the bottom of a bookcase, and as I bent down to look for it, I found another book entitled The Women Who Wrote the War by Nancy Caldwell Sorel. It’s a biography/history of the pioneering women reporters who risked their lives to tell the folks back home what was happening in Europe during World War II. I literally felt a lightbulb go off in my head. Now I knew what my main character had done before she showed up in Carding, Vermont.

I’ve only read a few pages of the book so far but I just had to share this passage with you. It’s from an a profile of Adolph Hitler written for The New Yorker in 1935 by a woman named Janet Flanner. It was a three-part profile of the hollow, evil man who would wreak such havoc on the world, and the following paragraph opened the last installment. It gave me chills of recognition.

“As a ruler of a great European power, Herr Hitler is the oddest figure on the Continent today, but even as a humble individual, he would still be a curious character. With a limited mind, slight formal education, a remarkable memory for print, uncanny powers as an orator, and a face inappropriate to fame, in fifteen years he planned, maneuvered, and achieved an incredible career. He is a natural and masterly advertiser, a phenomenal propagandist within his limits, the greatest mob orator in German annals, and one of the most inventive organizers in European history. He believes in intolerance as a pragmatic principle. He accepts violence as a detail of state…”

Does that sound like anyone we know?