Tag Archives: writers

04.18.23
by

Shooting the Curl of AI

A Writer’s Nightmare

Suddenly, it’s upon us. 

We stand unprepared, all thumbs and fumbles, wondering what to do. Like always.

It’s AI, artificial intelligence, and it’s coming to get you. Elon Musk said recently that artificial intelligence “has the potential of civilizational destruction.” Never mind that he might have had selfish reasons for saying that. You’ve got to consider the possibility that he told the truth.

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash.

We’ve known for decades that someday machines would learn to think. I once read a futuristic short story in Playboy magazine, back in the days when we all read Playboy for the articles (nod, nod, wink, wink). In this story, a worldwide group of computers had been connected with one another. Their pooled intellect gave birth to an über entity which took over the world, cutting biological humans out of the picture. 

I don’t remember the story’s title, or who wrote it, but it appeared in the 1960s. 

So we can’t say we didn’t see this coming. 

But now, it’s here, arriving on our doorstep last week, in a COVID-style sneak attack. Remember March 12, 2020, when they canceled March Madness?

It now seems the second full week of April 2023 will be remembered as When AI Became a Serious Matter.

Playing Around

People—not scientists necessarily, but the kind of dreamy folks I hang out with, i.e., writers and philosophers—now report playing around with something called ChatGPT. In their playing around, they have discovered that ChatGPT can write prose that seems remotely like something a human being might have written. 

Enrico Fermi in 1943. U.S. Government photo, public domain.

Let me assure you, Dear Reader, I am not among those who have played with ChatGPT. I would not have been among those playing with nuclear fission in 1942, either. 

The first nuclear reactor, in the West Stands section of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. Drawing by Melvin A. Miller of the Argonne National Laboratory, public domain.

But I gather, from what those others are saying: The problem is not that one cannot detect the output is computer-generated. Rather, it is that for the first time one can imagine that in the future—for example, later this afternoon—ChatGPT or a similar program will get good enough that one can no longer tell the difference.

Never mind the potential end of world civilization; AI could impact writers. 

This is serious.

Colloquium

I took part in a recent colloquium of concerned authors. Scores, maybe hundreds, of authors attended. Many of these authors, unlike Your New Favorite Writer, earn all or part of their income by writing. 

I started out puzzled but eventually caught the drift. Or, rather, drifts. 

  • 1. AI programs will soon start writing better than we can . . . or almost as well as we can . . . and we’ll all go broke. Publishers will no longer need human authors. They’ll just push a button on a machine and get a book, ready for release. No royalties will be owed to any humans. The AI machines, we assume, will accept their wages in electricity and silicon.
  • 2. Since AI is already quite useful at discharging the kinds of tediosities with which we writers are burdened, some of us hunger to use AI programs or bots—or whatever they are—in our own writing practice. Not for writing, you understand. Oh no, never!! Rather, we would use them as slave labor for menial tasks—up to and perhaps including the elaboration of trial texts which the writer may then modify. Thus we would reserve the higher functions of authorship for us who so richly deserve royalty checks. This would be, I suppose, something like the way research professors use graduate students. In this sense, AI is merely a tool, like a dictionary or thesaurus, clearly beneath the mystical heights of creative writing.

But you’ve already seen, have you not?—It’s so hard to get ahead of you, Astute Reader—how in some vague way this second concern is already at odds with the first?

  • 3. So, to reconcile the first and second concerns, some participants declared we authors ought to embrace AI to whatever extent is warranted, so long as the publishers are required to attribute each published work to a specific human author—one who gets paid. 

It would take at least an act of Congress to make this happen. But a squadron of intellectual property lawyers is already cranking up its engines to bombard publishing contracts and book copyright pages with model provisions—“guardrails,” they call them—protecting authors’ rights to control the use of their product, and importantly, to get paid. 

This drafting of guardrail language, all by itself, strikes me as a Herculean task. But it may be necessary work, because as you know, what people can do, they will do. 

There is no holding back this tide of AI. It’s a giant wave, and we shall either find a way to shoot the curl or be crushed in the collapsing pipeline.

  • 4. Beside the three areas of concern already mentioned, there is another. It seems existing AI platforms already incorporate the output of human authors as a training aid. The chatbots are learning to write better because their creators feed them sample text from published books that are the copyrighted property of authors—without acknowledgment or compensation, as far as I can tell. 

It may be possible, through legal action by authors’ groups, to prohibit the use of authors’ works as training materials for AI bots, or even to claw back some form of payment for the unauthorized uses that have already occurred. 

It’s yet another messy area for the lawyers to sort out. But I take it as a mere corollary of two more basic questions: 

1. Who’s going to do the writing, people or machines? And,

2. Who’s going to reap the benefits, authors or publishers? 

Pardon my chutzpah, Gracious Reader, but I suspect we’re still missing the Big Picture. 

Story

It’s all about the power of narrative. I once heard a lecturer say that when it’s time for bed, kids ask for stories. They don’t say, “Mommy, please read me the telephone book” or, “Daddy, I want to hear a grocery list.” They say, “Read me a story” or even, “Tell me a story.”

Authors are storytellers. Even technical writers owe their jobs to the particular skill of stating scientific or technical facts in a way that allows readers to understand those facts as a sequence of events including a chain of causation. In other words, they tell stories, no less than novelists or playwrights do. What’s true for technical writers is even more obviously true for freelance journalists and for the authors of narrative nonfiction books. 

So, if we storytellers are afraid that publishers will gain access to computer programs that allow them to cut us out of the profits, ought not the publishers worry that they, likewise, will be cut out of the profits?

If AI can write as well as human writers, will there not come a day (perhaps next Tuesday) when you can pull a cell phone from your pocket and command: “Tell me a story.” And the phone will make up a story on the spot and either speak it or type it to you. Maybe it will even assemble a complex dramatic video for your entertainment. 

And—get this, Dear Reader— the product will be first-rate. It won’t be merely grammatical. It will be tense and compelling. Maybe not hilarious—humor is notoriously difficult, and it may exceed the capability of machines to learn. But they’ll be able to assemble great suspense and action films. They’ll do it all by themselves. You can order up an original story at the touch of a thumb.

Originality

Oscar Wilde in 1888. Photo by Napoleon Sarony, 1821-1896. Public Domain.

Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said, upon viewing a flawless forgery of an art masterpiece, “It has all the virtues of the original, except originality.” The same may be said of these future machine-generated stories. Readers, however, will still gobble them up.

BUT SO WHAT?  What difference does all this make? 

If we can get stories concocted instantly by our phones, what impact will that have on literature?  Surely it will mean authors and publishers as we know them will no longer exist—at least, not in any traditional framework.

Yet story will survive. 

If we look to our phones for stories, that’s only because story is a basic requirement of the human race. You might even say the capacity for story is what makes us human. 

One can easily imagine machines telling stories. 

One cannot imagine machines needing stories told.

Only humans need that. And those who hear stories can also invent other stories. In fact, some of us can’t help ourselves. 

So story will survive. Humanity will go on. There will still be human storytellers.

I’ll still be here, writing the old-fashioned way, regardless what the machines may be doing. Whether I’ll be paid is another question; but then, I’m not being paid now. 

It’s not about the money. It’s about the story.

Keep reading. Keep writing.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

08.25.20
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Six Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood #4

Today we continue our series on “Six Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood.”

In our first three installments, we covered (1) achieving literary lionhood immediately, (2) actually writing something, and (3) getting feedback on your first draft. 

Once you have gotten that feedback, you can use it to revise the first draft into something better. You might think it will then be time to submit your work for publication. 

But first, Dear Reader, let us mention another step you should not overlook or skip in your understandable haste to be published. You can perform it while you are revising; or earlier, as you seek feedback; or even while you are writing the first draft. 

You can actually do this step from the first moment you become a literary lion. In fact, it is an essential part of being a literary lion.

Step Four: Associate

Writing is a lonely occupation.

Alone, you put words on paper. Alone, you revise those words. Alone, you submit your work for publication. And when your book, story, or poem is not chosen—it is you alone who faces the rejection.

A lonely pen. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.

It takes strong character and steadfast purpose to keep going. 

To counter the loneliness inherent in the craft, you will bless yourself and others by forming as many friendships, alliances, and acquaintances as possible in the literary community. Think of it as a “Lonely Pens Club.” 

A quick way to get started on this is to attend a writers’ conference.

The Writers’ Conference

Real testimony from writer and literary lion Larry F. Sommers:

I remember the first writers’ conference I attended, not that long ago:  The University of Wisconsin Writers’ Institute, one of the nation’s premier events, held every (non-COVID) spring in Madison. 
Writers, agents, editors, publishers, and writing coaches thronged the halls and meeting rooms of the conference venue for four glorious days. Some of them I knew already. A couple of the event’s organizers were UW writing instructors, Christine DeSmet and Laurie Scheer, old friends of mine. Three or four members of my writers’ critique group, Tuesdays With Story, were fellow attendees. But there were hundreds of other people, previously unknown, just waiting to be met.
As I chatted idly with these folks, attended workshops with them, conversed with speakers, teachers, coaches, agents, and various kinds of promoters, it dawned on me: “THESE PEOPLE ARE MY TRIBE!”
Some of them are as different from me as it’s possible to be. They’re working on stories and projects far removed from mine. But all of us know the thrill and the terror of writing one’s ideas down on paper, revising and rewriting, showing our work to others and receiving the inevitable critiques.
We may be fighting in different wars, but we’re all in the same foxhole.

Some people you meet at a writers’ conference will become close friends, with whom you feel a deep sympathy. Some, not so much. But even the kooks and the weirdos are worth meeting, listening to, and getting to know. Almost every writer has something to share—some bit of craft, philosophy, or marketing knowledge—that you can use. And they are amazingly generous with their knowledge.

It may surprise you to learn that they consider you a valuable contact and a source of useful information. In this foxhole there are no strangers.

When you attend a conference, it’s wise to go “loaded for bear.” Study the conference schedule to dope out which workshops and learning sessions are musts for you. Bone up on any presentation materials thata may be distributed in advance. Learn the names and reputations of agents, publishers, and other key participants. 

If the conference offers opportunities to share your work or to compete in impromptu writing challenges, figure out what you have to do to be included.

A writers’ conference is like a large, juicy, orange. In view of its dollar cost and relative infrequency—you really should suck it dry.

Bring business cards and hand them to everybody you can hand them to. Accept theirs as well, and write down or remember what you know about each person. The day after the conference ends, send each new contact a message of friendship and hopes for future engagement. 

Follow your new friends on social media. Attend their book launches, readings, signings, and other events. Be a social butterfly in the cage of literary lions.

The Critique Group

In Installment Three: Get Feedback, we touched on the importance of joining a writers’ mutual critique group. We won’t repeat that advice here but will mention a couple of ways this kind of group can help you befriend others in your tribe.

In the first place, some of these writers you interact with month by month may attend the same regional writers’ conference you attend. So you’ll already have friends at the conference; your initial plunge into the larger milieu need not be cold turkey. 

Also, because of frequent contact with these people, you will come to know them and their writings very well, as they will you. 

If anybody’s support will combat the cloud of gloom that may envelop a writer in her solitary task, it is these folks. They are your tribe-within-a-tribe.

Local Events

Make it a point to pop in on readings, signings, or book launches in your community. Be there for your friends. Buy their books, post reviews, and spread the word. It’s a matter of supporting your fellow writers and your local independent booksellers. This support may come back to you when it’s your turn to make a personal appearance—but it’s what you would do for friends in any case. And it also helps you to become known among the writing and publishing community in your locale. 

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In all this, Dear Reader, remember that your writing is a gift. In the first place, it’s a gift to you from your Maker. In the second place, it’s a gift you may give to your community. Only when the gift has been recognized, realized, and given away may the chance arise to earn money as a result. And the fruits of that quest are unpredictable at best.

So don’t get ahead of yourself. Play the long game.

In all your comings and goings with writers, agents, publishers, and others involved in the business of turning stories into the commodity known as “literature,” don’t be afraid to mention and defend the work you’ve been doing—but only within the general context of sharing within the tribe. Never commandeer center stage in order to promote your work.

Make sure to express your genuine regard for fellow writers and your appreciation of their work. 

Be patient, and associate.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: “Step Five: Submit” 

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)

08.11.20
by

Six Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood #2

Today we continue our series on “Six Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood.”

 “Simple” is not the same as “easy.” The six things you must do to pluck fame and fortune from the slushpile of rejected hopes are as simple as any six steps can be. 

If they were easy, everybody would be Stephen King.

Step One was “Skip Straight to Literary Lion.” 

This week we feel compelled to point out that writing is also an essential prerequisite.

Step Two: Write

At some point, every writer asks, “Am I really a writer?” Or, “How do I know if I’m a writer?” 

The simplest answer is best. If you write, you’re a writer.

Author’s Guild logo

This answer does not rest on anybody’s laurels. You need not be a member of the Authors’ Guild to be a writer—though, if you are a writer, it’s not a bad guild to be a member of. 

You need not have won a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, or a Newbery Medal. 

You need not even have published a book, an article, or a poem to be a writer. 

If someone asks what you do, just say, “I’m a writer.” This will get you past impostor syndrome. Unless you don’t actually write. 

“If I Had Something to Say” by re_birf is licensed underCC BY 2.0.

So write.

As to where you write, when you write, how often you write, how much you write, whether or not anybody reads what you write, whether or not anybody likes what you write—these are details. 

Just get something down on paper. 

(When we say “on paper,” we mean to include virtual representations of paper, as in a computer file.)

Discipline

Maybe you already have something down on paper. Maybe you need to add something to it, so what you have on paper becomes a more complete something. It could be a story, a screenplay, a poem, a novel, a novella, an essay, or a memoir.

Your first object is to write—and to keep writing. We’re talking about discipline, which belongs to what is called “the craft” of writing. 

Writers all have different methods, or different approaches to the actual task of putting something down on paper. 

Some write before breakfast; others write after lunch. 

Some write on a laptop; others use goose quill pens on antique parchment paper. 

Your writing nest. Photo by Roberto Nickson on Unsplash.

Some write from a beach house overlooking a blue lagoon; others write in rented office space to get away from family and friends; others write on the kitchen table while feeding six hungry children. 

Some write in absolute silence; others type to the tune of a Death Metal soundtrack.

It’s all okay. Your way is your way. But the more rarefied your minimal writing conditions become, the more obstacles you place in the way of getting anything down on paper. 

By all means, find the time and place that works best for you—but if things are less than perfect, write anyway. Do not let the perfect defeat the good.

Output

How much, and with what regularity, should you write? How much, and how regularly, can you write? There are no wrong answers to this question. But the more you can write, the more you will write. 

Some well-known authors apply the seat of their pants to their writing chair and do not rise until they have produced a thousand new words. Or they write flat-out for four hours each day and stop in mid-sentence when their buzzer goes off. 

If you need to quantify your efforts in that way, go for it. But one size does not fit all. Some of us just write whenever we can squeeze it in. If a lot of things bubble up inside you that you need to write down, that’s as good a way as any.

So relax. Your Muse will not fail you. Just write. 

We hate to even mention “writer’s block,” but we suppose we must, even though it’s akin to whispering “homesick” at a summer camp full of junior Brownies. 

Some writers insist writer’s block is a myth, that there is no such thing.

We prefer to say that if writer’s block exists, it applies to non-writers, not to writers. And the beauty part of that is, you get to decide each day whether you are the one or the other.

First Draft

We noted above that you may already have something down on paper. We gently suggested that you keep on writing. When you reach the place where it makes sense to type “The End,” go ahead and do so.

Then do a little victory dance, eat a Twinkie, and congratulate yourself. You have achieved that which many people never achieve. You have completed the first draft of a literary work. Well done, thou good and faithful servant.

But know that the achievement you just celebrated is the start of a long process. First drafts are inherently defective. 

Some writers have even said, “All first drafts are shit.”  We prefer more moderate expressions.

But the fact remains that all first drafts need to be improved. No author ever rolled a first draft out of his old Underwood typewriter, sent it off to Random House, and received a million-dollar advance in the next mail. 

(Harold Robbins claimed that was his process, but he was a notorious liar.)

Suffice it to say, before you can begin to improve your first draft, you must have a first draft to improve. Thus our constant admonition: “Keep writing.” 

Revision

When you go back and read your first draft, you will want to change something, and that’s revision. 

For many of us, revision is the fun part of writing. We are editors at heart and love to chop away at dull prose, spruce it up, and bring it to life. And that is a good and holy thing. 

But if you are one of us—one of those who would rather edit than write—try to resist the urge.

James Patterson. Photo by Susan Solie-Patterson, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

You may be the greatest reviser on God’s green earth. But if you start with a poorly conceived first draft, no clever amendments to the copy will revise it into greatness. 

That is why they pay James Patterson a lot of money.

We fear, Dear Reader, that you must acquire the knack of putting a good story into your first draft right from the start.

Unless you are a “natural storyteller,” to build a compelling story, one worth writing down with the best words and phrases you can bring to it, is an art that takes many years, and lots of practice, to acquire.

So you’d better start now.

Square One

There you are: Just you and your keyboard. What are you going to do?

You start with an idea. We can’t help you there; it has to be your own idea. The good news is, there are a lot of ideas you could have that will deliver the goods, depending what you choose to do with them.

Let your idea become a person. A specific person, a character with a need and a desire. The story you are going to write will be her story. She is the “progagonist.” Her chief attribute, above all others, is action. 

A protagonist takes action prompted by his or her needs, to meet his or her desires, and despite serious obstacles.

Here is where it gets tricky, Dear Reader. It may be hard to put yourself in the protagonist’s shoes. Unless you are a swashbuckler in real life, a protagonist is different from you and me. 

When faced with the demands of life, we hem and we haw. We shilly-shally and we dilly-dally, in a wishy-washy way.

Not our protagonist. The protagonist plunges right in and commits herself to a course of action, whether impulsively or with a carefully calculated plan. 

She acts. Right now. 

Before you, the author, can catch your breath, the protagonist has dragged you into a conflict, a problem, a nearly-insoluble dilemma. 

The protagonist will have to use her wits and battle her way out. So the one thing the protagonist cannot be is passive.

Protagonism

Writers sometimes say: “The protagonist must protag.”

That may be the main principle to observe in writing your first draft. 

The protagonist must protag.

In your new identity as a literary lion (see Step One), you are no doubt reading books and articles about story structure—books that break or analyze your story’s plot into definable acts, or beats, or “stages of the Hero’s Journey.” All of these concepts are fine and dandy. They will help you out of tight spots. We encourage you to learn and use them. 

But none of them will work out well unless your protagonist is active. And if your protagonist is active, he or she will organically create the story structure, just by protagging all over the story’s landscape. 

Keep your protagonist protagging until you come to some satisfying end. 

Then you can start revising. 

BUT

You cannot revise out of thin air, Dear Reader. For successful revision, you must expose your first draft to intelligent readers and get well-considered feedback. Which will be the subject of our next article.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: “Step 3: Get Feedback” 

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)

02.25.20
by

Birth of a Book

Who is a writer? 

What is a writer? 

How does a writer come to be?

Does a writer spring full-bodied from the brow of Zeus, like Athena? Or does a writer rise from the sawdust of the arena floor, like Eric Hoffer? Are writers born, or made?

Athena emerges from Zeus’ forehead, armed and ready for battle. Attic exaleiptron (black-figured tripod), ca. 570–560 BC. Found in Thebes. Public Domain.

All I know is, writers write. Perhaps you are one of us. We who cannot not write. 

Some of our tribe, like the fictional Jo March of Little Women and John-Boy of The Waltons, scribble in notebooks from childhood on and sell their first work as teenagers. Others may hold their fire like dormant volcanoes, then erupt in middle age. My friend Greg Renz waited till retirement to novelize the stories he had been processing over 28 years as a Milwaukee firefighter. 

I’d be willing to bet that more than once during those 28 years, Greg told some of his stories to someone, informally. I doubt anybody suddenly becomes a writer without some kind of prelude. What warming-up exercises did Homer go through before composing 27,000 lines of dactyllic hexameter known as the Iliad and the Odyssey? 

My Odyssey

Dear Reader, I was an old man when I set out to burst upon the literary scene. I wanted to share my dearest concerns with others.

I did not know how to do it but was called to try. Impressions, thoughts, and feelings that had been marinating in cobwebbed bottles on the dusty shelves of my soul began to ooze forth as written words that the world might see.

Like Greg, Jo, John-Boy, and Homer, I did not come to this calling completely cold. 

I wrote a detective story when I was eight. Around that time, I also drew a few comic strips starring myself and a fantasy sidekick as cowboys, fighting bad guys. In junior high I got a $25 savings bond for writing an essay about traffic safety. I wrote for the high school paper. I was a radio guy in college. After a series of abortive career launches in young manhood, I at last burrowed safely into the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs, the agency that oversees the National Guard and Emergency Management. My role there included both writing and photographic skills. After 23 years with the agency, I retired. Immediately I was called to edit a well-regarded and historic religious quarterly, The Congregationalist—a part-time job I did for six and a half years.

I had done no “creative” writing since grade school. But I had the itch to “be a writer.” Having reached the age of 70, I knew that if I wanted to be a writer, I’d better get started. 

For by that time I was feeling definitely Homeric. Odyssean, in fact. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in his poem “Ulysses,” has his old Ulysses (Odysseus) say—

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! 
As tho’ to breathe were life! . . .
. . . but every hour is saved 
From that eternal silence, something more, 
A bringer of new things . . . . 

New things. Yes. I was ready for new things. So in 2016, I quit the best job I ever had and declared myself a writer. Not in some doomed quest for fame, fortune, or any other phantasm. But merely to share myself with you and others in a new way. Have you ever had that kind of an urge?

A New Chapter

There were things to get off my chest; this I knew. I just didn’t know exactly what they were. That was what Mr. Donald Rumsfeld would call “a known unknown”: I knew that I did not know it. But faith told me that if I only started to write it down, it would come out through my fingers and splat itself upon the virtual page of my laptop screen. It would become visible, and then I could fix it up.

The real itch inside me, the thing I wanted to share with the world, was precisely what T.S. Eliot mentioned in his poem, “Little Gidding”:  

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. 

Yes, I thought, that’s really what I’m all about. I want to unearth the long-ago and show it in new writing, so that I, and my readers, can see that past with new eyes.

I wrote short stories about life in the 1950s, starring a little boy named Izzy Mahler, based on my own small-town boyhood. Three of them—“Nickle and Dime,” “The Liberation of Irma Ruger,” and “The Lion’s Den”—achieved online publication, with minor paychecks, by The Saturday Evening Post. Yes, Virginia, there still is a Saturday Evening Post.

“Those Old Siberian Blues,” a whimsical essay about our then 12-year-old Siberian husky, Montana, was published in Fetch!, “Wisconsin’s #1 Free Dog Publication,” in December 2016. 

But soon, bigger game was afoot: A sweeping historical novel, an immigrant saga.

A Novel Obsession

My wife, Joelle, had researched and archived our family’s roots, both on her side and on mine. She did such sound research that she won an award. 

The Main Office of Larry F. Sommers, Writer–a spare corner of my bedroom. The mess is essential to the creative process.

Since I was now a self-admitted full-time writer, she badgered me to write a brief prose essay on one of my ancestors. This was necessary to claim a cultural skills badge in genealogy from the Sons of Norway. Both of us have Norwegian lines, but I was the “official” member of the organization. Besides, she said, “You are the writer, I’m just the researcher. Write something about one of your ancestors.”

So I looked into the research that she had painstakingly compiled and learned that my great-great-grandfather, Anders Gunstensen, came from Norway in 1853 and settled in Menard County, Illinois. 

Gentle Reader, please take note of this: I knew nothing about Anders Gunstensen. We had no diaries, letters, artifacts, heirlooms, or even word-of-mouth stories about Anders, his wife Johanne-Marie Nybro, or Norway. None of this had come down through my family.

I am thus a Norwegian without any discernible Norwegiosity. I snakker ikke norsk (speak no Norwegian); Grandma didn’t bake fattigmands bakkelser (“Poor man’s cookies”) at Christmas; I don’t even own a Norwegian sweater. Uff-da!

We had only dry statistics: Anders’ dates of birth, emigration, marriage, and death; names of his parents and more remote progenitors; what ship he traveled on; the woman he married; the places where he lived; the children he fathered; and the simple fact that he wore Union blue as a soldier in the Civil War. 

To make even a brief article from these bare bones took some interpretation—dare I say, interpolation—from hard facts to reasonable inferences. 

Anders embarked for America February 8, 1853, the very day after his passport was issued. Hmm. Seems he was in a big hurry to get out of Norway. 

He sailed from Arendal, Norway, to New Orleans, Louisiana. Not New York, not Quebec. New Orleans. Picture a 23-year-old farm boy leaving Norway in early February and arriving in New Orleans eight weeks later. The heat alone must have prostrated him—not to mention the spectacle: Hordes of people, all races, all colors, all modes of dress, all speaking a polyglot of American, European, and African tongues. And some of them buying and selling others in open-air slave markets.

What a novel this would make.

The trickle of Norwegian immigrants in the 1830s and ’40s had become a stream by the 1850s. That stream flowed from New York or Quebec to Northern Illinois, then to Wisconsin, then to Minnesota and on west. Anders traveled north from New Orleans, undoubtedly by steamboat, and stopped when he got to Central, not Northern, Illinois—in a place with only a handful of other Norwegians. He had to learn English and local customs fast. 

Then, two years after settling in this non-Scandinavian part of North America, he married a Norwegian girl, Johanne-Marie Elisabeth Nybro, who had come to Menard County from guess where? Oiestad, Anders’ own home village. Is that a spooky coincidence? How did that happen?

Can you see, Fair Reader, how a person might start to become a novelist? If you were in my place, wanting answers to questions that had no answers, you might do the same thing I did: Make the answers up!

Which is how my novel, Freedom’s Purchase, came to be.

Next Week:  Update on the novel project.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)