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Story Selection

10/12/2023

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History is often associated with dry academic writing—the kind of work that feels choked with dust before the ink has dried on the page. Perhaps this is necessary when the intent is to demonstrate that one is scholarly and objective, but there is something lost when humanity, humor, and a sense of the ridiculousness of our whole crazy race is excluded. A bare recounting of the facts regarding an event or personage may be an excellent chronicle, but to me history needs blood and breath. To come alive, it must be a story, but a true story, one recounting what actually happened as processed through the mind and perception and heart of the historian.

That being the case, selection of the right story to tell is just as critical for the historian as for the fiction writer, if not more so; a fiction writer is at liberty to craft character, plot and action to suit the story to be told, but the historian must work with the material supplied by reality. Thus, in writing Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold, the dramatis personae and the events of the story were already set; the question was not what would happen and to whom, but how I would present Al and Rosa Hoots, Useeit, Hanley Webb, J. D. Mooney, and Black Gold himself as individuals who both acted in and were acted upon by the events of the time they lived in.

When the purpose of writing is to entertain at least as much as to inform, nonfiction and fiction writers must consider similar elements if readers are to be attracted and held. The protagonist(s) must be appealing to the audience in some way; even an antihero must resonate with the reader somehow, such as by becoming the instrument of justice against the truly despicable or by displaying some distinct virtue in spite of being badly flawed. Heroes must have a dream or a goal toward which they are moving, and obstacles—preferably both internal and external—that must be overcome in order to reach the desired end. The unlikely, the unpredictable, and the unusual spark and hold interest as they drive twists and turns in the characters’ behavior and in their responses to events. A story of unbroken successes, however true and admirable, soon palls to all but the most devoted fans; a struggle with which readers can identify keeps them hooked until a satisfactory closure is reached.

Horse racing holds many great stories, but it is no coincidence that the Thoroughbreds with the greatest bodies of literature built around them—Seabiscuit, Exterminator, Phar Lap—have been outsiders who became great champions against the odds. In my own small way, I hope I have made a contribution to that tradition, telling the true-life story of a little black horse and an unlikely owner, trainer, and jockey who, for one golden moment, stood atop the racing world.
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The Emotional Roller Coaster

9/7/2023

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​In a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, C. S. Lewis wrote, “Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.” Over thirty years later, with fourteen books published in genres ranging from scholarly literary analyses to poetry to science fiction and the first book of his beloved Narnia series (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) just hitting print, Lewis portrayed his relationship to writing in another light: “Ink is a deadly drug. One wants to write. I cannot shake off the addiction.”

I suspect that for most writers, the relationship to the Muses is similarly ambivalent; writing can be a joy, but it is also quite capable of being obsession and sometimes sheer drudgery (as any writer who has plowed through the tasks of completing a major revision or constructing an index can attest). What it is not—at least in my experience—is good therapy, at least not when writing for eventual publication. (Journaling as a therapeutic exercise is a different ball game altogether, and is best left between oneself and one’s therapist.) Perhaps it is different for poets, who (by their own testimonies) often don’t grasp the full import of what they have written until it is reflected back to them by others. And perhaps a fiction writer can take the path of Stephen King, who admitted that he used his childhood phobias as the foundations for his bestselling horror stories. For most of us prosy sorts, though, it’s best to have one’s psychological house somewhat in order before committing ink to paper, for putting a book out in print is more likely to reveal what shape your self-concept is in than to heal it.

The reason that writing for publication generally isn’t therapeutic is simple: it isn’t about you. In writing for an audience, you are putting not just your writing but your investment of yourself on the firing line of others’ judgment. More often than not, the exhilaration of seeing your brainchild in print is followed by the low of realizing that sales aren’t what you hoped. Reviews? If you did your job well, you can expect to see more good than bad ones, but it only takes one scathing opinion—put out in public for all to see—to leave you feeling as if you’d taken a dagger to the gut. Never mind that the critic’s opinion may be based on personal agendas, ideology, or a general dislike of your topic rather than the specific merit of your writing; even the kindest and best-meant of criticism is not easy to take, let alone the sort that is anything but.

With Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold coming out in five days, I am getting reacquainted with the emotional roller coaster that comes with releasing a book. The difference between my experience as a novice author twenty years ago and my experience now is this: back then, the emotions were raw and new, and I really had no realistic idea of what to expect. Now, I know what can happen; I just don’t know what will happen. I am not sure that this is an improvement. Still, as with much of life, all I can do is to prepare myself to accept the worst while hoping for the best.
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On History and Storytelling

7/27/2023

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​Before history, there were stories. True stories, preserving events in common memory. Stories told to shape cultural narratives, or to challenge them. Stories meant to instruct the young. Stories embodying great truths, and stories told purely to entertain.

History, as commonly defined today, began with the written word—a vast achievement that allowed information to be passed between generations, long after the deaths of those who originally observed or discovered events and facts. Thanks to the written word, we can draw on knowledge built up across centuries and cultures on a scale unavailable to our distant forebears.

Nonetheless, Homo sapiens remains a storytelling species, and this has a bearing on our histories. For histories are more than dry recitations of facts. Cultural, social, religious, and political pressures have a bearing on which facts will be recorded and remembered and which will sink into legend, or be forgotten entirely. Some things are emphasized; others become historical footnotes, or lie neglected until the dust is blown from some journal, paper, or letter that brings them to light again. Individual historians, too, act as curators, for even in a tiny portion of history—say, the biography of one prominent person—there is simply too much information for every bit of data to be given equal prominence. Thus, the historian invariably becomes storyteller to lesser or greater degree, choosing—sometimes consciously, often unconsciously—which matters will be given emphasis, and filtering the emotional content that invariably becomes attached to facts through his or her own psyche, with all its experiences, shaping influences, emotional reactions, and biases. No matter how dedicated the attempt to be objective, the fingerprint of the individual historian inevitably becomes attached to the history he or she presents.

Like many another horse-crazy youngster, I first became acquainted with Black Gold’s story through Marguerite Henry’s Black Gold. Like several others of Henry’s fictional works for children, it followed the story of a real-life horse primarily through the fictional or semi-fictional point of view of a young character with whom her juvenile readers could identify—in this case, teenaged Jaydee Mooney, whose real-life model, J. D. Mooney, rode Black Gold to victory in the 1924 Kentucky Derby at the age of 22. Aided by the work of noted illustrator Wesley Dennis, she was able to fit both the basic facts of Black Gold’s life and some legendary elements into the theme of the success of an underdog (underhorse?) against the odds, aided by someone who saw him as special when few others did. That Henry took some liberties with the actual history does not detract from her writing. Her purpose was to produce a historical fiction story suitable for children, winning their sympathy for her hero horse and his special human, and she was obviously successful in doing so. Many years later, with the one-hundredth anniversary of his improbable Derby win approaching, Black Gold emerged from whatever corner of my memory I had kept him in and trotted out, demanding that I give his story another look. Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold is the result, representing five years of planning, research, and late nights spent bending over a computer keyboard.

Dream Derby is history, not historical fiction, and so the constraints on telling this story have been those of history: to remain true to the available facts recorded close to a century ago, supplemented by later records of the recollections of those who lived through or witnessed those events. I was and am not interested in recounting “history as it should have been,” which is generally no more than dressing up the presenter’s personal beliefs and biases about the present in period guise. That approach may reveal a great deal about the historian, but little about the era and people supposedly under review. For good or ill, they are what they were, not what we might wish them to be. Where I become storyteller as much as historian is in trying to discern the real, breathing human beings and horses whose lives made the history so that the reader can see the world they lived in and the events they were part of through them. Their story is now mine and, through me (I hope), yours, bringing back a world that was very different than our own, yet (because of our shared humanity) very much the same.
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    I'm Avalyn Hunter, an author with a passion for Thoroughbreds and a passion for writing and storytelling.

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