This
month, Fabulous Florida Writers is pleased to welcome guest blogger Victoria
Allman. Victoria
has been following her stomach around the globe for fifteen years as a yacht
chef. Her two non-fiction books, Sea Fare: A Chef's Journey Across the Ocean
and SEASoned: A Chef's Journey with Her Captain, won First Place for
Travel in the Royal Palm Literary Awards, and her essays on travel and food
have appeared in Dockwalk Magazine and Marina Life Magazine. Wander
is her first work of fiction. Victoria was our featured writer on
July 5, 2013.
When I was ten years old, I copied down the words
to Elton John’s I’m
Still Standing and told my mother I’d written it. Of course it was a lie,
but for about a day and a half she believed me. She praised me, spoke of how
gifted I was, how creative. In fact, she was so proud, she bragged to her
friends about me, showing off the lyrics I’d copied. Apparently, her friends
listened to the radio more than she did and it took about thirty seconds before
I was busted.
It was the first and last time I’d written a
lie…until recently.
My punishment had been so severe that in fear of
getting in trouble again, I stuck with non-fiction. Inherently, non-fiction is
the truth. It is something that can be verified and checked. It is based
on real life, facts, and events. That was something I could write about. Real
life for me was being a yacht chef and traveling the world’s oceans. I wrote
about the food I found in different ports, life on the boat, descriptions of
places, and the people I met.
But, through my first two books, I found this
sticking to the truth restricting. I was tied to what actually happened, when
exactly it happened, and where it all took place, which meant I had little room
for creativity. I was terrified a man I’d met once, ten years earlier, would
recognize what I wrote and call me out for saying he wore a red sweater when
really it was more of a burgundy color.
One day, while I was diving in the Virgin Islands,
I envisioned finding sunken treasure, but I couldn’t add that into the memoirs
and travel adventures as I had never actually found
treasure and remembered the early penalty for lying. So, I turned to fiction
and started writing a novel set on a boat traveling from Savannah to the Virgin
Islands. I invented characters, I dreamed up bad guys, I imagined boat chases –
I was lying again.
Wander starts in Savannah, Georgia with
Kevyn Morgan, an antique restorer, finding out the father she thought had died
thirty years ago was really alive and living in the Caribbean searching for
sunken treasure. Longing for answers, Kevyn sails her sailboat down to Ft.
Lauderdale, Key West, the Turks and Caicos, and the Virgin Islands to find the
father she never knew.
The funny thing was it wasn’t all made up. I was
writing about places I’d been and putting the characters in real buildings and
restaurants. I was describing the smell of the ocean at midnight, the color of
the orchid blooming on a palm tree, and the view from the bow of the boat.
There was a truth to my descriptions, a sense of place that I hoped would have
the reader trusting that I knew of where I wrote. I realized I was using the
techniques of nonfiction in my made-up story.
The essence of non-fiction must be present in good
fiction. The reader must feel like the tale could actually be true, that it
might be something that could happen to them. It is this sense of place that
has catapulted great stories into ones that have stood the test of time and
become classics.
In Gone With the Wind Margaret
Mitchell’s words transport you to Georgia and make you feel like you are in the
Old South. Mitchell was from Atlanta and wrote of what she knew. You can
envision the landscape in her words. It is this sense of place, this truth
about where she is writing that made Gone With the Wind one
of the most famous books from the South.
Can you imagine Steinbeck’s East of Eden set
in New York or Hemmingway’s To Have and Have Not
in Oklahoma? No, because it is the authentic feel of the setting that adds to
the story.
Here in Florida, we have such a sense of place our
fiction authors need to capture the feel of the oppressive heat of August or
the buzz of Miami in their writing. If they don’t, the story will fall flat and
the reader will be left disappointed. Writers like Carl Hiaasen, John D.
MacDonald, and Elmore Leonard know this and have captured the feel of the state
in what they write.
It is this combining of the two sides of writing
that makes for great storytelling. Now, I’m not saying if I write a murder
scene I am going to go out and practice just to get the right feel. That will
be the fiction part coming through, but I am excited to explore the ability to
lie and make up stories with the real world places and flavor that I learned
from my years of writing about travel on a yacht.
My writing has come full circle. Now I lie and tell
the truth.
For more about Victoria's life as a yacht chef,
visit her web-site at www.victoriaallman.com.
