Jean MacIntyre

Our family home was a large brick house on a two hundred acre mixed farm in Eastern Ontario, Canada. Over the years, we had sheep, pigs, cows, chickens and hens, horses – oh, and lots of kids. My dad came from a family of thirteen children, my mother from a family of seven, so I wound up with five sisters and five brothers. (My parents’ autobiography – The Way It Was – gives a great description of my background.) We all had chores to do after school and on weekends. But when the chores were finished and homework was done, we were free to read. And read we all did. Anything and everything we could get our hands on. I wouldn’t attempt to write about someone with a bad childhood because I don’t know what that would feel like.

It’s difficult to decide how a book begins for me. Sometimes it’s an idea for a storyline that pops into my head. Sometimes I’m working on my photographs, look at one, and decide there’s a story to go with it. My mother, a devout Baptist, passed on last year and suddenly I had an idea for a book set partly on Earth and partly in Heaven. That’s my next project once the cottage is closed up for the winter. (And I’m counting on Mom to feed me the parts about Heaven, now that she’s there).
Once I have the basic idea, I prepare bio sheets for my two main characters. I have the blank form in the computer so that I can print one out and fill it in whenever I need it. I clip pictures of the characters from the catalogue and paste them to the side of the page. The bio includes everything I can think of – name, age, birth date, Zodiac sign and characteristics, address, residence, hair and eye color, height and weight, education, career, vehicle, marital status, parents, siblings, medical history, religious and political leanings, and anything else that comes to mind.
By the time the bios are finished, I know these people really well and the story just writes itself. I’m not obsessive about sticking to schedules and I don’t try to force the writing. If I get stuck, I just leave it until the next idea comes to me. I have yet to struggle with a storyline.