IN PRAISE OF PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIAL

ByLee Ann

This week I’ve continued to thoroughly enjoy writing Chapter 5. Partly because it’s another chapter full of big developments for both Muskoka and the Muskoka Colonization Road, but mostly because I have plenty of primary source material.

Primary source material includes all kinds of eye-witness accounts, recorded in diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspaper reports, letters. It is to a non-fiction book what compost is to a garden. You can produce good stuff without it, but with it your results are stronger and more colourful.

In this chapter I’m writing about a major upgrade to the first 19 kilometres of the Muskoka Road. This topic could be kind of technical and boring – we’re talking about gravelling and planking here – except that I have the 1870 engineering specs that the government sent out and the engineering drawing hand-done by the supervising engineer. The specs include details like this for the gravelled part of the road:

  • “If broken stone is used it will be so broken that the largest will pass through a ring of 2 1/2 inches [6 cm] in diameter.” I love this! So that must mean that the supervising engineer – the wonderfully named  Thomas Nepean Molesworth – carried such a ring with him?

And for the planked portion of the road:

  • “Pine or hemlock planks 8 feet by 3 inches [2.4m X 7.6cm] resting on wood supports 12 inches [30cm] wide by 1 foot [30cm] thick, fastened thereto with five foot [1.5m] cut spikes driven diagonally at each end of a plank.”

Sounds like a pretty sturdy road, right? Not really. Because we have the letters written by Harriet Barbara King, a self-described “emigrant lady” who took a stagecoach up that same stretch of road the summer following its re-engineering. Here is what she had to say:

“Oh! The horrors of that journey! The road was most dreadful – our first acquaintance with ‘corduroy’ roads… Your brother with his arm round me the whole way (I clinging to the collar of his coat), could hardly keep me steady as we bumped over every obstacle. In the worst places I was glad to shut my eyes that I might not see the danger.”

The Muskoka Colonization Road was a bone-jarring, dangerous, painful route into the district for almost 80 years. I can tell you that, or I can show you that, through eye-witness accounts from primary source material. The humus for my story!

WRITING TIP: Play Can Result in Progress

ByLee Ann

My theme for Chapter 5 is “Don’t Work So Hard.” That’s the theme for my process, not Chapter 5’s contents. Chapter 5 is about a 10 year period that marked two key turning points for the Muskoka Road:

  1. It extended north out of Muskoka and into the Parry Sound District; and
  2. It met its biggest challenge: the railway.

My biggest challenge to date has been the tendency to work really hard and worry about the imperative of getting the first draft done. It’s a pressure-cooker of my own making; one I’ve decided to get out of. Whew! Too hot in there.

So I will write Chapter 5 in a different way, having as much fun as I can. I started by reviewing the outline – yes, that wonderful document! – and reminding myself of the stories I get to tell in this chapter: New road-building technologies.  Another harrowing description of a stagecoach ride up the road.  “Manitoba fever.”

I’ve paused to savour the richly named cast of characters:

  • Thomas Nepean Molesworth, engineer.
  • James Hankinson Jackson, storekeeper, census-taker, community-builder.
  • Anson Greene Phelps Dodge, lumber baron and railway promoter – who was known as “Alphabet” Dodge because of his habit of signing his name with all three of his initials.

And I’ve been reading late-1800s newspapers from Pennsylvania. Muskoka was heavily marketed there, to “sportsmen” looking for adventure and escape from the coal-fueled city. The personal columns carry tales of several fishing clubs and a group of judges and “other prominent jurists of the State” camping on Lake Muskoka. Not all trips were idyllic. One man was emotionally scarred by the sounds made by a bullfrog he was trying to kill for dinner. Another sustained a serious cut on his knee in an unfortunate flag-raising incident. But one fisherman vowed he had found the definitive protection against Muskoka’s black flies: forget the mix of pennyroyal and almond oil, what you really want is equal parts tar and pork fat.

Hey, cottage opening weekend is coming up. You gotta be ready!

I’m not sure any of these stories will make it into Muskoka’s Main Street. But they’ve given me a sense of the district during a certain brief time in its history. That’s fun. That’s also progress.

WRITING FROM AN OUTLINE, PART 2: The Quilt Approach

ByLee Ann

I’ve heard it said that there are two kinds of writers: planners and seat-of-the-pantsers. Planners work with outlines, index cards and detailed notes to plot out their storyline to the nth degree, then sit down and write it all up. Pantsers just start to write and find out what happens next by writing – it’s all quite organic.

I like to do a bit of both. In my last post I talked about how writing from an outline keeps me anchored in my story and focussed on what I want to say. That’s true – but I also like to dive into a topic and see where it takes me. I’d chafe against too much pre-defined structure, but just jumping into a book without any idea of how I plan to tell the story? Nope – too scary for me.

Here again is the Outline for Chapter 4 of Muskoka’s Main Street. Chapter 4 outline The outline is my high-level structure; I’ve defined the entire book to this level of detail. The elements within the outline might change a little, but basically this is the book I am going to write – and also, by the way, the book the publisher agreed to buy.

Each bullet point is a topic I want to cover in the chapter. I’m not sure yet which order these will appear in the final version, but that doesn’t matter. I will write each topic separately, using the “quilt approach.” I love this approach. It works like a making a quilt: you make separate, individual “squares” first; you sew them together later.

With this approach to writing, each bullet point in the outline – each topic – is a “square.” I don’t have to start writing in any particular order. I can write the “square” I am interested in writing that day. Pick a topic, write it. Then write the next topic that grabs my attention. Writing is more fun this way, and I think when you write what appeals to you, your enthusiasm gets onto the page.

After I’ve written a few “squares”, I figure out what order they go in. Since Main Street is a chronological story, it’s pretty easy for me to arrange the topics by the date they occurred. But I don’t necessarily write them in that order. In fact, as of this week, I’ve drafted all of Chapter 4 except the Sidebar about the Free Grants and Homestead Act and the part about Captain Hunt arriving on the scene.

I feel like writing about the Free Grants Act next. More on that soon!

WRITING A BOOK FROM AN OUTLINE, PART 1

ByLee Ann

My outline is my anchor and my roadmap. Written back during the earliest discussions with the publisher, it provides a high-level, chapter by chapter blueprint of how I intend to tell this story. Here’s what the outline for Chapter 4 looks like. Chapter 4 outline I’m drafting Chapter 4 now and it’s big! Lots was going on in Muskoka between 1865 and 1870: logging moved into the district, the first steamship was launched on Lake Muskoka, townships were starting to have enough people in them that they were able to incorporate and govern themselves, settlers organized an association and published a guide for new pioneers – and new pioneers flooded in after the new Free Grant Lands and Homestead Act passed.

Every single one of these events had a direct impact on the Muskoka Road. True! If the road wasn’t being ripped up by the stagecoaches hauling loggers and equipment, it was being bypassed by ever-so-grateful travellers who could take a nice boat ride for at least part of their journey. As the townships formalized their existence, one of the first by-laws they passed was invariably one to deal with road maintenance. And the settler’s guide had a few choice words for how the road had been laid out in the district – like hello, we can’t go in a straight line, every straight line leads to a lake, or a ravine, or a cliff here!

It all makes for fun storytelling. But I get easily side-tracked – there are so many fabulous Muskoka stories. Little boys who left home to join a “shanty gang” in the bush. Individual settler families and how they hacked a farm out of a boreal forest. The wheeling and dealing of the community leaders. Without my outline I’d fall right off the rails of the main storyline.

It’s all about the road. It’s not enough that a particular fact is fascinating, funny or stranger than fiction. Any person, any event, any new law or innovation I write about has to have a direct bearing on the road. Of course, I have to give a certain amount of context so the reader gets the significance of the road and its role in the broader history of the district – but I have to walk a fine line. Too much context and we lose the point of the story. Too little and the story becomes dry and boring.

When I find myself deep in a side story, I come up for air and ask, where was I going with this? The outline brings me back to my story.

HOW LIFE AFFECTS WRITING

ByLee Ann

I had two blog posts drafted this week – one a “how-to” about writing from an outline, and this one, which is a more honest reflection of what’s been going on.

First, I went on vacation. You might not have noticed that, because I had stockpiled some posts and scheduled them for release while I was away. But then I came back and two major things happened, which is why I have not posted for a couple of weeks.

  • One, I did not feel refreshed and ready to get back to work. Book writing, magazine article writing and giving workshops did not energize me as they usually did; I felt exhausted at the prospect of working.
  • Two, my friend Sue died suddenly of a heart attack at age 45.

Of course, any death causes me to ask the big questions: Am I doing what I want to do? Am I where I want to be? Are the people in my life the ones who I want? If the answer is no to any of these, it’s time to change. Because time might soon be up.

My answers were all yes to the big questions. But there was still the exhaustion. And as I thought about it, no wonder. January and February were relentless. Productive, but relentless. I wrote two magazine articles, conducted six workshops, completed a long and complicated request for arts funding. I drafted two chapters of the book, and then re-drafted them many times, trying to find my voice. Instead of feeling energized, I was exhausted. The fun had leached out of my writing life.

So obviously, it’s time to change. Here’s what I’ve decided:

  • I’m going back to writing three days a week, instead of five.
  • I am not writing any more magazine articles until after the book is done.
  • The workshops are almost done for the season. Depending on where I am with the book, I’ll reassess whether I do any in the fall.
  • I will no longer hold myself to the imperative of writing a weekly blog post. I’ll probably post once a week, but there will be times when I won’t. And that will be OK.

Because until my time is up, I want to enjoy my time.

MUSKOKA: Then and Now

ByLee Ann

This week I slammed up against some contrasts and realizations about Muskoka. Funny how that happened.

I was revising Chapter 3, which means I was deep in the 1860s of Muskoka and its first white settlers. The gruelling business of hacking out a place to live in a boreal forest. Scratching in seed around massive tree stumps that would take seven years to rot before they could be dug out of the ground.  Creating through strength of will and muscle some fledgling communities.

Then one evening, I turned to my latest issue of Muskoka Magazine to relax. This monthly periodical shares updates on what’s happening in the region, plus profiles on “Muskoka lifestyles.” Full-page colour ads for contractors who build exquisite lakeside getaways.  Villas available for fractional ownership. Festivals, cottage décor trends, and recreation options in communities mature enough to have a Heritage Foundation.

Slam.

Is this even the same place? Well, of course it is. But at the same time, a different world.

In the 1860s and 70s, people were trying to make Muskoka into something it is not. From a raw wilderness of forest, lakes and rock, white settlers came and tried to tame it into farmland, neatly organized into 100 acre lots. And for a while it seemed to work. In the early 1860s the farmers along the Muskoka Road produced an astonishing amount of crops, even in the worst soil Morrison Township had to offer. But once the forest’s thin layer of humus had been depleted, the farmers were left staring at the impenetrable granite of the Canadian Shield.

Thankfully, today, we aren’t doing that any more. We found out the hard way that only about 10% of the district is suitable for farming. The rest is Precambrian rock, lakes, rivers, and – once again – forest. These very elements are what we treasure about the region. Instead of trying to hack this wild district into farms, we go there to enjoy nature. And through the efforts of such organizations as the Muskoka Heritage Foundation, we try to preserve nature as much as possible.

My happiest realization is that Muskoka is a district known and loved for recreation rather than back-breaking struggle. The district’s residents have all its splendour in their back yards. People come here to play, to escape the city, to rest and enjoy seasonal family havens. For plenty of families, this has been a multi-generational joy. In fact, at exactly the same time the early settlers were trudging up the Muskoka Road, so were the first tourists. And of course, long before they arrived, the first nation people also enjoyed the area for its abundant natural gifts: game, fish and breathtaking beauty.

But experiencing the “Muskoka lifestyle” doesn’t come cheap. We are a long way from the free grant lands offered to settlers in the 1860s; Muskoka is now one of the most expensive addresses in Ontario. So imagine first these families of immigrants, many with nothing more than dreams in their pockets, trudging up the Muskoka Road in creaky wagons dragged by oxen. Then flash forward to glossy pages of designer cottages. This to me is the starkest contrast of all: an area once literally free for the taking is now far beyond the means of most people.