Today is the Fourth of July. I’ll spend a couple of hours this morning watching the local parade, which passes my condo complex, sitting in a camp chair and greeting neighbors. I’ll shut the windows to keep out the sound of those @#$%^&* illegal fireworks.

I’ll also watch a movie. That may seem like quite a segue, but I grew up at the movies. In years past, my mother’s family owned movie theaters, from the silent era on.

The movies also play a role in my novels. In my Jeri Howard book Bit Player, Jeri’s case takes readers back to Hollywood in the 1940s. My most recent Jill McLeod book, Death Above the Line, finds Zephyrette Jill taking a break from riding the rails, She winds up in the cast of a film noir. She also meets a former actress who was blacklisted.

The movies of choice for the Fourth of July are Yankee Doodle Dandy and 1776. In the first, Jimmy Cagney dances across the screen as that quintessential song and dance man George M. Cohan. And 1776 gets me every time, with William Daniels as John Adams. Benjamin Franklin is played by Howard Da Silva, who was blacklisted, for real.

So, watching these movies is a holiday tradition. It’s all good, right?

Yet lately, I’m bothered. There’s a blackface number in Yankee Doodle Dandy.

I know blackface is a theatrical tradition dating back to minstrelsy in the mid-19^th century in the United States. In the 20^th century, there are Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer and Bing Crosby in Holiday Inn. That’s why I can’t watch Holiday Inn, for all that many folks consider it such a classic. That blackface number in Holiday Inn is excruciating. And the one in Yankee Doodle Dandy makes me wince.

So, 1776. I’ve seen the musical on stage several times, and I have the DVD of the movie. The most difficult part, for me, is the battle and compromise over slavery. Just a movie, right? With terrific performances and wonderful songs? Well, it’s a movie with lots of undercurrents and lots to think about. Those founding fathers “twiddle, piddle and resolve,” according to the lyrics of one song, as they argue about whether to declare independence and then about the writing of the declaration. We’re still arguing about the constitution that followed, facing—or not—the consequences of those actions in Philadelphia all those years ago.

Flawed people, living in different times. Those founding fathers were white men of property who viewed the world through that lens, despite Abigail Adams’s admonition to her husband to “remember the ladies.” Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. And the slaves? Well, three-fifths of a person, a compromise at the constitutional convention that increased the power of slave-holding states.

For decades, from the 19^th to the 20^th century, many white performers and audiences didn’t see anything wrong with performing in blackface, though this 21^st-century person finds it difficult to look at those stereotypes.

What does this have to do with writing? A lot, in my opinion. Flawed people. That’s what we’re dealing with when we write fiction. The characters I create wouldn’t be very interesting if they were perfect. In Witness to Evil, Jeri Howard’s case leads her into a confrontation with white supremacists. I wrote that book in the mid-1990s. I wish it wasn’t so relevant now.

In the Jill McLeod books Death Rides the Zephyr and Death Deals a Hand, readers glimpse how passengers aboard the trains in the early 1950s often treated African American porters with disdain and disrespect. And in the first book, a baseless accusation of theft. That’s the way things were back then and including that in the novels informs the picture I create of the times.

I make decisions when I write, determining how much, or how little, information about those flawed people goes into the book, and what it’s meant to convey.

We hold these flaws—a necessary part of the creative process.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you just don’t know what comes next? That moment when you have a plot outline, you know where you are going, but it is not coming together. The moment when you realize a character’s storyline is signaling something is out of whack.

For example, one of my main characters in Pay Back, Laury Cooper, was stuck in the Honolulu Airport for months. Just stuck. Wouldn’t leave, didn’t want to, just sat in a seat waiting for me to send him on his fateful way to Saigon before April 29, 1975. Part of the problem was probably fear of facts; historical fiction can do that, accompanied by images of readers throwing rocks at your books or cursing your name for a truth they don’t accept. Like many topics, Vietnam has that effect on those who lived through the era. The other problem was me; I knew once Laury left that airport, I faced writing his scenes like a fiend in a semi-frenzy, possibly without bathing, until his part of the book was drafted.

It held up the book’s publication. So, recently when one of the main characters in my new historical series started balking about his storyline in book two and refusing to leave another main character’s pantry, it began to impinge on the publication date of the first book in the series. This led to my discovery of plotting while coloring fish. Had I known the technique earlier, poor old Laury Cooper (Pay Back: The Cooper Quartet) would have been on his way from Honolulu to Saigon and the book published on time.

How did I discover the wonder of plotting while coloring fish? I downloaded an online coloring book to my phone for something to do while standing in lines, etc. Quite by accident, I discovered the Zen of it all. With my hands and eyes occupied finding numbered colors, my brain began to noodle over my plot predicament, working it out with each color, my eyes locked on the screen, my senses engaged in the picture filling in before my eyes. Any scientist will tell you that one time is not proof, so the next time I was stumped, I did the same thing, and again, the plot resolved itself, enabling me and the characters to move on.

Which is wonderful, but unless I grab a notebook or run to my computer, my thoughts are lost in the ether even if repeated out loud seven times. I used to be one of the notebook people, spiral-bound notebooks in different colors with the book’s working title written across the front in indelible ink. The troubles with that method are the following: which notebook is the note in, where is the notebook (never where I am), and on which page are the glorious words that take the plot from mediocre to the heights (I tended to write on the backs of pages, up the sides, and in no particular order).

I now have my ReMarkable2 (https://remarkable.com/) at my elbow, not a notepad, not a notecard, or a sticky note. When inspiration strikes, I scribble my brilliance on a page in my ReMarkable, name the file so I can find it, file it under the appropriate book, and keep coloring or keep scribbling depending on where the flow is best, comfortable that my genius has been captured. When I do get to the computer, I prop my ReMarkable on a bookstand, open the appropriate file, and have my thoughts, new direction, and any new text at hand as I write.

I can hardly wait to color each morning. It gets my juices flowing, allowing me to revisit where I left off writing the day before and resolve any outstanding issues before applying the seat of my pants to the seat of my chair and succumbing to the discipline of writing.

And if I get stuck, I can always color fish or birds or flowers or . . .