‘Write what you know.’  Everybody—especially writers—have heard this adage.  So why do I always find myself writing about sisters (I have three brothers), old houses (my house is less than five years old), and activities I’ve never even planned on pursuing (cooking, gardening, sailing)?

            I’d like to think it’s more than just ‘the grass is always greener’—I mean, don’t we all wonder what it’s like ‘over there’ regardless of how hard we’ve worked to obtain ‘over here’?  Or maybe it’s a sincere desire to learn something new, to try on a life (ie. one filled with sisters) that for whatever reason have been denied me by birth or by the sheer virtue of lack of time.

            I believe it’s a cool mixture of all the above.  In The Memory of Water I write about two estranged sisters.  Granted, my only experience with sisters was watching my mother (the oldest of 5 sisters) with my aunts chatting at my grandmother’s kitchen table.  But to me it was that intimate mystique of girls growing up together in the same family; something I didn’t understand yet felt its absence in my house full of boys.

            But why make the sisters in The Memory of Water be avid sailors?  Not only have I always been afraid of deep water, but I’d never been within fifty feet of a sailboat.  I’d like to think it’s because I wanted to finally face a life-long fear.  Maybe even shake myself out of my comfort zone (a place I rarely leave).  Or maybe it was that part of me that calls itself ‘writer’ demanded that I pursue my craft with honesty.  If I expect my readers to identify with my characters, then I’d better be able to fully know my characters—their likes, dislikes, peculiarities, and what in their lives makes their souls sing.  Which brings me to the art of sailing.

            The Memory of Water is set in the South Carolina Lowcountry in a town on the coast called McClellanville.  It wasn’t too much a stretch of my imagination to see Marnie and Diana Maitland, the two sisters at the heart of the story who were raised in this small town, on a sailboat, and to have one of the sisters feel more at home on the sea than on land. 

            As tempted as I was to write all scenes while safely on terra firma, that ‘writer’ part of me wouldn’t allow it.  So I dragged my entire family with me while I signed us up for sailing lessons.  Granted, we weren’t on the open ocean, but we were on a sailboat in deep water, moving our sails at the wind’s whim and coming closer to understanding two fundamentals of sailing:  how to trick the wind to make our sailboat move as fast as it could, and how the flapping of crisp sails and the gentle thrum of water against the boat’s bow could make a person’s soul sing.

            Can I call myself a sailor now?  Not at all.  It would take years spent on a boat to become a proficient sailor.  I think I’ll have to be satisfied with just writing about it.  That’s what I do best, after all.  At the moment I’m sitting in my car at my daughter’s horse barn where she takes horseback riding lessons.  Surprisingly (or not!) my next book will have a character who was once an avid horsewoman until a devastating accident.  I don’t know if I’ll be climbing into a saddle anytime soon, but at least I’ll have a readily-available research source and I won’t have to throw on a life jacket to interview her!