How Does a Book Begin?
Today, August 17, 2021, is the official publication date of my middle grade nonfiction title, Threads of Peace: How Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Changed the World. Nine years in the making, the book comes loaded with grateful acknowledgments. Without many helping hands and healing voices, this book simply would not be.
Where and when does a book begin? Is it even possible to pin down the moment when an idea first rolls in and starts taking up space in a writer’s mind? Or are “where” and “when” the wrong adverbs to employ? Because maybe this isn’t about time or place. A book idea doesn't emerge as a single event.
Everyone wants to know, “What was your inspiration?” The truth is, I’m not a big fan of inspiration. I tend to push new ideas away—I have too many already and not enough time to take them all on. But this one kept showing up. This one took root slowly.
Photo courtesy of Vasantha Krishnaswami
Maybe it goes back to a long time ago, to my childhood discovery of a clutch of photographs my mother had saved from her own youth—photos of Gandhi, including one of his funeral pyre.
Such a tragic end to a fascinating life. Still, for years, it never felt like my story to tell.
So “What” isn’t the right adverb either, apparently.
How, then? How did this book begin to feel as if I could dare to write it? It was another book that pointed me in this direction, even when I didn’t know at the time that I was starting to research one of my own.
Gerald Horne’s The End of Empires: African Americans and India traces a history I’d never read about before, about the long relationship between African Americans and India.
Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
For a long time, a lengthy umbilical cord had linked the largest “minority” in what was to become the world’s most powerful nation and the largest colony of the once potent British Empire.
And although Horne’s book notes that Martin Luther King Jr.’s adaptation of Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolent resistance is the most visible example of this rich history, it made me realize (slowly, because that’s how these things work for me) that this example, well-known as it is, had never been written about before for young readers.
So—how? You just have to trust that you will know when an idea has staying power. You have to trust you will grow into the skills a book calls you to employ.
