Messerschmitts, Walter Mitty, and Me

From kindergarten through graduate school, I sat in a lot of classrooms. At least half that time was spent staring out the window, daydreaming. I’m not sure why it took me so long to realize that if I just wrote these daydreams down, I’d have a book. Those first attempts were pretty shaky, but eventually I tried writing from first person standpoint, and my novel DAYS OF SMOKE took off with a life of its own. I don’t know how else to describe using first person, other than to call it Walter Mitty-ish. This is a lesson to budding writers – experiment a little, vary the way you write, to help you find your voice.

I believe one should write about something for which they have a passion, and I’ve been passionate about airplanes since I was a kid. I was very lucky as a boy – I had nurturing, loving parents, who encouraged any interest their three sons’ showed that didn’t include beating the tar out of each other. That’s how I came to get a ride in the copilot’s seat of a 1927 Ford Trimotor, an experience which cemented my interest for life. In fact I now live on an airport, in a hangar. I suppose I took up aeronautical writing partly in self-defense – now, when I drool over planes for hours at a time, I can at least tell people I’m doing research. This is funny, but it’s also another lesson – if you’re even half as passionate about as a subject as I am about flying, you’ve got a powerful source of inspiration to draw upon.

But inspiration can come from anywhere. For example, the German squadron commander in my novel was inspired by the principal of my junior high school. Like the fictitious commander, Mr. Thompson was a no-nonsense administrator who nonetheless turned out to be a really nice guy. I say that even though on the first day of school back in 1969, he paddled me. Let me tell you something, THAT was inspiration.

I’ve been a pilot for more than thirty years, and I took a number of the novel’s flying scenes straight out of my logbook. I’ve flown a lot of hours with a guy named Charlie, who takes pity on a starving writer and lets me keep my hand in at the controls. Most of these flights took place on beautiful days, and they inspired descriptions of flying that were almost as much fun to write about as they’d been to live.

But one scene was based on a less than ideal flight. As we approached the airport that day, the engine seemed to be losing power. The instruments were all in the green, but the engine continued to rev down, and Charlie announced he was cutting the landing pattern short. As we turned base leg, the engine quit cold. The propeller continued to windmill at first, but after Charlie dropped the landing gear and flaps, we slowed down enough for the prop to freeze in flight. I distinctly recall one propeller blade pointing straight toward heaven – I didn’t wanna think about where the other blade was pointing. But Charlie kept a cool head and set us down light as a feather. I’d have kissed the ground after jumping out, except that fuel pouring from under the cowling had already formed a gassy lake under the plane.

My most intense inspiration came from family history. I was researching Nazi mass-murders in Ukraine for a pivotal scene, when I stumbled across a brief description of the destruction of Pochep, the village from which my grandfather had emigrated in 1923. I knew I had to write about this, keeping in mind all the while that these doomed people were relatives and friends of my direct forebears. I became obsessed in the two weeks it took to write just nine pages – I woke up one night at 3:00 AM after a vivid dream about an infant victim, and I fired up the computer to get it down while it was still fresh in my mind. While this process could be a little disquieting at times, the result had greater impact than any writing I’ve ever done.

The lesson from these stories is that we all have a lot of life experience to use as inspiration. Mix it with a little imagination, and you can create compelling storylines.

I believe that fiction can sometimes tell a more profound truth than history. But that doesn’t relieve an author from doing extensive research. I conducted interviews with several ex-Luftwaffe pilots. Prime among them was Gunther Rall, Germany's third ranking ace, credited with an astonishing 275 aerial victories. General Rall flew the same type of aircraft – over the same area of Russia – as my protagonist, and he generously shared with me the mindset and experiences of a top German ace. A writer in my position simply cannot get luckier.

But it was US combat veterans who taught me the true extent of Hitler’s threat. The most influential of these vets was George Moore. Near the end of the war, George’s unit had been advancing through Germany when out of nowhere a tremendous firefight broke out. There was nothing worth defending in the area, only a tiny village called Gardelegen. They fought all afternoon and into the evening, before the Nazis finally melted away into the woods. Next morning, George was sent out as part of a patrol. They found a burned barn with more than a thousand bodies inside, political prisoners and Jews from some concentration camp. That’s the only reason the German army fought a delaying action, so they had time to roast those poor people. This atrocity struck more deeply into George’s soul even than watching his best friend die next to him in combat. The lesson here is that you cannot overestimate the value of doing eyewitness research, if possible. Not only do you stand to learn facts from a unique perspective, you might also find yourself a good friend, like I did.

Now, selling the book isn’t necessarily the end of your trouble. For instance, when my book cover was first sent to me, I was appalled to see that the graphic artist had mistakenly used a picture of a Spanish-built Messerschmitt. No amount of explanation could convince the publisher that this was a glaring error. It wasn’t until the release of the ebook that reader comments finally got ‘em concerned. Thus it was that one morning I awoke to find a brand new cover in my email – I bet I sat and stared at that correct picture for more’n half an hour, with a big sloppy grin on my face. Only then did my eye wander down to the bottom of the page, where I noticed that my name was now misspelled. If there’s a lesson here, I guess it’s to keep your sense of humor intact – you’re gonna need it.

In closing, I’d like to make two recommendations to anyone looking to get published. First, find yourself a good writer’s critique group. My own – the Word Weavers – sure taught me the finer points. And second, stick to your guns. In trying to sell DAYS OF SMOKE, I received a stack of rejection letters so thick it could’ve replaced the Sears and Roebuck catalogue in an outhouse. So keep writing, keep querying those publishers, and don’t let a few rejections get you down.

Not even sixty-nine of ‘em, like I got.