Written in response to...
A behind-the-scenes look.
A few years ago I drafted a story as an homage to a book I’d loved as a child. That book was called ‘Island of the Blue Dolphins’ by Scott O’Dell and was in turn, based on a true story of a girl who survived on an island alone for 18 years just off the coast of California.
Although some of the assumed biases in the book are based on tropes such as the ‘Noble Savage’, at the time I didn’t understand any of this. Instead, I was completely in awe of the protagonist, a young girl called Karana, who was capable and resilient in the face of devastating loss.
You can read about the debunking of some of the myths that Scott O’Dell unknowingly based his book on here and more from the United States Park Services on the Channel Islands (the setting for the story), and the mystery of the Lone Woman here.
‘Island of the Blue Dolphins’ was one of my favourite books growing up and, as can be the way with formative stories, I longed to write something in a similar vein.
In the story published last week, I finally accomplished this goal but rather than an island, I set my story on a distant planet. However, it was something closer to home that gave me the idea for how the interplay between the main characters might evolve.
For a long time I watched people in my suburb live with and love their dogs, so much so that the animals become family members, even surrogate people. In thinking about this, I wondered what drives humans to rely so much on the canine (or feline or even equine) and to treat these animals better than we sometimes treat other humans. And that was the idea I wanted to explore in this story. For Karana in ‘Island of the Blue Dolphins’ it is the leader of the wild dog pack, for Ava in ‘Planet of the Blue Horizons’, it is Tobor who replace the human connection that’s missing in their lives.
Tobor was not an obvious choice of companion for our heroine who is all alone on the strange blue planet, lost in the vast universe. He becomes a ‘friend’ because Ava has no one else to talk to and rely on just as Karana had no one else for the 18 years she was stranded on her island, alone.
Although I wanted my heroine to be as resourceful as Karana in the ‘Island of the Blue Dolphins’, I also wanted to demonstrate how much of the human quality we give to animals and, in my heroine’s case, the inanimate because of our own needs for connection.
There’s nothing wrong with this at all of course. What I wanted to highlight was the importance of a human connection and in the absence of this, how we find ways to cope with extreme situations, and it is this essence of our humanity which makes us so resilient in the face of great adversity.
I hope you enjoyed the story and this week’s behind-the-scenes insights.
And, announcing that the next reader-suggested prompt will be:
I knew I shouldn't have sent that text.
The response to this prompt will be published on Sunday, 27 July at 7pm.
And if you’d like to suggest a prompt, please leave a comment or send a message below :-)
Or let me know what you thought of the story and/or this week’s newsletter.
Until next time,
Jacqui