M. Mark Miller, Author

Category: On Writing

  • On Writing: Using Scrivener To Manage Multiple Threads in Narrative History

    This morning when I did my regular pass though my Facebook Page, I paused at the “Scrivener Tip of the Day.”

    Scrivener is writing software that I use for nearly all my work these days. It’s far to complicated to describe in a few sentences, but you can read about here. For this discussion, just think of it as a combination word processor and file manager with a suite of tools to help organize complicated writing tasks.

    One of the appeals of Scrivener is that a novice can figure out the basics in a few minutes and go to work, leaving the advanced features for later.  That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve learned enough about the program to find it very useful, but I still have a lot to learn.  That’s why I always check out the Tip of the Day.

    Often the tip is something I already know; often it’s about a feature that I think I’d never use, and sometimes—like today—it provides a solution to a problem that’s been vexing me for weeks.

    Today’s tip is by British crime novelist David Hewson, who explains how he uses Scrivener to keep track of the things as he writes a novel based on a Danish murder mystery broadcast by the BBC 4 as a television series, “The Killing.”  I’m sure there are major differences between Hewson’s work on a novel based on a TV series and my narrative history on events that happened in Yellowstone Park more than 130 years ago. But his post describes a problem that parallels one that I’ve been working on: how to keep track of a story that has several distinct threads.

    Hewson’s story has three separate threads:

    • A crime story about the pursuit of a killer.
    • A family story about couple struggling to come to grips with a tragedy.
    • A political story about a man’s effort to become mayor of Copenhagen.

    My book, which I’m calling Encounters in Yellowstone, has even more threads:

    • The Nez Perce Indians’ story of fleeing their homeland in Washington and Idaho in hopes of making a new life in the buffalo country of the Montana plains.
    • The Army under General O.O. Howard who pursue the Nez Perce across three states.
    • The Radersburg Party of tourists who have one of their members shot and left for dead, two women taken captive, and several fleeing through the wilderness.
    • The Helena Party of tourists who have two of their members killed in blazing gun fights with the Indians.

    In addition, Encounters will have several compact stories that are contained in single chapters.  These include stories of other army units that hunted for and fought the Nez Perce, settlers who were attacked and robbed, and scouts who scoured the wilderness looking for the Indians.

    Hewson describes how he uses Scrivener’s tools for labeling files, sorting them, and creating collections to keep track of various threads.  (You can see his blog post for the details.)

    Once threads have been assembled in collections, they can be viewed separately to check  for such things as completeness, continuity and style.  Two collections can be viewed simultaneously to check for transitions.  If any problems are spotted, they can be edited on the spot.

    I’ve posted here before about the problems of keeping things straight while writing a narrative history with a several  threads involving a large number of people.

    I said in that post “My job is to analyze the accounts of these people—and of dozens of others—and sift out the truth. Then I’ll try to put the whole thing together in a coherent whole. To do that, I’ll need to look for places where the various viewpoints converge and diverge, overlap and separate, compliment and contradict.”

    Hewson has described how to use Scrivener to help solve those problems.  I’m grateful for his advice and look forward to giving it a try.

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  • On Writing: Narrative History Requires More Than Getting the Facts Right

    I just finished an article for The Pioneer Museum Quarterly on Fred Bottler, a pioneer rancher in the Yellowstone River’s Paradise Valley north of Yellowstone National Park. Bottler built the first ranch in the valley halfway between Bozeman and Mammoth Hot Springs. That made it an ideal stopping point for early expeditions exploring the park so dozens of park journals and reminiscences mention Bottler’s ranch.

    Gustavus Doane

    Bottler knew the Yellowstone Park area well because he had prospected for gold in there 1860s. That made him an ideal guide, and he accompanied several people who visited the upper Yellowstone in the 1870s.

    My article provides Bottler’s biographical information and recounts stories about him. One of those stories, told by Bottler’s son, Floyd, concerns a pair of needle guns, which were an early type of repeating rifle.

    Floyd said his father won the guns in a card game with soldiers at Fort Ellis, an army post near Bozeman. Although Bottler knew the guns technically were government property, he thought they would be handy if Indians attacked his isolated ranch. He decided to keep them.

    An officer at Fort Ellis, Lieutenant Gustavus Doane (who had a remarkable moustache), heard that Bottler had the guns and decided to retrieve them. Floyd said that when Doane arrived at Bottler’s house, the rancher invited him in and seated him where he could see the guns hanging on a wall.

    Floyd said Doane would look at the guns, then look at Fred, and then back at the guns. Finally, Doane told Bottler that a man living on the edge of Indian country needed such guns and he could keep them—but only if he kept them out of sight when he visited the fort.

    Then, Floyd said, “Their eyes met again and held for a long moment. Then both men rose and the hands met in a strong clasp”

    I couldn’t resist quoting that directly in my article. But when I asked Ann Butterfield, the Pioneer Museum Associate Director, to read a draft of my article, she objected.  She said she liked what I had written, except for that “gazed into each other’s eyes” stuff. “Men just don’t act that way,” she added with a scoff.

    I immediately checked my source and confirmed that I had quoted Floyd accurately. I assured Ann of that, but she was’t really  mollified. That made me think.

    It’s my job to present old stories for today’s readers. I want people to read straight through my stuff and say: “That’s interesting.” I don’t want them stop and say: “This just doesn’t sound right”—even if it is right.

    I also like to quote exactly what people wrote because their word choices make personalities and emotions shine through. It’s always a balancing act to decide when modern sensibilities might collide with old fashioned ways of saying things.

    When I turned in final draft of my article, it didn’t contain the “gazed into each others eyes” quote. Writing narrative history is not just about getting the facts right; it’s also about getting the reader’s experience right. If it distracts, it’s got to go.

    The Pioneer Museum Quarterly will publish my article on Fred Bottler in a few weeks.  I’ll let you know when it’s available.  Then you can decide if I made the right choice.

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    — Photo detail from the Yellowstone Digital Slide File.

    — You can read an excerpt from my article on Fred Bottler here.

    — To see related posts, click on “Narrative History” under the Categories Button on the right side of this page.

  • Narrative History or Historical Fiction 3: A Moonlit Night In Yellowstone Park, August 23, 1877.

    “Should I approach it as narrative history or as historical fiction?” That question haunted me this week as I continued research for my next book, Encounters in Yellowstone 1877. I’ve written about it before, here and here.

    Great Fountain Geyser

    To write the kind of story readers want, I need to include details that bring the story to life and give it credibility. That’s true no matter how I approach the book, but there’s more flexibility in fiction.

    A crucial scene in the book occurs on August 23, 1877, the night before Nez Perce Indians take Mrs. Emma Cowan captive along with her brother, Frank, and their 13-year-old sister, Ida. Earlier that afternoon, the tourists learned that the Nez Perce had fought a bloody battle with the Army two weeks before and were headed toward the park. In her reminiscence about the trip, Emma admited the news worried her.

    In his book about the trip, Frank said, “Mrs. Cowan was uneasy, and upon being asked what was wrong, replied ‘nothing.’” Frank said that later he saw Emma come to the door of the tent she shared with her husband and Ida and look out several times. Emma’s repeatedly peering out of the tent is a good example of the adage, “actions speak louder than words.”

    I was reminded of Jerrie Hurd’s admonition to write slow scenes fast and fast scenes slow. Jerrie says “when you get to the action, slow down, take your time, fill-in as much detail as possible allowing the reader to savor every moment of what’s happening.”

    There’s no doubt that Emma was worried, but what did she see? If I knew that, I could heighten the drama, but neither Emma nor Frank described the scene and there are no other accounts by members of their party.

    What to do? I saw three options: (1) write historical fiction and invent a plausible scene, (2) write up what I already knew as narrative history and hope that my readers will forgive the lack of detail, or (3) do more research to flesh things out. I chose option 3.

    I knew that the tourists were camped in the trees near the Fountain Geyser, which is at the edge of the Lower Geyser Basin in Yellowstone Park, so the first thing I did was a web search for images of the area. I found several photos like the one above that show several geysers spewing columns of water and steam in the middle of a chalky plain surrounded by pine forest. (I plan to visit the site this summer to get more detail.)

    Then I reviewed Emma and Frank’s accounts of the evening. After deciding to head home the next day, the group put on a sort of minstrel show to celebrate. They built a bonfire and spent the evening singing and dancing. Then the bachelors in the group curled up in their blankets under the trees while Emma, her husband and Ida retired to their tent.

    Next, I looked for journals of travelers who were nearby that night. One of them was Jack Bean of Bozeman, a scout the Army hired to find the Nez Perce. Bean was on a hillside about 30 miles from Emma’s camp watching the Nez Perce arrive at Henry’s Lake. Bean didn’t comment on the weather, but apparently had no difficulty seeing the Indians’ campfires four miles away across the lake.

    Another Scout, S.G. Fisher, who had been hired in Idaho, was 10 miles closer than Bean in Targhee Pass. Fisher had heard about a Nez Perce camp ahead of him and was planning to attack it with his force of 80 Bannack Indians. Fisher said he approached the camp cautiously because “the moon was shining brightly.” Fisher found the Nez Perce had moved on—and I found an important snippet of information—it was a moonlit night.

    With the new information from my research, I feel confident that I can write compelling description of Emma’s behavior—one that sticks close enough to the facts to qualify as narrative history. It probably will go something like this:

    Emma didn’t fall asleep quickly that night. Instead, she repeatedly came to the door of the tent she shared with her husband and sister and peered out. Perhaps she was just checking to make sure the bonfire her friends had built to celebrate their impending departure from Yellowstone hadn’t spread.

    Perhaps she was hoping to see Fountain Geyser play one more time. The bright moonlight reflected off the surrounding chalky ground would have made that a beautiful sight.

    Most likely, she was worried about encountering Nez Perce on the trip home. Emma couldn’t have known that Yellow Wolf and his band of Nez Perce scouts had seen the bonfire and were planning to attack the camp the next morning.

    I’m glad I kept researching. I’m sticking with narrative history.

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    You also might enjoy:

    — To see related posts, click on “Narrative History” under the Categories Button on the right side of this page.

    — Image detail from Coppermine Gallery Photo.

  • Montana Book Award Honors Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Kushner Resnick

    Goodbye Wifes and Daughters tells an archetypical story, one that Montanans know all too well. Some men cut corners to maximize profit; others willingly work in dangerous places to support their families, and many men die. It might have been hard rock miners in Butte or asbestos processors in Libby, but Susan Kushner Resnick chose to tell the story of coal miners in Bear Creek, Montana.

    On the morning of February 27, 1943, an explosion ripped through Smith Mine #3 killing 75 men  that day and the town of Bear Creek over the next decade. Resnick puts the story in context. She tells how the pressures of World War II make men feel it’s their patriotic duty face danger to keep up production. How owners exploit that patriotism to maximize profit. How methane builds and sparks ignite it.

    All that is important. But the power of the book lies in Resnick’s recreation of the life in a small town. Resnick has researched deeply and she uses the details she dug up to bring the people to life. She tells us not just that the the town took pride in its high school basketball team, she tells us how many points to the top scorer made, and who sat on the bench, and where they went with their girlfriends after the game. Such exquisite detail brings the people—both those who died and those who survived—to life.

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    — To find out more about my work with the Montana Book Award look under the “Categories Button” on the right.

  • Montana Book Award Honors Everything: A Novel by Kevin Canty

    The only fiction on this year’s list of Montana Book Award winners tells the intertwined stories of a fishing guide and his friends as they encounter challenges that life might throw at any of us. Missoula author Kevin Canty’s novel doesn’t quite live up to its title, Everything: A Novel, but it sure comes close. Among the issues Canty addresses are the death of a life partner, dealing with cancer, loving a child while watching her make bad decisions, falling in love with married partner, and selling a piece of real estate you love so you can live in comfort.

    Canty explores these universal themes in a specific setting, Missoula and the valleys and mountains that surround it. His clear prose  is equally adept at evoking the splash of a fish jumping in a mountain stream and the clatter of beer glasses in a student bar.

    The central character is a middle-aged fishing guide who calls himself “RL.”  The book opens with RL and his friend, June, drinking whiskey on the bank of the Clark Fork to commemorate her late husband. RL’s daughter, Leila, falls in love in love with one of his employees whose marriage is on the rock. And RL rekindles his affair with June, an old flame who’s in town for cancer treatments.

    There’s not a strong central plot that links together the several stories, but Canty proved he is a master of the short in his earlier books (Where the Money Went and A Stranger in This World: Stories) and the shared links to RL and the Missoula location are plenty to hold the book together.  It’s Canty’s characters and their problems that make the book stick in the reader’s memory like a well set fishhook.

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    — To find out more about my work with the Montana Book Award look under the “Categories Button” on the right.

  • Guest Blog: Reading Hemingway in Yellowstone by Craig Lancaster

    Craig Lancaster

    How does he do that? When you pick up one of Craig Lancaster’s books, he grabs you by the throat and drags you kicking and screaming into the story. You’ve got no choice.You just turn the pages until you get to the end. Then you say, “that was good.”

    Craig’s writing is invisible like a crystal clear mountain stream. You know it’s there not because you can see it, but because of what you can see in it. You never say “that guy sure know’s how to create characters.” You fall in love with the good guys (and hate the bad guys). You don’t say “he sure knows how to describe a scene.” You see a street in Billings or a mountain in Utah. You don’t tell yourself “his plots really work.” You just keep turning the pages.

    I should have figured it out when I read Craig’s first novel, 600 House of Edward, but I was having too much fun. Maybe I’ll see it when I read his new novel, Summer Son, but I doubt it. I’ll just  enjoy the book first. Then I’ll go back and look for things that make his writing work.

    Like me, Craig is an admirer of the invisible prose of Ernest Hemingway—as Craig puts it—”the spare, almost parched, approach to language, in which simple words built simple sentences that stacked up into simple paragraphs, the sum of which was not simple at all.”

    On his blog a while back Craig recalled a summer trip to Yellowstone Park. That’s perfect, I thought, I’ll ask him to write a guest blog about two of my favorite subjects, Yellowstone Park and Ernest Hemingway.

    He obliged me.

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    Considering the summer of 1987 through the lens of nearly a quarter century, I wish now that I’d kept a journal or carried a camera to capture every little moment and object that demanded my interest. That summer, my parents packed up the Grand Marquis, tossed me, my sister Karen and my brother Cody into the back seat and pointed the car north, toward Yellowstone National Park, for a two-week vacation.

    To be perfectly frank, I’d have rather stayed home in suburban Fort Worth and continued putting the moves on Lisa Fravert (who, it turns out, was far less interested in me than I was in her), but my folks compelled me to go. I cordoned off my share of the back seat, threatened my much-younger siblings with imminent death if they crossed into my territory, and dropped myself into two things that I hoped would stave off boredom and family interaction (which, if you think about it, are the same thing to a teenage boy): my Sony Walkman and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

    (Quick digression: Seriously, a Sony Walkman! Cassette-style, even. In my lifetime alone, a blink-of-the-eye 41 years, I’ve known music on eight-tracks, vinyl, cassettes, compact discs and, now, computer files so compressed that 400 songs can fit on a device half the length of my index finger. We cannot be far away from new music being piped directly into our cranial nodules, pre-selected by an algorithm that assesses every song we’ve ever heard and sends us new selections based on our biochemical responses of pleasure. It’s going to be great.)

    I’d discovered Hemingway the previous spring, when I was assigned to read A Farewell to Arms by my honors English teacher, Janelle Eklund. I hadn’t held out much hope for it. Hemingway struck me as hopelessly rooted in an era that had nothing to do with me or my life, a name on the spine of books in my parents’ house that I’d never seen cracked. It was only after I did the work of crawling inside the book that I saw and appreciated Hemingway’s genius—the spare, almost parched, approach to language, in which simple words built simple sentences that stacked up into simple paragraphs, the sum of which was not simple at all. To write in such a way requires supreme control, an unwillingness to expend a single unnecessary syllable. Long before I read Hemingway for the first time, I’d resolved to be a writer, and in my teens, I was still flailing around for my voice, often with poor results. On a given day, I could do bad imitations of Dave Barry, Stephen King and, God help me, Andy Rooney—sometimes all three of them in a single paragraph. In Hemingway, I found an approach to writing that I could understand and an ethic I could emulate. He had built his creative writing on a foundation of journalism, the career path I came to follow. It was, in so many ways, a perfect convergence of my developing sensibility and a tangible manifestation of where it could lead.

    In Casper, Wyoming, where we spent a few days with extended family, I ventured into a mall bookstore and bought a collection of Hemingway’s short stories, and this wrenched open a whole new realization of the man’s talent. I’m going to employ an out-of-left-field comparison here, one I’ve used before: Hemingway’s short stories remind me John McEnroe’s career in doubles tennis. Both derived their greatest fame for other things—Hemingway for his novels, McEnroe for his Grand Slam singles titles and obnoxious bearing on the court. And yet, in these sidelight endeavors, both are possibly the greatest who ever lived. It’s an incredible level of ability for one person to possess.

    Onward, we drove, hooking up with my mother’s sister and her family in Billings, where I live today. The merged families then made their way to Red Lodge, up the switchbacks on the Beartooth Highway, to Cooke City—where I met a woman who’d known Hemingway, a connection to him that knocked me out—and into the park. This is where the haze of memory fails me a bit; I cannot remember the order in which we took in the sights, or how many days we stayed, or even the finer details of the majesty we saw. I spent a lot of time on narrow trails leading to viewing platforms, my 4-year-old cousin Dani riding on my shoulders. The rest of the time, I spent with my nose in Hemingway’s prose and my ears under assault by Rush’s Moving Pictures.

    (Another quick digression: What’s it going to take to put Rush into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame? I’m serious. I can think of few pop-culture travesties that irritate me more.)

    I was 17 years old that summer, and now I am the age my mother was back then. The calendar turned over faster than I could have imagined, but even though time has erased the sharp edges of memory of that vacation, it will never leave me. I can glance to my left as I write this and see those two books—the very ones I manhandled that summer—sitting in my bookcase. I can walk out my door and into my city and state and know that I’m finally at home in the land I fell in love with as a teenager. I can pull up my current manuscript—backed up nightly on a Web-based server, a phrase I couldn’t have conceived of twenty-four years ago—and know that I’m working at the dream Ernest Hemingway helped nurture in me, the writer’s life.

    Simply put, I’m a lucky man.

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    Craig Lancaster is the author of the novels 600 Hours of Edward (a Montana Honor Book and High Plains Book Award winner) and The Summer Son. Visit him at his website (www.craiglancaster.net) and/or his blog (http://craiglancaster.wordpress.com).

  • News: Bound Like Grass: A Montana Memoir Masterpiece

    The Montana Book Award honors books that have a Montana setting or author, or —in the case of this year’s winner—both. Not only does Great Falls author Ruth McLaughlin live in Montana, she grew up here. In fact, her memoir about life in the northeast corner of the state is a quintessential Montana story.

    Bound Like Grass: A Memoir of the Western High Plains tells the story of McLaughlin’s idealistic grandparents’ pursuing their dreams by homesteading and her parents’ hardscrabble existence trying to hang onto the land.

    The book begins with McLaughlin finding the only remains of the house where she grew up are a blackened chimney and rubble—perfect symbols of the broken dreams caused by the Montana homestead era of the early twentieth century.

    Historians agree that big chunks of the three million acres of Montana land that were claimed under the Dessert Land Act of 1877 should never have been homesteaded. Promoters enticed homesteaders to try dry land farming with the slogan, “Rain Follows the Plow.” That was always a dubious statement and it proved to be false —if not an outright lie. Dry land farmers enjoyed some success in the relatively wet years in the 1900s and 1910s, but then drought set in launching an exodus on par with the dustbowl.

    While it helps to know the background, McLaughlin’s book isn’t a history lesson. It a story about the descendants of the rugged people who kept their land through the Great Depression and the  tough lives they led. In addition to their struggle to make the meager land yield enough to put food on the table, her parents contended with raising four children, including two disabled daughters. McLaughlin tells the heartbreaking stories of her sisters with loving candor.

    Even more heart rending is the story of her brother’s escape to California and his troubled relationship with their father. After his father gives up farming, the son asks for only one thing—a worn out tractor that could be restored into a valuable collector’s item. The old man sells the tractor for a few dollars—a searing symbol of toxic relationship.

    McLaughlin writes with the blazing clarity of prairie sun on a cloudless day. She uses writing techniques like a master novelist to turn what might seem the most ordinary of lives into a compelling story. Ruth McLauglin’s Bound Like Grass belongs on your bookshelf with Montana’s other masterpiece memoirs: Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky, Mary Clearman Blew’s All But the Waltz, and Judy Blunt’s Breaking Clean.

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    — To find out more about my work with the Montana Book Award look under the “Categories Button” on the right.

  • News: Memoir About Growing Up on High Plains Wins 2010 Montana Book Award

    The Montana Book Award winner and honors books are listed the the news release below. I will provide reviews of  them—and maybe some good books that didn’t win awards—over the next few days.

    You can read my post about the selection process here.

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    BOUND LIKE GRASS WINS 2010 MONTANA BOOK AWARD

    The 2010 Montana Book Award winner is Bound Like Grass by Ruth McLaughlin, published by University of Oklahoma Press. This annual award recognizes literary and/or artistic excellence in a book written or illustrated by someone who lives in Montana, is set in Montana, or deals with Montana themes or issues. Presentations and a reception with the winning authors will take place Thursday, April 7, during the Montana Library Association Conference in Billings.

    Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains is an honest, beautifully written memoir of McLaughlin’s own and her family’s struggle to survive on their isolated wheat and cattle farm. With acute observation, she explores her roots as a descendant of Swedish American grandparents who settled in Montana at the turn of the twentieth century with high ambitions, and of parents who barely managed to eke out a living on their own neighboring farm.

    Four Honor Books Were Chosen:

    Everything by Kevin Canty, published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. Canty’s novel chronicles a year in the lives of five appealingly aimless Montanans. Layla, a bright college student, and her heavy-drinking father, RL, fall into parallel adulterous romances—she with Edgar, a promising young painter, he with Betsy, an exgirlfriend undergoing cancer treatment. Meanwhile, June, a friend of both father and daughter, struggles to put the death of her husband behind her. There is a lot of booze and heartbreak in the book, yet it is full of optimism and humanity.

    Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Resnick, published by University of Nebraska Press. One morning in 1943, close to eighty men descended into the Smith coal mine in Bearcreek, Montana. Only three came out alive. “Goodbye wifes and daughters . . .” wrote two of the miners as they died. The story of that tragic day and its aftermath unfolds in this book through the eyes of those wives and daughters—women who lost their husbands, fathers, and sons, livelihoods, neighbors, and homes, yet managed to fight back and persevere.

    The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick, published by Viking. In his tightly structured narrative, Nathaniel Philbrick brilliantly sketches the two larger-than-life antagonists: Sitting Bull, whose charisma and political savvy earned him the position of leader of the Plains Indians, and George Armstrong Custer, one of the Union’s greatest cavalry officers and a man with a reputation for fearless and often reckless courage. Philbrick reminds readers that the Battle of the Little Bighorn was also, even in victory, the last stand for the Sioux and Cheyenne Indian nations.

    Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West by Dan Flores, published by University of Oklahoma Press. Dan Flores has assembled some of the most important and evocative artwork created in the region, depicting scenes from the Wind River Range of Wyoming to the Canadian border country. The accompanying essays are insightful and solidify Montana’s art history identity.

    The Montana Book Award was founded by the Friends of the Missoula Public Library in 2001 and winners are selected by a committee of individuals representing areas throughout Montana. Members of the 2010 Montana Book Award committee included Honore Bray, Missoula; Adam Kish, Twin Bridges; Mark Miller, Bozeman; Carole Ann Clark, Great Falls; Jill Munson, Fort Benton; Gordon Dean, Forsyth; and Samantha Pierson, Libby.

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    — To find out more about my work with the Montana Book Award look under the “Categories Button” on the right.

  • News: A Peak Experience — A Whole Day With Book Lovers and Great Books

    I spent the whole day on Saturday closeted with half a dozen book lovers from all over Montana. We got together at Chico Hot Springs to pick the 2010 Montana Book Award Winners. The process works like this:

    Publishers submit books for consideration. About all that’s required is that a book be about a Montana setting or by an author who lives in Montana. Except for technicalities defining the details of publication and residence, that’s it. Past winners have included fiction (The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford), non-fiction (Full Court Quest by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith), and young adult (Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson.)

    After a book is submitted, it is distributed to readers who vote via email. As soon as two of them endorse the book, it is fully nominated so everyone reads it. If two people reject the book then it’s set aside. This means each judge reads about 25 book a year—about a dozen or so that get fully nominated and another dozen that get rejected.

    Because about half the submissions arrive in the last quarter of the year, readers have to scramble to get everything read. (My eyeballs literally ache sometimes.) But by the time the meeting at Chico rolls around, everybody has read all the nominated books. That makes for a marvelous experience—a full day of discussing a wide range of good books with avid readers who have thought about them carefully.

    The meetings start with one judge introducing a book. After a brief group discussion, another judge introduces a book for discussion, and the process proceeds until all the nominated books have been discussed. Finding one “best book” in a diverse set  may seem like an impossible task, but by the time all the nominees have been discussed, four or five books emerge as leaders.

    Then committee members cast secret ballots indicating their top four choices in rank order. We weight the votes (4 points for a first rank, 3 for second, etc) and tally them. The committee discusses the tally, eliminates the low scorers, and votes again. The process repeats until one book has five first-place rankings—and it’s the winner.

    The committee then uses similar procedures to decide if there should be Honor Books and if so how many. For the last couple of years, entries have been so strong that number of honor books has been set at four—the maximum allowed. The one regret: many good books don’t get awards.

    After the judging, there’s time left in the afternoon for a soak in hot springs waters and drinks in Chico’s cowboy bar.

    And in the evening—dinner in the wine cellar of Chico’s five-star restaurant. Great food and great conversation with avid readers who love books. It just doesn’t get any better!

    The Friends of the Missoula Public Library sponsor The Montana Book Award. Book lovers everywhere owe them a vote of thanks.

    I can’t announce the winners until they’ve been notified officially. When that happens, I’ll provide reviews on this blog. I look forward to telling you about some really great books.

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    — The Montana Book Award Logo is a woodcut by Claire Emory.

    — To find out more about my work with the Montana Book Award look under the “Categories Button” on the right.

  • What’s a story? It helps to know what you’re looking for:

    Helena Daily Herald, Sept. 30, 1870

    Last week, I promised I would explain how I find the stories I post on this blog. The first step is defining what I look for.

    Most of the stories I post come from the collection of first-person accounts of travel to Yellowstone Park that I assembled for my presentations under the auspices of the Humanities Montana Speakers Bureau.

    In my promotional materials, I promised to bring travelers’ experiences to life using their own words. I soon figured out I could read four or five excerpts of three hundred to a thousand words in an hour presentation. That meant I had to be very selective as I went through my files.

    At first I “just followed my nose,” that is, I read and noted things I found fun or exciting, then excerpted and edited selections for presentation.

    My collection grew into dozens. There was just too much good stuff. How could I choose just four or five tales? My solution was to tailor each presentation to its audience. When I presented to women’s groups, I focused on stories by women. When I presented in Billings, I included stories by people who lived there. But, an account written by a person who lives in Billings, isn’t necessarily interesting to a Billings resident. It needs to be a story.

    So, what is a story?  I found an answer in Jon Franklin’s wonderful book, Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction.

    Franklin, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer and teacher, emphasizes the “complication-resolution” structure of stories.  He says a story is a description of what happens when a person encounters a situation that demands a response.

    That situation can be the high adventure of life-threatening danger as in “Colter’s Run”.

    Or the need for quick thinking to protect another person as in “Colonel Picket Gets His Bear”.

    Or the humor evoked by the need to get even with a supercilious twit as in “Maud Gets Her Revenge”.

    With the complication-resolution definition of a story, it’s not hard to recognize one when you see it. But that doesn’t mean finding stories is easy. In fact, most accounts of Yellowstone travel in my collection contain nothing but banal descriptions of one sight after another. But I slog through them anyway. You never can tell where you’re going to find a nugget.

    I found one of my favorite stories, “A Million Billion Barrels of Hot Water” after slogging through more than 40 boring pages.

    ∞§∞

    — Next topic: “Sometimes the best stories are the worst history: Differences between journals, articles and reminiscences.”

    — Clipping adapted from the Yellowstone Digital Slide File.