In the files of research for my two novels I had amassed a great deal of information about the everyday life of the people who settled southern Ontario in the middle years of the 19th century. In novels a writer uses these background details to add colour to a scene. But it’s important not to overload a story with facts, so much of this material has to be left out of the novels. But the information about everyday life was so compelling that I wanted to find a way to share more of it with my readers. One solution was to write a simple information book showing different aspects of pioneer life. I rejected that idea because I believe strongly that young readers become interested in history through stories. They need to be caught up in the lives of interesting characters to become hooked on history.
So I had a dilemma. I didn’t want to give just the facts about pioneer life but I knew that stories could take only a sprinkling of the interesting details I wanted to share. My solution was to create stories around a fictional family, just as a novelist does, but to include information pages after each story to expand on the details dropped into the stories.
I had decided that the stories in this book would grow out of the daily chores that pioneer children had to do. Repetitive chores, however, can be very boring both in the execution and in the telling. So how to make my stories interesting? In all our lives, in even the most boring of weeks, things happen that stand out, that make us run into the house shouting “You’ll never guess who I saw at the shopping mall,” or …”what happened at recess today.” So as I researched I kept alert for moments in the lives of those long ago pioneers when something happy, funny, sad or scary made a day memorable. Then I built my stories around such moments as Sarah finding the first egg of the season or Willy standing up to a bully at school.
Even with episodic stories, a book needs shape and cohesion if the reader is to feel satisfied at the end. I had decided right at the start of my planning that the story would follow the rhythm of the seasons—a natural choice for a story set on a farm. But as I created the characters who became the Robertson family, got to know them as individuals and realized that they had hopes and aspirations beyond the round of daily chores, I saw a way to create a story thread that would knit all the episodes together. And so it came about in the finished story that as the seasons turn and the Robertsons go about their necessary farm tasks, they also gradually prepare for the next big step in their lives—the building of a new house.
Excerpts from the acceptance speech for the 1995 Children’s Literature Roundtables’ Information Book Award given at the Serendipity Conference in Vancouver, February 1996.