Fiction Vs NonFiction

 

At the end of this month, I will be participating on a panel of authors from Scholastic discussing the value of non-fiction, titled: Three Reasons Kids Need to Read More Non-Fiction. During this discussion, I will talk about my debut historical biography, Unlawful Orders.  Preparing for this has set me thinking about my most recent books, some of their differences and similarities, and why both fiction and non fiction are valuable.  I'm putting down some of the things I have come up with for both genres.   

Fiction helps young readers learn empathy for others. Empathy enables building social connections that can prevent bullying, help children make friends, and ready them to receive help from others. Non-fiction helps nurture a young person’s “insatiable curiosity,” a term that had to be invented to describe the way the very young ask a thousand questions a day. Okay, maybe the number is really closer to a hundred, but you get the picture. They wake up each day with a desire to know more, and good non-fiction can be a fertilizer to keep their blossoming curiosity to from withering as they grow older. In the words of Albert Einstein: 

“I have no special talent – I am only passionately curious.”

I have entered both worlds in my writing career. A few years ago I penned Courage, middle grade fiction written to encourage empathy by immersing them in the lives of kids coping with a variety of issues. Among them are a child dealing with the recent death of a parent from cancer, and one who is just trying to live a normal life despite having sickle cell anemia, a chronic and sometimes debilitating illness. One child is homeless and friendless, another is feels he has to be an overachiever to meet the expectations of his adopted parents. Yet another kid is best friends with the daughter of the Chicago policeman who sent her father to prison. All these young people come together in a story about finding the strength to forgive and grant others second chances. I wrote Courage as a modern day version of the prodigal son story, in hopes it would entertain young people, and at the same time encourage readers to forgive others who have hurt them.

Unlawful Orders, my upcoming nonfiction book (Oct 2022), shares the true story of a family that deserves to be everyone’s role model. I love superhero stories, and tales of wonder-kids who save their dystopian world. But there is something extra in a stories about real human beings in real locations handling real events. And the Williams family saved lives and changed all our futures in more ways than one.

The book centers around one member of the family, James Buchanan WIlliams, “JB” who grew up in a small town attending a one-room schoolhouse - taught by his mother. She was the first African American to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico. How the school’s English department building eventually came to be named after her is a story all its own.

From there the story takes readers on a journey through the history of the twentieth century, with bits of engineering, aerodynamics, psychology, and medical science thrown in. After growing up on the family farm, JB went off to fight for his country during World War II. He and a hundred other Tuskegee Airmen staged what came to be known as the Freeman Field mutiny, an act of disobedience against a superior officer’s order that could have cost him his life, but that preserved his dignity.

After the war, JB headed back to college to obtain both an MD degree and a Master of Science in surgery, before moving to Chicago. The book tells how he became the chief of surgery in a major hospital while working to expand healthcare for the poor across the United States. His efforts included a trip to Washington DC and to lobby President John F. Kennedy for an end of discrimination in medical schools and hospitals.
He also lived long enough to accept a special invitation to attend President Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Dr. Williams and his two brothers not only worked to advance the field of medicine, they raised families whose members continue to excel in the fields of healthcare and of education to this day.

If you are interested, the webinar panel discussion will take place on Wednesday, April 27th at 2:00pm EST. I do not have access information yet, but I should have that soon and will update this post. I will also update my website with the information once I have it. 

Unlawful Orders - Black History Month edition

 April 10, 1945

The date doesn't mean much to most people. That's because most people have never heard of the Freeman Field Mutiny.  101 US Army Air Force officers faced a possible death penalty when they refused  a direct order from a superior officer while World War II raged. This exposed each man to a possible death sentence. 

 Years later, the men also earned Congressional Gold Medals in 2006 from former president George Bush.

This is a nonfiction book I wrote last year and that will be published by Scholastic in 2022 titled Unlawful Orders. 

The book is a biography of one of those young mutineers, following his journey from farm boy who enjoyed shooting rattlesnakes and not having to bathe every day, to renowned Chicago surgeon with a patient list that included Dr. Martin Luther King and jazz great Muddy Waters.  

This is the first of a set of posts that will follow this manuscript from idea  to sale to eventual publication.  Today I will show you how the idea came to me, a question I hear about almost everything I write.

Two years ago I had never heard of the Freeman Field Mutiny or Dr. James Buchanan Williams. I had been asked to write a series of short essays on mother's with black sons for a group called Mother's of Black Boys United, a support and lobbying organization.  They wanted things to post for Woman's History Month, and I found several captivating women to highlight. That included Clara Belle Drisdale Williams, granddaughter of slaves, daughter of sharecroppers, scholarship recipient, valedictorian, and mother of three doctors.  (The picture shows her at graduation from Prairie View College) 

I began by writing about her post graduate career as an award winning teacher  who single-handedly integrated New Mexico State University to earn a second degree, and ended up becoming fascinated by her middle son, James Buchanan, the mutineer.

In the height of World War II, James was a Lieutenant, training to become a Tuskegee Airman. At the end of March, 1945, he was transferred to Freeman Field in Indiana. There, he and the other black officers on the base were confronted by segregation. The commanding officer ordered them to sign a document agreeing they were unequal and accepting segregation.  

James and 100 other officers were arrested after they refused to sign their humanity away and obey their commanders order to admit their black lives did not matter when compared to the white officers on the

base. I think I fell a little in love with James Buchanan, and came to envy his future wife, Willeen Williams. (Pictured are James and Willeen in front of the New Mexico State University English department building named after his mother) I enjoyed reliving the day he graduated from medical school and asked her to marry him because he could not travel to Chicago to begin his internship without her. He became a first at many things in his life, and learned that even after studying in both the US and Canada, earning a masters degree in surgery and becoming chief of surgery at a major Chicago hospital, he still had to face people who thought he couldn't be a good doctor simply because he was black.

He went through life quietly, working for change to help tear down racial discrimination in  the military, in medical schools, and in hospitals at a time when Separate But Equal was a way of life. Like Forrest Gump, he was present at many of the turning points in American history. Unlike Forrest,  he served as an active participant in many of those changes. 

I wanted to write about him. I had no choice, especially since I had learned to love that man who spent many years in Chicago, not far from me.  As a woman who grew up with zero interest in history, the path to Unlawful Orders included months of in depth research to really see the man below the surface, and details of the time he grew up and practiced medicine.

In future months I will return to the subject of Unlawful Orders to discuss how the story helped me get my agent back, taught me some important differences between writing fiction and non-fiction, how the acquiring editor and author work together, the cover process, marketing,  and other steps until the final publication.