An author's journey

People frequently ask me, ‘what made you want to write a book?’  

There are human beings in this world who don’t have a voice, who have been silenced out of fear or shame, or drowned out by society. I want to be that voice for them. I want the words on the pages to shout out their stories; the abused, the forgotten, the mentally-ill, the homeless, those who are different than the majority.

In order to authentically capture their voices, I wanted to interview real people who had suffered through terrifying experiences. So I did.

I talked with people who had been bullied as children for being overweight, gay, and artistic. I sat at bus stops, on park benches, and even on the curb to speak with homeless people to try to gain an understanding of what it felt like to be them. 

One of the main characters in my second book has paranoid schizophrenia.  I wanted to understand what it felt like to have a disease of the mind. As I googled in search of information about the disease, I stumbled upon the true story of an amazing woman, Elyn Saks.

Ms. Saks is Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould Law School, an expert in mental health law and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship winner. Saks lives with schizophrenia and has written about her experience with the illness in her award-winning best-selling autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold. She is also a cancer survivor. 

For whatever reason, reading about her just wasn’t enough. I wanted to talk with her, understand her struggles, her triumphs, her thoughts and feelings. So, I continued to search until I found an email address. My heart raced as I typed a quick email to her explaining that I was writing a book and wanted my characters to be authentic. At first, I hesitated to hit ‘send’, but then I thought, what the heck. What’s the worst she could say? Maybe I would never even hear from her. After all, she was a New York Times Best Selling author and an important person at a major university. Perhaps her assistant would send me back an email saying she was just too busy to be bothered.

Then, it happened. Later that afternoon, my cell phone rang. An unfamiliar number crossed my screen. I hesitated, but thought it could have something to do with my mom, who had been fighting cancer. So I picked up.

“Hi Shannon, this is Elyn Saks. You emailed me. Is this a good time to talk?” I almost passed out right then and there. If my memory serves me correctly, I even let out an uncontrollable laugh. I couldn’t believe she actually called me back and it was her, really her! We scheduled a time to talk that next day. Our discussion gave me insight into what it felt like to be a person with paranoid schizophrenia, which I’m hoping comes through in my second novel, Bluebirds Don’t Cry.

I believe in order to deliver a powerful emotional experience to my readers, I need to really understand how each of my characters feel. To do that, it takes a conversation with real people.