Drawing on those memories helped me to determine a course of action for the beginning of the story. Another element that I drew upon was the memories I had from having to move to new homes. My father was in the military so we had to move several times when I was younger.
Both of these elements gave me what I needed for a beginning. As I began the story, I wanted to open with some action that quickly brought the reader into the main character’s development, and give the reader someone to sympathize with.
The next element was to give a background and set the scene for the main characters and to begin developing the relationships between them. Once I had established that, I set out to introduce some of the other, magical characters.
As I was doing research and was trying to come up with Native American characters to fill in for the ones in my dream, I came across many stories in Native American mythologies that dealt with animals. Being an animal person, I quickly decided to try and work in animal characters. I tried to find animals that we were familiar with and that would adequately represent the more fantastic fantasy characters that were in my dream. I also wanted animals that were native to the southern part of the United States.
Being a fantasy adventure story however, I still wanted that element of magic or the fantastical, so I gave the animals human intelligence, unusually long lives, and the ability to speak. They were also an integral part of the background mythology that was used to set the main plot line.
I also tried to select key scenes from within the story to illustrate. The drawing of the turtle is the first time Adam encounters one of the Little People.
More in Part 3
