GIRL IN A RED SHIRT – OWEN MULLEN
As an author, I’m often asked how a book comes to be written. Readers are keen to know what seed sparked the idea. When I started, did I know how it would end? Are the characters inventions or based on real people? How familiar is the location? And why that particular location, anyway? The truth is, it depends. Some stories need teasing out, others arrive with little more to do than capture the words on the page. Often characters are constructs of a several people who’ve crossed my path. Or sometimes, they come straight from my imagination with no conscious point of reference.
The story I’m going to read an extract from, Girl In A Red Shirt, turned out to be a very different experience for me. Not the usual Christmas tale and not the usual route to writing.
Originally part of an unpublished novel, it told the tale of a group of American soldiers being pursued by the Vietcong through the Vietnam jungle – a terrifying experience not easily forgotten. The book it was lifted from took a different direction and this section was cut and filed away. Years later, when I was invited to contribute to an anthology to raise funds for a good cause, I remembered it. But the anthology had a festive theme, which presented a whole new challenge. I kept the initial premise and had the two main characters – Danny ‘Dakota’ Goodpipe, a massively-built Sioux Indian, and Billy Randall – meet up again on Christmas Eve, twenty years later.
Snowed-in and unable to travel on, they are forced to confront the past. With jets being de-iced on the runways, they go back to the past together and it soon becomes obvious that since South East Asia their fortunes have taken very different paths, paths I hadn’t considered in the initial writing.
By moving them forward in time, hearing them speak about themselves, I understood who they were better than when I’d first set them down in the steamy snake-infested jungle, running for their lives.
And in a sense, like the reader, discovered them myself for the first time.
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