How I Came Up With the Ideas for my Novel The Soldier's Journal

The Soldier's Journal

My original plan for writing a novel was to capture the events from my combat deployments in order to make sure they weren't lost over time.  These were events of courage that I felt if I didn't write them down, no one would remember the brave men that died or risked their lives.  With this as a goal, before I had learned about writing, I intended on writing a true story, maybe a memoir.  But I heard others tell stories that I wanted to capture as well, and these stories weren't mine to tell so I discarded the memoir idea in favor of a book of short stories.

When I began writing this book, I realized I didn't know a lot of the information, the details, to make it an engaging book, especially for the events that I heard third hand, and I didn't always have access to those that had witnessed the events.  It was about this time that I read Tim O'Brien's books and realized that I could write the stories as fiction by using the facts that I knew and the other details that I knew from my experiences to fill in the blanks, which ultimately wouldn't be true stories but probably better told stories.

My original manuscript was called The Soldier's Notebook.  My intention with this book was to present the Afghan War from multiple perspectives, American and Afghan.  This proved too difficult given my work schedule and access to individuals with the experience I needed to know about in order to write the book the way I wanted.  I still might write this book, but at the time it didn't seem possible.

At about this time, the U.S. Congress approved women for service in combat arms and special operations.  Simultaneously, I was reading a book on writing that suggested if you wanted to give your plot a face lift, then change the sexes of your protagonist or major characters.  The Soldier's Notebook had primarily been told from a male point of view, the only view I knew, and at the time the war was primarily fought with men as women weren't permitted in combat roles.

All of this combined into an idea that would tell a story from the point of view of the first female Green Beret to serve in Afghanistan.  I combined this with her father's journal that described the war in 2006 as opposed to her version of the war in 2019, which gave to stark comparisons of how the war had changed and yet how many of the elements had remained the same.

I divided up my true war stories between the female protagonist and her father and I also inserted scenes where she faces sexism from soldiers and officers.  I interviewed a number of women about their experiences in the Army and in elite positions in order to get a flavor for the type of situation she would face.

It took me a year and a half to finish my first draft, which I used as my thesis for my MFA in Creative Writing.  I've spent the last six months editing and redrafting and submitting to agents.  No luck so far.

In future posts, I'll outline my new strategies for getting my book published and tell you what is working and not working.  If I can't find an agent to represent me, I'll self-publish.  that means I'll have to figure out how to market my novel, I'll probably use Kindle Publishing, and I'll have to find a cover.  More to follow.  Wish me luck.

RR

Resources:

Five Reasons How and Why Veterans Should Write a Book