Fiction Versus Nonfiction

I recently finished reading two books. One was a nonfiction book about horses, and I came away with the thought of “Really? What kind of tale is this author spinning?” The fiction title was a mystery and the protagonist was a Realtor. From what little I know about buying and selling real estate, that part of the fiction book was completely based in fact.

It is obvious that the line between fiction and nonfiction can be, and often is, blurred. But as an author who writes both, I sometimes wonder just where that line is. Every author has a unique writing process, but certainly a nonfiction book needs to be steeped in fact. Even if the author knows the subject like the back of her hand, research should be done to confirm lesser known facts. For the reader’s benefit, the ideas need to be presented logically, with a little entertainment, such as a good story that is relevant to the facts, thrown in for good measure.

While the writing process for nonfiction can be methodical, with the author checking off each of the points he or she wants to make, fiction can be a wilder ride. From the invention of characters, scenarios, sometimes even the invention of entire towns, the process can be challenging, but a lot of fun. The inventions, however, need to have enough fact in them that the reader is not taken out of the story in disbelief.

In these ways, nonfiction can have an element of fiction, if the author is telling a story to illustrate a point, and fiction must have enough fact to make the story believable. That can be a thin line that is hard to follow, and I applaud every author who gets it right.

I have written many books, and looking back, I have done better weaving all of this together with some books than with others. I am thrilled to report, however, that I seem to have gotten it right in my newest equestrian mystery, The Fame Equation, which has been selected as one of three finalists in the mystery category for the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Book Awards. 

In a few days I will head to Salt Lake City in a day or so to see if this book, the third in the series, has been selected for a gold medal, or a silver one. In either case, I am so honored by this recognition. This is the sixth award for the series, which has also been optioned for film and television. After so many, many long months of mixing horse facts with the lives of my fictional characters, it is a wonderful feeling to know that in the end, the balance was right.

In a final note, I will be at the Midwest Horse Fair in Madison, Wisconsin April 15-17 teaching people about ground driving and riding in balance. Hope to see many of you there!

––

Lisa Wysocky is an award-winning and bestselling author and horsewoman who educates people about the horse. She also is a registered PATH instructor who consults with therapeutic riding centers across the country about their hoses and horse herds. Find her online at LisaWysocky.com

Life Imitating Art . . . Or Not

                                                                     Milton C. Toby photograph

By Milton C. Toby

A few months after European Horse of the Year Shergar was taken from the Aga Khan's Ballymany Stud near the Curragh Race Course in Ireland, an enterprising reporter from the Irish Press asked author Dick Francis about the theft. Francis was in Dublin promoting his 22nd novel, The Danger, which featured a private business that specialized in rescuing the victims of kidnappings. The protagonist of The Danger once worked for Lloyd's of London, the insurance company that held much of the insurance on Shergar, so there was a connection between the real and the fictional--tenuous but sufficient--to pique the newspaper's interest.

The reporter wondered if Francis, whose horse racing novels were best sellers around the world, had any insights about the theft of Shergar, a real-life mystery that would become the sport's most famous cold case.

"This book [The Danger] is about people, rather than horses, being kidnapped," Francis explained. "One of my other books, Blood Sport written in the '60s, was about a classic winner from England who is taken to America and kidnapped over there. I have been accused more than once of giving crooks ideas. I certainly hope I didn't give them the idea for what they have done with Shergar."

It was a brief interview that morphed into a promotional exercise for Francis's then-current book, and also for an older one. No real news there; not a surprise.

I've been a fan of Dick Francis for years. The reminder of a long-forgotten book that might have some bearing on my own research into the theft of Shergar encouraged me to track down and reread Blood Sport. Written in 1967, 16 years before the theft of Shergar, Blood Sport still is a good read--and an interesting lesson in the problem of reliable horse identification in the pre-DNA era.

There is no real question about whether Gene Hawkins will find the stolen stallion, Chrysalis. Hawkins is a Dick Francis hero, after all, and they tend to be very good at what they do. The book turns on the mechanics of the search and how Hawkins will prove that the horse he recovers, a nondescript bay with no distinctive markings, actually is Chrysalis. Hawkins makes his preliminary identification based on the horse's odd appetite for sardines but in the end he must rely on an in-person examination by the stallion's groom ("lad" for Anglophiles), who is flown to the States from England and driven across country to verify the horse's identity.

The Cross of St. Bridget, a patron saint of Ireland, watches over horses and riders at the Curragh Race Course.
A few hundred yards to the north of the Curragh, Shergar was taken from Ballymany Stud.
Copyright 2015 Milton C. Toby

"Sure I'd know him," Sam Kitchens tells Hawkins. "Maybe I couldn't pick him out of a herd, now, but I'd know him close to. The way his hide grows, and little nicks in his skin. I wouldn't have forgotten those." Kitchens makes the identification after Hawkins spirits the stallion away from the ranch where the horse thieves were holding him. Francis doesn't deal with what must be a problem, though, convincing stud book officials in two countries that the horse really is Chrysalis.

Unlike Chrysalis, Shergar never was recovered. The best evidence suggests that the horse was killed shortly after he was taken from Ballymany and the question of a positive identification never became an issue. In any case, just about anyone in Ireland would have recognized Shergar on sight and there was DNA analysis if needed. Bits of bone purported to be the remains of the horse still turn up at the Irish Equine Centre from time to time. So far, though, researchers there have been able to dismiss the claims without utilizing a DNA reference sample kept under lock and key.

Conventional wisdom points to members of the Irish Republican Army as masterminds for the theft of Shergar. No individual or organization has claimed responsibility, however, and the Irish police have not charged anyone. The disappearance of Shergar is a mystery worthy of Dick Francis.





 

 

Sefton's Story, or Why I Love Research

                                                                     Milton C. Toby photograph

by Milton C Toby

Writing often is a solitary chore, at least for me, especially with a deadline looming. Researching a book or magazine article, on the other hand, usually is an enjoyable exercise in fettering out minutia and finding links between seemingly unrelated  facts. But more about that later.

July 20 fell on a Tuesday in 1982.

That morning, as they did every morning at the same time, members of the Household Cavalry--Queen Elizabeth II's official bodyguards--were making their way from the regiment's barracks in Knightsbridge to the Horse Guards Parade. The horses and riders were en route to the popular Changing of the Guard ceremony. At 10:40 am, as the procession passed through Hyde Park, a massive nail bomb hidden in the trunk of a Morris Marina parked on a side street exploded.

Thirty pounds of nails were packed around 25 pounds of explosive and the damage wrought by the bomb was enormous. Four members of the Blues & Royals were killed by the blast, and a number of soldiers and civilians were injured. In addition to the human casualties, seven of the regiment's horses were killed.

Sefton, an Irish-bred draft cross which had served with the regiment for several years, suffered severe injuries, including a severed jugular vein and 34 other shrapnel wounds. Many of Sefton's wounds were life-threatening; after 90 minutes of emergency treatment and eight hours of surgery by a team of cavalry and civilian veterinarians the horse's chances of survival were estimated at 50-50. Major Noel Carding, Veterinary Officer of the Household Calvary, directed the emergency first aid for Sefton and the other injured horses. He was said to be the first British military veterinarian in more than a half-century to treat cavalry horses suffering with wartime injuries.

Sefton survived the bombing and eventually returned to duty with the regiment as a national hero. Donations in Sefton's name exceeded 600,000 pounds and were used to construct a surgical wing at the Royal Veterinary College. He was retired from military service in 1984 and spent the rest of his years at the Home of Rest for Horses. His rider, Michael Pedersen, also survived the bombing but ever after was plagued with post-traumatic stress disorder. He committed suicide in 2012 after killing his two children.

The Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility for the Hyde Park bombing, and for another bombing later in the day at Regent's Park that killed seven members of a military band from the Royal Green Jackets regiment. The attacks were low points in Irish-British relations during the "Troubles." Jonathan Irwin, a prominent Irish bloodstock agent and head of the Goffs Thoroughbred sales organization, was disgusted by the bombings.

"Common ground between Ireland
and England"
Copyright 2009 Milton C. Toby

"I thought it important that England should realize that many Irish people felt real horror at the incident," Irwin wrote in his autobiography, "Jack & Jill: The Story of Jonathan Irwin." He organized a fund-raising effort that raised 47,000 Irish pounds from private donors. The money was used to purchase six cavalry horses for the British military.

"Horses have always been a kind of common ground between Ireland and England," Irwin wrote, "and I thought this would be a quiet, but symbolic, way of joining hands across the sea."  

So what's the connection between Sefton and research?

I came across Sefton's story without actually looking for it. I was in Ireland a few weeks ago doing preliminary research for a book about Shergar, a Thoroughbred stallion that was stolen from an Irish stud farm owned by the Aga Khan in 1983. Conventional wisdom is that the horse was taken by the Irish Republican Army and held for ransom--he never was recovered and no ransom was paid--but I think the story is more complicated. I touched base with Jonathan Irwin in County Kildare, who I knew from my days at The Blood-Horse, which led me to his book, which led me to Sefton.

Looking for one story, I stumbled across another interesting one. And that's why I love research!

  

The Review Conundrum

                                                                     Milton C. Toby photo

by Milton C. Toby

Book reviews come with an inherent contradiction that I have never managed to sort out to my satisfaction. We love the good reviews and pass them around shamelessly to anyone who’ll pay attention, while hating and hiding, as best we can, the bad ones. The mostly unspoken assumption is that the author of a favorable review is erudite, intelligent, and discriminating, a literary heavyweight whose opinion matters. A bad review, on the other hand, almost certainly was written by a person residing somewhere south of us on the evolutionary scale, a knuckle-dragger whose opinion can be safely ignored.

But does the perceived distinction between a good review and a bad one actually make sense? Probably not. (I’m ignoring the trolls who surf the internet and post scathing reviews just for the sake of making authors miserable. The trolls truly are the bottom-feeders of social media!)

I enjoy a good review as much as anyone, but the satisfaction is fleeting. The critical reviews, on the other hand, have been far more valuable.

Dance’s Image: The Forgotten Story of the 1968 Kentucky Derby, was an award winner with positive reviews—all except one. In a post-Derby epilogue I summarized the career of Hall of Fame jockey Bobby Ussery, who won the 1967 Kentucky Derby with longshot Proud Clarion and who finished first in the 1968 running. Although Dancer’s Image subsequently was disqualified for a controversial medication positive, Bobby Ussery still thinks of himself (rightly in my opinion) as the winner of back-to-back runnings of the most famous race in the world. I named the other back-to-back winners—it’s s short list—but in the process somehow managed to leave out the most obvious one, Ron Turcotte, rider of Riva Ridge and Secretariat.

The 1968 Kentucky Derby            George Featherston/Keeneland Library photo

One Amazon reviewer who happened to be a big fan of Turcotte’s took me to task over the omission. Getting a fact wrong is the kiss of death for a nonfiction author, and I was annoyed and suitably humbled by the one-star review. But I got over it. The bad review hurt, but it gave me the opportunity to correct the error for the book’s second printing.

A "good book, but . . ." review for Noor: A Champion Thoroughbred’s Unlikely Journey from California to Kentucky, proved to be even more valuable. The reviewer pointed out a couple of minor—but annoying nonetheless—factual errors. The review again gave me the opportunity to have the errors corrected, but it also demonstrated a fundamental shortcoming in my writing process.

I needed an independent fact-checker who knew the minutia of Thoroughbred racing and who was willing to pick through a manuscript with an eye for errors that neither I nor my advance readers noticed. I contacted the reviewer, thanked her for pointing out the issues with Noor, and asked her to check the facts in my next book, Cañonero II: The Rags to Riches Story of the Kentucky Derby’s Most Improbable Winner. She did a great job vetting the facts in Cañonero II and has agreed to serve as fact-checker on a book my agent is shopping around now, a history of racing’s addiction to performance enhancing drugs. I never would have connected with Val if not for a critical review.

In the end, a book review—good, bad, or indifferent—is what it is, one person’s opinion that we as authors can do with as we please.

Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien perhaps said it best:

“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.”

If you’re an author, how do you balance the good reviews with the bad? If you’re a reader, how important are reviews to your book selections?

History Matters!

                                                                    Milton C. Toby photograph

by Milton C. Toby

            A report that aired recently on the CBS news program Sunday Morning caught my attention. The subject was the fate of movie props and other memorabilia from the golden age of Hollywood, iconic items such as:

          ●Dorothy’s ruby slippers and Bart Lahr’s Cowardly Lion costume from The Wizard of Oz;

          ●The piano that Dooley Wilson played in Casablanca;

          ●Marilyn Monroe’s white dress from The Seven Year Itch;

          ●The statue from The Maltese Falcon.

            All are safe and sound, in part because of the renewed interest in preserving Hollywood’s past, but mostly because such relics can be worth a ton of money. Monroe's dress reportedly was sold for $5.5 million in 2011, The Maltese Falcon statute sold at auction for $4,085,000, and the Casablanca piano and the Cowardly Lion costume each drew final bids of more than $3 million. The question is not whether Hollywood’s past should be preserved. The answer to that one from most everyone is a resounding “yes.” The burning questions these days are different: How do we preserve history? Who is going to take the lead in the preservation effort? And what about those historically important items that lack any particular monetary value?

            Horse racing is facing a similar challenge. Hollywood Park, Atlantic City Race Course, and Suffolk Downs all shut their doors in recent months, leaving in jeopardy huge archives of historically important material from all three tracks--photographs, film, video, and written matter. There is no across-the-board exit strategy for preserving the archives at America’s race tracks. If the material is going to be saved for future generations—and that is a very big “if” given the current climate—the saviors will be dedicated individuals struggling against long odds. Digitizing images and text is a step in the right direction, but who decides what is worth saving and what can be tossed?

            One of the unsung heroes in the preservation war is Kip Hannah. Kip worked as supervisor of production operations for the television department at Hollywood Park when horses still were running at the Los Angeles track. Months after Hollywood Park closed, Kip is still on the job there. Assisted by veteran pari-mutual clerk Roberta Weiser, who is volunteering her time to the project, Kip is working to organize and preserve the massive print and image archives accumulated during the track’s 75 years of operation. Hollywood Park management is funding a project to digitize film and video from all the races at Hollywood Park, but so far, no individual or group seems willing to champion the entire preservation effort.

            I got to know Kip when I was researching Noor: A Champion Thoroughbred’s Unlikely Journey from California to Kentucky. An Irish import, Noor had a banner year in 1950 racing in California for Charles S. Howard (Seabiscuit’s owner). Howard was looking for a worthy successor to Seabiscuit, and Noor was his choice to fill that role. Noor lacked the longevity of Seabiscuit, but he was a very good horse nevertheless. He defeated Citation four times in 1950, set a batch of world records in the process, and was named champion handicap horse of the year.

I contacted Kip looking for photographs of Noor and his races at Hollywood Park. The horse did most of his West Coast racing across town at Santa Anita, but in the rich Hollywood Gold Cup he became the first horse to defeat two Triple Crown winners. Noor already had Citation’s number, and an aged Assault was an also-ran in the Gold Cup. (The only other horse to accomplish the feat was the ill-fated Exceller, who defeated Seattle Slew and Affirmed in the same race, the 1978 Jockey Club Gold Cup.)

Kip quickly sent a stack of black and white photographs, many of which I used in the book, and to my surprise, a bundle of medium-format negatives he located tucked away in a filing cabinet. Although there is no way to be certain, my best guess is that the negatives never were printed and that no one had handled them in more than 60 years. Unfortunately, the negatives had suffered mightily during their decades in storage. They probably got wet, or too hot, or both. The negatives were stored in individual glassine envelopes, and the emulsions were hopelessly stuck to the glassine.

An expert in photographic restoration confirmed what I already knew, that the negatives were unusable—all except one.

The image was a good one. It shows a long-striding Noor in the morning, galloping with legendary jockey John Longden crouched low over the horse’s withers. It was perfect for the book and after some discussion with my editor we used it on the cover. I’m still excited when I pick up a copy of Noor knowing that publication of the book almost certainly marked the first time that anyone had seen the image.

Thanks, Kip!

Bylines, Books & Blogs

                                                                     Copyright Milton C. Toby

Memories of a first byline, like those of a first love, tend to linger.

My first job out of college found me as the number-two staff writer in a two-person sports department at the Standard, a small daily newspaper in Aiken, South Carolina. We covered the Masters golf tournament because it was next door in Augusta, Georgia; high school sports; the University of South Carolina Gamecocks and the local community college teams; an astonishing number of bowling leagues—and, thankfully, horse racing. Aiken was a major winter training center before the advent of year-around racing, and good horses like Palace Malice still show up there from time to time to recover from a hard campaign.

Early on a Thursday, my fourth day on the job, the sports editor motioned with a hand in my direction.

“We need an article about the horses running in the Belmont Stakes on Saturday, the ones that wintered in Aiken,” he said. The deadline was 10:00a.m., three hours away. I had no clue which horses those might be or how to track down their trainers on the backstretch of a race track that in pre-Internet days was so far away from Aiken that it might as well have been on another planet. My problems were compounded by a couple of obvious shortcomings for a reporter: I had not the slightest idea how to write a newspaper article—I’d heard of the “Five Ws,” the basics of information gathering, but my undergraduate degree was in animal science, not journalism—and I lacked even a basic ability to type.

Against all odds, things turned out okay.

The article with my first byline ran on page 1 that day, albeit below the fold; Greentree Stable’s Ruritania, an Aiken-trained longshot, ran a creditable second in the Belmont, seven lengths behind winner Riva Ridge; and 44 years later I’m still writing about Thoroughbred racing. With the help of www.newspapers.com, a research tool I use almost daily, I tracked down the article. It’s good, not great, but better than it had any right to be.

I left Aiken the next spring for a 12-year run at The Blood-Horse magazine, where I covered racing in the United States and made trips abroad for the Grand National Steeplechase, the Japan Cup, and the Caribbean Classic in Panama. My first of 125 magazine covers for The Blood-Horse was an image of Secretariat’s first foal.

Bill Straus photo

I wrote about racing in Asia (I was at Sha Tin in Hong Kong for Lester Piggott’s last ride) and Latin America during six years living abroad, and I continued freelancing after a return to the States for law school. My eight nonfiction books include national award winners Dancer’s Image and Noor, a biography of the champion filly Ruffian, and The Complete Equine Legal & Business Handbook, which is used in several college undergraduate equine law courses, including the one I teach at the University of Louisville’s Equine Industry Program.

After a break from three years’ weekly blogging about equine law at www.thehorse.com, I’m excited about joining my colleagues, and learning from them, at Horse Crossings. I’ll be sharing my thoughts about writing nonfiction (because that’s what I do, and because editors and agents haven’t recognized the merits of the two novels gathering dust on a shelf in my office), new projects, research, publishing contracts, copyright, finding an agent, racing, and horses.

And, no, I still haven’t learned how to type without staring at the keyboard.