Ruta Sevo's Blog: Roots of My Writing - Posts Tagged "karl-may"
The Start of WHITE BIRD
I have a novel nearly finished. It is still in revision, and revision, and revision. There is a famous successful writer known to go through forty revisions. I am on number fifteen. While I wait to decide when to terminate, it might be fun to think back on the 30 books I read for research and share some of that excitement.
Last January I decided I should write a book I would want to read. What would that be? What do I wish I’d done but didn’t do for some reason? I could do it in fiction. This came up: Peace Corps in Nepal in the 1970s, a love affair in the field, a love child, a Tibetan Buddhist nun, and a Tibetan Buddhist shaman. Go!
First I had to find out if the Peace Corps was in Nepal in the 1970s. It turns out it was, according to http://www.peacecorpswiki.org/Nepal which is a place where volunteers put information about their experiences and the history of the PC in particular countries. The security situation reduced the program in 2000 and again in 2002, and then suspended it between 2004 and 2012. Since my story takes place in 1970-72 or so, I was safe. Also, there were women in the field then, so there could be a love affair.
What was like to be a volunteer there and then? A wonderful resource is a one-hour video called Jimi Sir you can watch on YouTube. The subject is the experience of an actual volunteer: see http://www.jimisir.com/ The video was made by a friend of his, Claude von Roesgen, who visited in order to make it. It won awards. “Live alongside Jimi, a Peace Corps volunteer in Melung, a day’s walk south of the trail from Kathmandu to Mt Everest base camp. Delve into the ways of the Tibetan Buddhist people living and farming side by side with the Hindu Sanskrit culture.” The one-page introduction to the video on the website is nice. I was ecstatic to find this, of course.
Why 1970-72? I was in West Bengal, India around that time. I didn’t go into the Peace Corps because I was in graduate school to get a degree in South Asian studies, and part of graduate study was to do field work. (Thank you, National Defense Foreign Language Fellowships at the University of Chicago.) My challenge was to find out if village life in Nepal within a day of Kathmandu was anything like village life within a day of Calcutta. It turns out that Nepal is 80% Hindu and many things are similar, especially among people growing rice for a living. I could describe people, food, shops, streets, festivals and such that I had seen. Additional videos helped me come to this conclusion.
A novel is not a travelogue. In fact, there are writers known for writing about places they’d never seen. A famous one is Karl May (1842-1912) “ranked high as one of the best loved and most widely read German writers. His tales of adventures set in the American West and in the Orient have sold close to 100 million copies in German and dozens of more millions in translations (33 languages).” http://www.karl-may-stiftung.de/museu... He was called an imposter, a liar, and a con man for making up stories about PLACES HE NEVER VISITED. Let’s look at the number again: 100 million copies sold, 33 languages.
Here’s to Karl May: “Inventing a world is the essence of being a writer.” http://www.spiegel.de/international/g...
Last January I decided I should write a book I would want to read. What would that be? What do I wish I’d done but didn’t do for some reason? I could do it in fiction. This came up: Peace Corps in Nepal in the 1970s, a love affair in the field, a love child, a Tibetan Buddhist nun, and a Tibetan Buddhist shaman. Go!
First I had to find out if the Peace Corps was in Nepal in the 1970s. It turns out it was, according to http://www.peacecorpswiki.org/Nepal which is a place where volunteers put information about their experiences and the history of the PC in particular countries. The security situation reduced the program in 2000 and again in 2002, and then suspended it between 2004 and 2012. Since my story takes place in 1970-72 or so, I was safe. Also, there were women in the field then, so there could be a love affair.
What was like to be a volunteer there and then? A wonderful resource is a one-hour video called Jimi Sir you can watch on YouTube. The subject is the experience of an actual volunteer: see http://www.jimisir.com/ The video was made by a friend of his, Claude von Roesgen, who visited in order to make it. It won awards. “Live alongside Jimi, a Peace Corps volunteer in Melung, a day’s walk south of the trail from Kathmandu to Mt Everest base camp. Delve into the ways of the Tibetan Buddhist people living and farming side by side with the Hindu Sanskrit culture.” The one-page introduction to the video on the website is nice. I was ecstatic to find this, of course.
Why 1970-72? I was in West Bengal, India around that time. I didn’t go into the Peace Corps because I was in graduate school to get a degree in South Asian studies, and part of graduate study was to do field work. (Thank you, National Defense Foreign Language Fellowships at the University of Chicago.) My challenge was to find out if village life in Nepal within a day of Kathmandu was anything like village life within a day of Calcutta. It turns out that Nepal is 80% Hindu and many things are similar, especially among people growing rice for a living. I could describe people, food, shops, streets, festivals and such that I had seen. Additional videos helped me come to this conclusion.
A novel is not a travelogue. In fact, there are writers known for writing about places they’d never seen. A famous one is Karl May (1842-1912) “ranked high as one of the best loved and most widely read German writers. His tales of adventures set in the American West and in the Orient have sold close to 100 million copies in German and dozens of more millions in translations (33 languages).” http://www.karl-may-stiftung.de/museu... He was called an imposter, a liar, and a con man for making up stories about PLACES HE NEVER VISITED. Let’s look at the number again: 100 million copies sold, 33 languages.
Here’s to Karl May: “Inventing a world is the essence of being a writer.” http://www.spiegel.de/international/g...
Roots of My Writing
About my fiction: WHITE BIRD, VILNIUS DIARY, and MY BOAT IS SO SMALL (pending)
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