By Crystal Smith Paul

The first time I was able to see myself in a character, it blew my little mind. Cassie Logan was born in the late 1920s but her family reminded me of my own. She loved school like me and her brothers got on her nerves like mine did. Her mom liked to cook like mine did. My reaction to Cassie’s story as told in Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry is why representation matters in fiction.

“Write What You Know,” Reconsidered

The conventional advice is to “write what you know”. Beginner writers or non-writers take that too literally. You only need a snippet of understanding or experience or interest even to jump off into the fiction pool. You just have to be able to connect emotionally to the plot. Not just what happened but how what happened made you feel.

Because that’s what’s universal.

When I Knew Characters, Not Authors

When I first started reading chapter books and thought I might like to write fiction one day, I didn’t know what my favorite writers looked like.

You couldn’t google them. There was no internet.

Novelists perched on my parents’ bookshelves, like Stephen King and Amy Tan, were in the paper or on TV sometimes or maybe had their picture inside the book’s jacket flap but not always.

I knew entertainers by face and voice; writers by titles and characters. My first favorites were Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. In books, I was into series; The Boxcar Children and The Babysitter’s Club.

I didn’t think about the author at all, let alone wonder what they looked like. I knew what their characters looked like. And that’s what mattered. It was about the story.

Fiction Is an Unmanned Boat

In fact, as I got older, knowing too much about the author sometimes impeded the mysticism of their mechanics. Suddenly, they were a real person and not this entity that produced this beautiful thing that existed outside and separate from their being.

I specify fiction writers here because non-fiction carries a celebrity tailwind. Certainly the author matters to the audience and most of all to the publisher.

I see fiction as an unmanned boat. Non-fiction is captain driven. For instance, I knew what Maya Angelou or James Baldwin looked like (also books on my parents’ shelves) because their faces were on their covers.

How Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry Changed How I Read

Reading Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry changed things. It was first time I did start to care about the author.

The narrator and main character, Cassie Logan, was older than me but a preteen living with her family in the 1930s Jim Crow South. It was an echo of cinema I’d seen already like the Imitation of Life and Roots (and maybe Glory by then) but different because the main character was a little black girl, like me.

I knew then that the who is writing can be just as important to the reader as the story itself.

Taylor’s Roll of Thunder is historical fiction, she was born ten years after the 1930s time period of the novel. However, her life experience as a black American woman, born in segregated Mississippi, gave her enough perspective to fictionalize an umbrella of racial themes.

Cassie Logan’s story resonated with little me, born in the early eighties in North Carolina, because I’d experienced my own racial aggressions by then.

No, my family wasn’t facing violence like Cassie’s but there were people who would have at another time, not really so long ago, killed for the land we owned.

How an Author’s Life Shapes the Story

After reading Taylor’s children’s book, I began to understand how an author’s life impacts the stories they choose to tell. And now I think about my formative years. Taylor’s Logan family series was a staple in my black girlhood, much like the Addie doll from the American Girl books or the black fables, The People Could Fly.

Why I Wrote Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? First

It’s no wonder I wrote Kitty Karr first, a novel encapsulated by race, and not a romance. That’s not to say I won’t write one one day or that my books don’t contain representations of love. Multitudes of elements exist inside of any work of fiction because a story is layered in some way by the author’s experience.

That’s why the little me in the Eighties was able to connect to a story about a little girl growing up in the Thirties, written by a woman in the Seventies.

Homage, or How Little Has Changed?

I gave my childhood favorite another read last year because the themes in Roll of Thunder are intrinsically related to my second book.

Is that me paying homage to the story and author that helped me work out the injustices that I couldn’t articulate but felt as a child?

Or does it signify how little has changed?

Want more behind-the-scenes on the writing life? Subscribe to The Annex for free to receive my musings on writing, inspiration, and how it all gets done. And if you haven’t read Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? yet, grab your copy — it’s where the Blair House universe begins.