Nanowrimo, and Stories Involving the Great Depression and Children.

Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month and is an organization that promotes writing in the month of November.  The idea is for writers to write the first draft of their book in one month so they get it out and ready to be revised.  The hardest part is just to get it out and into the world and so Nanowrimo gives writers a place as well an incentive to do that.  It happens every November and this year I decided to do it.  The goal is 50,000 words in one month.  As you can imagine, that is a lot of writing per day and my life has almost been revolving around it.  

I am writing a historical fiction novel so I am going to tell some stories and facts for this month's history week.  The story has to do with two children (Russell and Clara) who ride on the boxcars in 1930.  There wasn't much easily found information so I have done lots of digging.  

One of the best websites I found is one telling stories that were passed down generations from children and adults who rode on the boxcars.  I will be sharing some of those stories and other facts that I found along the way.

Children ran away from home if their parents didn't have enough food, or they didn't have anywhere else or if they just craved something different and joined friends who were leaving.  Girls went too, sometimes they dressed up as boys to get jobs on farms or in swamps for a day that paid 50 cents a day.  Sometimes the girls didn't, however, and at times got better help from strangers who would give them a meal or the money in their pockets.    

The first story that interested me is about a boy named Bill.  It starts when he arrived in Topeka, Indiana and walked to the town jail to get away from the falling rain.  He wakes up by the sound of a loud shout of 'line up over here!' bellowed into the cell.  They marched Bill and people just like him a couple blocks down to an empty lot that was filled with cut up tree trunks.  'Start chopping!'  The man yelled, and they did.  After an hour he yelled, 'line up,' once again.  They were marched down another block where breakfast was laid out for them.  After a while they were ordered to leave and once again the group of people were on their own again. 

I decided to use this to inspire a section in my story to tell one way of how different states react to finding people in the jails or on the trains in the early morning hours.  The state officials would either escort the people, specifically children, out of the state, give them a meal and make them leave after or make them do a type of community service like the story above, as well as any variation of the three options.    

You can find many other stories here: https://erroluys.com/greatdepressionarchive14.html.  These stories, passed down from generations, interested me the most out of any website I was able to find and they inspired me to include similar scenarios in my story.  

I would love to hear you thoughts.  Do like reading historical fiction and have you ever wanted to write a story around a certain time period.  If so which one? 

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