Rachelle Delaney

Oh hey, you’re back to find out where my ideas for the setting and characters of The Ship of Lost Souls came from. How nice of you to drop in. Tea? I’ve got cinnamon rooibos with maté. Not your style? Well then, make yourself comfortable. How’s that nest for you? Not to pokey?

The idea for my main character, Scarlet McCray, came to me quickly and fairly effortlessly. Her voice was easy to access, as if she’d always existed in some part of my brain. And in a way, she really had. I’m not gonna lie. There is definitely some 12-year-old Rachelle in 12-year-old Scarlet. Twelve-year-old Rachelle could have really used an outlet like the Margaret’s Hop to channel her boundless energy into.

The character Jem Fitzgerald, on the other hand, was a little trickier. I thought I knew him, but I didn’t really get to the bones of his being until far into the rewrites, when my editors were challenging me to think harder about him. It was then, in the throes of that fourth or fifth round of edits, when I realized that the characters you initially cobble together aren’t necessarily the right ones in the end. And you have to be open for big, scary changes. I think that letting go of an original idea is one of the hardest lessons writers have to learn.

As for the setting, well, I knew next to nothing about the world of pirates when I started this project. The idea of recreating life onboard a ship was very intimidating, until I realized that the Lost Souls lived in the Tropics. And I knew the Tropics, having spent some quality time there over the past few years. The place I was particularly familiar with, however, was the jungle. (The photo below is from my most recent trek.)

Mulu National Park in Malaysian Borneo

The more I thought about it, the more I fell in love with the idea of the Lost Souls venturing into mysterious jungles. I wanted to recreate the night I spent in a hammock across the river from the world’s tallest waterfall, in Venezuela.  Or the time I came upon a band of peccaries — very smelly wild pigs — while hiking in Costa Rica. And the terror I felt when my guide told me they might attack us, en masse. (They didn’t.)

When I was about halfway through the first draft of the Lost Souls, I visited the gorgeous island of Dominica in the eastern Caribbean. One of the most popular hikes in Dominica takes you to… dum da da da!… a boiling lake. And so it was that I found myself on a multi-hour hike, slogging through pouring rain and mud, to see the legendary boiling lake. It wasn’t the worst hike I’ve done. But it was up there. Anyway, I decided that my suffering wouldn’t be in vain. The Lost Souls would have to conquer the hike to the boiling lake as well. And they did. Far more stoically than I.

Lately I’ve been getting asked where the concept of The Ship of Lost Souls, its setting, and its characters came from. Of course it didn’t spring to mind all at once. I spent a month or so mulling it over, jotting down notes, and blurting out half-formed ideas to patient writer-friends before attempting any actual writing. And even after the first draft (actually, even after the second), the story kept evolving.

I guess I first started thinking about pirates about four years ago, when I was working as an editor at a small press, combing through a collection of ghost stories in search of grammatical gaffes. I believe it was ghost stories of North Carolina, but I’m really not sure. Anyway, one stuck in my mind, because it revolved around pirates. I can’t for the life of me remember what it was about, but I do remember thinking that the world needed more stories about pirates. As I had yet to see a certain new movie, I hadn’t realized that the world was already pretty well packed with pirates (or that pirates wore such copious amounts of eyeliner). This I noted later, a little sheepishly.

Anyway, somehow I got to thinking about pirate children, and I became enamored with the idea of how different life would be onboard a ship of pirate children compared to a ship of “grownup” pirates, since children have such different ideals and priorities. And the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that the captain of said ship would have to be a girl. More about the creation of Scarlet in the next post. 

So I originally envisioned myself penning a darker novel for teens – kind of like Lord of the Flies, except with pirates. But it didn’t take me long to realize that that wasn’t going to happen. I’m not really a dark, Lord of the Flies-type writer. Slapstick and sea shanties are really more my style. My wild pigs would be stinky but friendly, not symbolic of some societal savagery that lurks within us all (at least I think that’s what we learned in Grade 11 English. I don’t remember much about that either.) 

Next post: where the setting and characters came from. And my own encounter with Smelly Wild Pigs.