Unlocking A Novel- Pine Village Football

When I first started researching Mudlavia, I researched everything that happened in Warren County during 1918 and 1919. My research led me to the Pine Village football team and included reading The Good Ol’ Day’s “Game In Progress” and Doris Cottingham’s book, Pine Village Football The Inside Dope.

I wanted to tell the story of Mudlavia because of my grandpa, but while I was working on it, I discovered so many other fascinating stories about Warren County’s history, and the idea of telling the story of the Pine Village football team took root. There was a line in The Good Ol’ Day’s “Game In Progress” that caught my attention. It said, “The story of this man is a most interesting one and I sincerely hope that someday it will be told in full.” (The man they are referring to is Claire Rhode, the Pine Village football team’s manager.)

For two years now that sentence has been haunting me, and the facts, stories, and headlines about Pine Village’s football team have been rattling around in my head. The problem was that I could not figure out how to put that information together to create a compelling work of historical fiction.

I knew it would be hard to focus on a single player on the team (as well as Claire Rhode), because I don’t have a lot of individual information on the players and didn’t want to make a bunch of things up. There was also the fact that the team ran from 1898 until 1927, which is a huge span of time. Should I start at the beginning? Should I focus on the glory years? Should I try to fit all of it in?

For two years every idea I came up with felt wrong.

This past year I partnered with Simon Herrera from Vintage American Football to try and bring a vintage football game to Pine Village. I presented this idea to various people in our community and we formed a committee to make this game a possibility. Recently we were sitting in a meeting talking through ideas and someone mentioned something we could do and the meeting continued on.

I’ve had all this information in my head, all these ideas, all these facts, and suddenly her words unlocked them. I needed to be in the right place at the right time. A few simple words blew the whole thing wide open, and as I drove home, the storyline came to me.

If you are writing and you are stuck, keep researching and taking notes and writing. Be patient. As all that information gets filed in your head, at some point you’ll hear something or read something or experience something that will unlock your story and turn it into something magical!