Julie Checkoway > Quotes

“A related question is where in time to begin. Should you begin far back in a character's past and move forward, or should you begin in the present and make use of flashbacks only where necessary? ... If the material with which you want to open the story is from the character's deep past, then there has to be an important relationship between what has happened in the past and what is about to happen. In other words, is the material with which you open the story an arrow pointing toward the unified effect?”
― Julie Checkoway, Creating Fiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs

“All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot is too much or too little. And there is no better place to find answers than in the Victoria's Secret catalogue--or in any ad for lingerie--where the arts of seduction and revelation are so successfully practiced. After all, the secret of the effective lingerie ad is the secret of effective storytelling--to provide, moment by moment, the illusion of imminent expose, to give the viewer (read: reader) the uncanny sense that something fundamentally compelling is always just about to be revealed. Lingerie ads and storytelling balance the veiled and the unveiled, the seen and the unseen, the shown and the about-to-be-shown. In short, it is the art of the tease, the craft of selective 'coverage,' that, not just in lingerie but in storytelling, works to enthrall.”
― Julie Checkoway

“Still, who, I wondered, owns the disappearing story that, in, part, they tell? The story of the teacher and the children lives now in so few places: on that weather-beaten wall, in scrapbooks filled with photographs. History isn't a sculptured cup; it's more like a sieve through which so many stories pass and disappear.”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

“in 1937, a schoolteacher in Pu‘unene taught impoverished Japanese-American camp kids how to swim in the plantation’s filthy irrigation ditches, and he challenged them to transform themselves into Olympians. That”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

“She appreciated life, it seemed, appreciated being alive, as if it were some extra gift she hadn't ever expected to receive, as if, perhaps, she wasn't quite worthy of the magnitude of it; and because she appreciated life, he began to do so, too.”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

“that”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

“It was well known and much discussed back then that at least 50% of the sailors killed at Pearl Harbor had died from drowning. 50% of the Navy couldn't swim. The statistics had made the news and it had been Chicago’s backstroker Adolf Kiefer who would come forward to head the navy's effort to teach his sailors how to swim.”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

“But the water, that was the army Bill Smith wanted to join and Smith got his wish. He did his basic training at the Great Lakes naval center in northern Chicago and after getting certified at Bainbridge Island, Maryland, he headed back up to Chicago to serve his country for the rest of the war with other Great Lakes instructors who trained more than 1,000,000 sailors during the course of the war, including the first African Americans to serve.”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

“Finally he [Kiefer] persuaded his superiors to let him go up to Washington where he reported in person that the US Navy was still, even after Pearl Harbor, losing more men to water than gunfire. What good is a 5-man gun crew, Kiefer asked the Navy brass, if one of those five couldn't swim and fell in. With one man down drowned, what good was a five man weapon? Kiefer return to base with funding and he became the architect of an ambitious program to make sure every sailor went off to war knowing how to keep his head above water.”
― Julie Checkoway