Plotting

Today I continued to struggle with plot. My original plan, devised this morning, was that Robert Davis's day would unfold in short snippets chronologically throughout the novel. His backstory would form the meat around those snippets and inform the snippets. His problem and then solution or character arc would reveal itself over the course of the day. However, this just wasn't working. I was not compelled by his character arc, which in short, was to have him recognize that his son had a different dream for the son's life than his dream for his son. I don't know what it's like to be a father. I don't know what it's like to wrestle with that --- though I could have taken the imaginative leap.
I think that truly moved me to shift gears though was that if the day was about his character arc, it would take the story out of the hands of my adolescent great-grandmother (whose hands I originally intended the story to be in) and into the hands of an old man, and move the novel from a middle grade novel to an adult novel. This story originally compelled me because it was about a girl going after her dreams to go to college at a time when few women pursued higher education. It wasn't about a girl's recognition that she had to claim her own adventure and follow her own dreams. Just as her grandfather did, her father could not … and she had to figure out what that dream was … I'm still sorting through the symbolism of the burning tower. It is not clear to me. Originally, I had her recognizing that the tower was ego and when built to ego, would burn. But I have discovered this tower wasn't about ego to her grandfather. It represented his hard work coming to the land. So what realization will she have with it burning down. And what does it's burning down symbolize? This is a new struggle I will encounter, but one for another day. I've sunk time into this story, and now, I read Louise Penny's A Fatal Grace, and thank God for other writers to read.
I ordered The Plot Whisperer to help me learn how to plot. Looking forward to it arriving!

gigg~

Childbirth in 1854

I read this article about it:

Bogdan, Janet. “Care or Cure? Childbirth Practices in Nineteenth Century America.” Feminist Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 1978, pp. 92–99. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3177452.

Which led me to:

Dewees, A Compendious System of Midwifery