All 50 States Mentioned

A cool thing I was able to accomplish, in my mind at least, was to mention all fifty states in the book.  This happened in a very natural way, but also with a little fudging and conniving where needed. I write on page 6, “Adding to our roll call of states was major.” So we were going all out to collect states. The travel route itself gave me 19 new states to talk about, I think, but that was a far cry from 50. So during the editing and rewriting process, I kept a sheet of paper handy and started adding more state names when logical or convenient:  “The sun slanted west over the Pacific, with Hawaii an incredible 3,000 miles away.” “I met up with a couple of guys who hitchhiked down from Washington and Oregon the day before.” “Places like New Mexico and Oklahoma have hardly been settled yet.” “We ran into a guy with a sheepdog who was on his way to Alaska.” “Eric and Jake were headed back to their home in Rhode Island.”  etc.  That sentence about Eric and Jake was definitely not where those two guys were from (I don't remember where anymore), but I needed to get Rhode Island in there somewhere, so . . . That’s part of the magic of writing a novel rather than a memoir. You can switch around things like that, to make it fit the point you’re trying to make.