by Carol Brennan King June 29, 2023

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, all those years ago when I started to write Leaving Ireland.

I thought I would sit down five days a week and write it in…maybe a year. Certainly not the eight years I think it will take.

I discovered, as I wrote, that I needed to do a lot of research if the story was going to have as much quality and reliability and, let me say, genuineness as I wanted it to have.

1. So I set up a research file and started googling names and places and history. Yes, the history of Ireland, maybe 100 years before the story actually takes place. You have to know why your story happened, and I learned this kind of research was necessary.
2. Since the Brennan family had to do a lot of traveling once they decided to leave their homeland of Ireland to get to their destination thousands of miles away in Pennsylvania, I had to figure out how they traveled. More research! What were the ships like? Where did they sail from and to?
3. So we went to Mystic, Connecticut, where I actually got onto a ship of the period. I went down into steerage and then back upstairs to see where they did their cooking.

I checked out the sails and imagined what it would feel like to be sailing in the middle of the great green ocean, and in storms. Feeling their story. I learned how important it is to feel the story you are writing.

4. After checking out the ships and their building, we crossed the street, wandering a few blocks to check out a library of Naval History. All of those books, all of those books. I sat on the floor pulling one dusty book out after another, writing in my notebook furiously, until my writing deteriorated just to the titles of books I thought would be helpful.

5. We heard about a museum dedicated to the Irish during the famine years. The paintings in Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum in Quinnipiac University took me back nearly 200 years. I found myself wiping at the corners of my eyes over and over as we turned from one space to another, one face of tragedy to another.

I remember thinking these people could be my people, and fire took root in my gut.

6. Once my characters got to the United States, how would they get to their destination? What were the roads like?

OK, I knew the U. S. had trains in the States at that time, but did those trains go anywhere useful to the Brennan family? And where should I go to find that out? Fortunately, I lived fairly close to a train museum, and the man I spoke to there was very helpful. He even gave me a book that showed the inside of train cars as they developed, and more importantly, he helped me learn just where the train tracks in the area the Brennans had to travel were in about 1850.

But, I haven’t even talked about how the story came to be.

My father was an Irishman, though he was the second generation of his family born in this country. His great-grandfather and grandfather came to Ireland together in 1848, both dying years later within twenty miles of where I grew up. But I did not know that story yet.

Research sent me to the local historical society. There, I found the cemetery my forbears, the first of our family to come to the US, were buried.

As I stood there for the first time, at my great-great-grandmother’s grave, tears filled my eyes. I made a promise to her that brilliant fall day: I will tell your story with as much realism and honesty as I can.

My book is historical fiction, but even if your book is fiction, you must know these people to whom you are giving life.

You might do the kind of research I did. Or as in the first novella I wrote, you could use the internet and people you know. It might be the world you have experienced that will give you what you need to write a great story.

But you must get to know these people, what moves them, what hurts them, who do they love or fear? Then you must understand why they do what they do as this story is birthed in your head. So research is unavoidable.

I wrestled for two weeks if I should be this transparent, telling you my personal journey. And I decided I care enough about you and your writing, your stories, that I had to be honest. So there you are!

I will talk to you again with more writing helps.

Meanwhile, feel free to share with me what you are doing and what you might need from me.