Life: The True Stuff Our Stories Are Made Of by Margo Hoornstra

Ever wonder what the world would be like if you were never born? In the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey got to see the impact he had on the lives of others. For the rest of us, we’ll just have to calculate our own worth.

As authors, never been ties right in with those what if questions that drive our stories.

Where would the romance genre be without the secret baby trope?

In my first book, Honorable Intentions, I got a lot of mileage out of the teenaged daughter of a single dad hero. She was the product of a one night stand, and I built an entire book—heroine and all—around his desire to take care of her. Keep her safe and in his life.

In another, One Fateful Friday part of the Saturday in Serendipity anthology, the hero is sterile yet he and the heroine come together to adopt two orphaned children. In that same book, a secondary character and her husband who can’t conceive, live their lives as foster parents.

It might be I come by these storyline ideas naturally. My own mother was an unplanned pregnancy BEFORE my grandparents were married. *Gasp* Back then, in the early 1900s, such a thing was frowned upon and then some. Though Grandma and Grandpa eventually married and had another daughter, my grandmother was actually disowned by her family for having and raising the child conceived out of wedlock.

But think about it in a real sense. If my mother hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t be here, nor would my children or their children or…well, you get the idea.

My how times have changed though.

Married with two soon to be teenaged children, moving steadily upward in my career, with money in the bank and empty nest on the horizon, I had my own unplanned pregnancy. For me, inconvenience wasn’t a sufficient reason to not have and raise the resulting twins. Long story short (ahem!) my life has been better for the choice I made.

To each his or her own, but you can see what I mean about how some events in life shape the events in our stories. Scads of historical romances have been, well, born, with the unexpectedly pregnant circumstance as the inciting moment that drives the protagonist into action and on to what we term the heroine’s journey.

Here’s another true life occurrence that has me thinking fiction. My husband’s maternal grandmother left two children in the old country, never to see them again, while she sailed to the new world and a new life. And where she subsequently married and bore then raised three more children. That’s a book I’d love to write someday. I even have a title in mind - Emma.

What would the world be like if you had never been born? Certainly something to ponder now and then, isn’t it?

The 11^th and 23^rd are my days to blog here at the Roses of Prose. For more about me and the stories I’ve written so far, please visit my WEBSITE