Anne Ylvisaker shares the story behind her story …

My name is Calamity Anne and I attend the Happy Accident School of Writing. This is the story of how I stumbled into my second novel, Little Klein.

After I wrote my first book, Dear Papa, which was sparked by a family photo, a lost letter, and a misremembered detail, I floundered about for another story. I had scores of ideas, but without a main character tickling my imagination, each one came out flat and fizzled quickly. This went on not for a week or a month, but for a couple of agonizing years.

When I emailed my friend Frank, a composer, whining that I’d never write again, I had just filed away another three notions.

One was a tale my dad told me about the beautifully painted family trunk that carried his grandparents’ belongings from Norway. He’d gone to his cousin’s farm in South Dakota and found that his cousin had taken the trunk apart and built a doghouse with the boards. My dad was furious. He tore down the doghouse, brought the salvaged boards home, and used them to build a cupboard that showed off the fading rosemaling. I also had a photograph of my dad as a boy standing next to a homely doghouse of unknown origin, so I rambled about doghouses and transformations.

The second was a story my uncle told about his childhood in St. Paul. There was a family of boys, the Klein brothers, who rode around in a blue pick-up truck and bullied neighborhood kids. Once, in the early spring when melting snow formed a pond on a nearby college campus, the Klein boys floated a raft out on the chilly water and invited my uncle, called Little Ylvisaker by the family, to ride along. He hopped on and when they reached the middle of the pond, the Klein boys pushed him off the raft. I explored brothers, neighborhoods, and bullies.

Thinking about bullies led me back to Dear Papa and a bit character named LeRoy Pence. LeRoy was a bully, and no one liked him much, but I thought I knew the reason LeRoy picked on other kids and tried unsuccessfully to redeem him with a story of his own.

Frank emailed back with his own complaint. He was trying to write a ballet and was feeling uninspired. Let’s play a writing game, he said. Send me a three-sentence cliffhanger, then I’ll write the next three sentences.

Hmm, I thought. What if the Klein boys bullied the bully LeRoy Pence? I dashed off three sentences:

The Klein Boys tore down LeRoy’s doghouse and used the boards to build a raft. The homeless German shepherd followed them to the river where Little Klein pushed his brothers into the water with a shove that left him on shore. “Wait for me!” he cried as the swirling spring current caught the raft on its conveyor belt to the falls.

Frank wrote back:

“Woof,” said LeRoy.

Woof?

Hold everything. LeRoy is a boy not a dog. I looked back at my sentences. LeRoy’s doghouse…the homeless German shepherd…

Oops.

Yes, the clumsy way I constructed those sentences did make it sound as if LeRoy was a dog. I started to write to Frank to say no, what I meant was… but it was just a game so I played along.

After a few more exchanges Frank went back to his ballet, but LeRoy had woofed his way into my heart, and Little Klein intrigued me. How did boy and dog meet? What happened when Little Klein and LeRoy got left behind at the river? What happened to the big brothers on the raft? Were they swept over the falls?

I still had a long writing journey ahead, but that well-timed misunderstanding launched me into the story of Little Klein and his quest to become one of the Bigs; and of LeRoy, a wandering dog who noses his way into a family then struggles to keep them safe.

To read about the blunders that helped me write Dear Papa and my newest book The Luck of the Buttons, the first of three novels about a family that shares my proclivity for mishap, check out my website: www.anneylvisaker.com. And next time you’re stuck, leap before you look. Happy stumbling!

 Learn more about Anne Ylvisaker…