The Big Idea: Delia Sherman

When it comes to their projects, authors, like anyone, can bite off a little more than they can chew. The question is: What do they do then? This was the quandary that Delia Sherman found herself confronted with while writing The Freedom Maze, set as it was in antebellum Louisiana. As the book received both a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and a place on its list of the Best Children's Books of 2011, Sherman may have found a way to a solution. Here she is to discuss the issue and how she resolved it.

DELIA SHERMAN:

Eighteen years ago, I was stuck. I was living in a house in rural Maine, where my then-partner was teaching college, trying to write a historical novel that just kept getting longer and more complicated. My nearest neighbors were a mile away, and there was a goose whose chief ambition in life seemed to be to keep me from picking up my mail.

So when I heard that there was a children's book writing group starting at the college, I dropped the long, complicated historical like a hot brick and started a children's book.

The maze came first. One night, I dreamed I was sitting in the window seat of my house back home in Boston, reading a wonderful story. Out the window was a formal garden with rosebushes and a boxwood maze beyond it, much more romantic than my own suburban lawn, and the story I was reading was all about that maze. It was fascinating and exciting and I couldn't turn the pages fast enough to find out what happened next.

Needless to say, I couldn't remember a word of the story when I woke up.

That garden and maze haunted me, though. I wanted to know where they were and who might inhabit them.

The who was easy. I'd been wanting to write something about a girl who wasn't perky, who wasn't resourceful, who wasn't particularly outgoing, who was shy and reserved and not very worldly. I'd been a girl like that, and I couldn't be the only one in the world. Surely the others would like to read a book where they got to have adventures, too.

The where was easy, too. My dream maze and garden had a Louisiana feel. My parents both came from the South. I'd spent time in Louisiana, as a child and as an adult, visiting Mama's relatives. ...

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/11/25/the-big-idea-delia-sherman/