Uncategorized

I’m off tomorrow to New York to do research for my novel-in-progress.  I get asked sometimes about what I get out of going to the places my books are set–other than a great vacation!–and the answer may be a bit surprising.

Historical novelists rarely get to visit the places they write about, because those places aren’t there anymore.  I learned this most dramatically last summer researching THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD. The interior of the cathedral in Sevilla contains almost nothing–from chapels to altars to decorations–that would have been there when my heroine attended mass.  Granada is filled with a great deal of beautiful architecture, but baroque buildings have replaced medieval ones.  The palace where Isabella spent her childhood has not a remnant remaining of it.  You can get a sense for the warrens of medieval streets and countless tiny squares in some parts of the city, but I often feel a little bereft of what I am hoping for.

Rural locales are better.  The countryside probably hasn’t changed that much at least in places, and the plants and animals are presumably the same.  I get color from this–kinds of flowers, butterflies, shapes of hills–and the books are always the better for it. I had no idea, for example, how truly rural much of the Champagne region of France is, and I was  able to build that into FINDING EMILIE.

The main thing about going to the sites is avoiding awful mistakes.  Whoever said the devil is in the details must have been a historical novelist.  I had my heroine in THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD looking out across some hills to the sea and discovered that despite the proximity to the ocean, there was no sea view there. I like to avoid having characters watch sunsets out of north facing windows, or cross bridges that aren’t there, or not cross bridges that are. This is especially important for places that many readers may have been to.  One doesn’t want to get details about Paris or Venice wrong!

I do have have characters do things like stop at ruins I didn’t know existed until I saw them, or spend the night in a town too minor to make the guidebooks. One good part of travel is getting special details like that. I discovered, for example, that Sagres, where my heroine in THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD spent several years of her childhood, is unbelievably windy all the time–something one wouldn’t know from pictures.

I’m a college professor, so I can’t simply decide to take a trip when it suits me.  I need to go in summers or on winter break, so it’s not a matter of going before I start writing, or when I’ve finished a draft, or any other specific point.  At first I thought it would be best to go before I started writing, to soak up the flavor of a place, but it didn’t work out that way, and I think now that would have been a mistake. I can only afford to go once per book, and it’s working well to go after the first draft is done, or close to it.  That way I know very specifically what information I need.

I know where all the scenes are set, which makes it easier to put myself in the story. I stand in a garden and try to hear the characters talking.  I drive down a road and imagine what it would be to galloping on horseback. Even if I have to peel away the new housing development to see what was there before, or ignore the cars on a narrow cobblestoned street, I am there, letting it all soak in.

How much difference does travel make?  I’d say the books are ten percent better because of it.  Fiction still needs a great plot and wonderful characters way more than anything else. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft of my new novel, tentatively called BREAD AND ROSES, and I have a very good sense of every local I need to go see.  I won’t see Jewish peddlers on the Lower East Side, and it will be tourists crowding the Registry Hall at Ellis Island, but I’ll do what I always do:  pack light and take a good imagination.

The provocative title of the much acclaimed 1962 film “The Loneliness of the LongDistance Runner” came to me the other day as I was thinking about some of the strange things novelists do to develop and sustain their stories.

 

People often ask if I work from an outline, or if I know from the

beginning pretty much everything that is going to happen in my novels.  I tell them absolutely, positively yes.

Here’s the rest of the truth. I write all this down in a roughly three-page treatment, which I then put in a drawer and don’t look at again until I’ve finished, at which point I say, “I was going to write that?”

 

I suppose there are authors who just start writing without any plan and see what happens, but I don’t know any.  I suppose there are others who have thorough outlines they stick to, but I don’t know them either.  For me, as I imagine for just about every novelist, fiction is a combination of planning and inspiration.

 

There are a few reasons for this.  At the first keystrokes I can’t know the characters as well as I eventually will. In my work in progress, the main character was originally fairly sensitive to social problems, mostly because I liked her that way.  As the draft went on, I realized how unlikely that was and went back to introduce–at some peril of losing a bit of the reader’s sympathy–hints of the unthinking bigotry she would have inherited with mother’s milk.

 

And speaking of mothers, there’s been a complete role reversal in my protagonist Zora’s parents.  My original thought was an overbearing father and docile, rather caved-in mother, but I discovered the plot worked much better the other way around.

 

Plot is the key.  Other than “what are my characters like as people?” the biggest question is “what makes the best story?”  For historical novelists, this usually involves figuring out a way to get the main character into the right place at the right time.

 

Here’s where the ruthlessness comes in.  If a character is getting in the way of the story, the or she has to be disposed of. Novelists kill off characters right and left.  They force them into exiles of all sorts whether they want to go or not.  Sometimes they don’t need to be disposed of, but they must influence the plot in an unpleasant way.  “Wait a minute!” I might hear a fledgling character complain.  “I don’t want to be a jerk!”  Tough luck, I say!

 

Ruthlessness has a bad name.  Sometimes it’s simple expediency.  In my work in progress, I needed a means for Zora to break away from family and friends who were constraining her to remain in the aristocratic social circle of wealthy, turn-of-the-century New York.  So many exciting things affecting women, such as suffrage and unionizing, were happening in the years before World War I, and I had to get Zora out of the house.

 

How to do this?  Invent an acquaintance with a different point of view, one who exposes her to new things.  Give this person exactly the traits that fit the needs of the plot. Piece of cake!  Enter Sophia. I create characters out of thin air to aggravate problems and facilitate solutions.

 

 

As I go further into writing a novel, things start to fall into place. I know how people will react (and if I need something different, I go back and change them). I know how the characters will get from here to there. At this point I can’t type fast enough. Still, there are plenty of surprises ahead, plot twists the characters will tell me about as they are happening, things they will say I am not expecting.

 

 

Fiction is driven by what is called “the arc of the story.”  As my sense of that arc is honed, necessary revisions are clearer. This brings up another form of ruthlessness.  Sometime whole scenes, whole characters just have to go because they aren’t helping.

 

 

At this point, the novel has its own feedback loop.  Just this morning I went back through the first hundred pages to add small details I couldn’t have put in earlier, little hints of the inevitability, or at least the natural progression, of what lies ahead.  Zora is now a little snobbier and thoughtless at the outset, and her growing dissatisfaction with herself and her world more clearly linked to specific events.  A new character is introduced quickly a hundred pages before she will show up in earnest to enter the story.  I see whole conversations that need to change in focus or subject, or be eliminated altogether.  I see new words that have to be put in characters’ mouths or minds.  I see how, once they have said or thought these things, I can go back and foreshadow.

 

Gradually, through new drafting and this feedback loop, I reach the full potential of the story.  Pass after pass, the novel is layered into what you eventually read. For right now, I’m just holding on for the wild and wonderful ride.

 

 

For authors, a new book is such a daunting process that the earliest stages, long before the first words of chapter one are put down, is a time of wary circling. You know the feeling–something interesting and unfamiliar catches your eye, and you move in, maybe just a little, to check it out more closely, maybe poke it with a stick to see if it moves.

You don’t know–you really just don’t know–what’s going to happen. Every year I must go through several dozen ideas for historical novels, some I think of on my own, but probably the majority suggested by fans and friends. Some ideas get abandoned quickly–not enough information for a historical novelist to go on, not enough interesting or appealing in the lives of the real-life characters, not enough of something else. Other ideas get put aside for another time. The circling begins with the third group, the ideas that won’t go away, the voices that say, “write about me!”

My bookshelves are full of biographies of women I haven’t written novels about and probably won’t: Cosima Liszt Von Bulow Wagner, Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel, Hypatia, Clara Schumann, Hadley Hemingway, Gertrude Caton Thompson, to name a few. Several are still possibilities: Ada Lovelace, Pauline Viardot, and Marie Curie spring to mind.

Marie Curie is the latest casualty of my circling. I read every biography of her (four, if I recall) and even wrote fifty pages of a first draft before I ran into an obstacle I didn’t know how to handle. In my four novels to date the protagonists have always been characters of my invention through whose lives fascinating real-life characters come and go. I had some doubts about having a biographical character as the protagonist, but Curie’s life is just so amazing that I set my concerns aside.

Turns out that little muse fretting on my shoulder was right to be nervous. I have had to admit in the last week that a novel about Marie Curie just isn’t working.

In my first draft, I told the story from Marie’s point of view, as a third person narration. Here are the opening few sentences:

“Don’t look,” Manya Sklodowska whispered to herself as the first snow of the season thickened the air and stuck to the lawns of the Saxony Garden outside her classroom. She knew it was snowing even without looking, because the world sounded different, as if someone had picked up the edges of Warsaw in white paper and wrapped up a gift of silence.

At neat rows of desks, twelve-year-old girls in white-collared, blue serge uniforms squirmed. They’d been waiting for snow for all day, ever since the gray sky began to lower and the air took on the faint astringency of winter….

Okay, not bad for a first draft, but here’s the problem: I am describing something that happened that day to a real person. I had the biographies open in front of me and worked from them. I did a good job, in my estimation, in dramatizing a quite traumatic event involving a surprise visit by the superintendent of schools, but the problem was that the entire book would be no more than that. I would move on to the next few pages of her biography and dramatize that, and then the next, and in the end I would have told the story of her life, but not much more.

I learned something valuable from this–that I need to be able to make up the story. I get excited about inventing characters and putting them in situations where I don’t know what’s going to happen. That gets me up at six every morning ready to put fingers to the keys and continue the adventure. That wasn’t going to happen with Marie Curie, because there wasn’t a plausible fictional character I could create who would be alongside her, observing her but having her own life story too.

I decided to try a new approach, having multiple narrators from various stages of Marie’s life–her sister, her father, her first love, her husband, her fellow physicists, her students, her lover. Here is the same scene told from the point of view of Hela, who was in the same class as Marie:

“Don’t look!” My mouth forms words I don’t dare say aloud. The first snow of the year is falling. Nothing else thickens the air indoors this way, or makes the world outside go quite so silent.

I stare straight ahead at Mademoiselle Tupalska. Over her old-fashioned whalebone collar, old Tupsia has one of the meanest and ugliest faces I’ve ever seen. Her thick brows knit into one line, and her mouth turns down in furrows that make her chin look cut through like a marionette’s. She’s taking out her ruler now and laying it on the desk. After a few months of school, there’s no need to slap it in her palm to frighten us into obedience. Most of us know from experience the damage she can do with it.

Tupsia knows what I want–what every one of the girls in our white-collared blue serge uniforms wants–as we sit in our neat rows of desks reciting Russian verbs. We’ve been waiting for snow for all day. Now the tickle in my nostrils from a draft through a cracked window has a faint astringency like the witch hazel we put on our scrapes and scratches at home. I see the other girls trying not to squirm or let their eyes drift to the windows, where we could be making halos of our breath, or punctuating the condensation on the window with the tips of our noses. Old Tupsia will have none of that. She doesn’t care if it’s snowing. She only cares about these dusty old books. I bet she eats cardboard for breakfast.

I try not to giggle at the thought as I look sidelong at my sister Maria. She’s ten, a year younger than I am. Before she was advanced into my class, I was the youngest and the smartest, but Manya knows everything I do and a lot more besides. Math, history, literature, German, French, and catechism–she’s the best at all of them, even though she is a bit too chubby around the middle and has hair that never looks nice for more than a minute…

I kind of like this approach, but deep down I still don’t think I have solved the problem. I am still stuck with too little to create except phrasings. I love to write, and I find point of view one of the most fascinating aspects of fiction, and if someone said “we’ve just got to have a book about Marie Curie and we need it soon,” I would probably go forward. But no one is saying that, and I am very glad of it, because I have decided to put this project aside until I find a way around this problem, if there is one.

This is the first time this has happened to me. Usually I get inspired and plough through to successful completion of a novel. This was a really valuable lesson, to see that there is more to a historical novel than a great real-life story. Marie Curie supplied the plot and the characters, but she couldn’t supply the inspiration. But I can wait. If she wants her story told, she’ll find a way to get in touch.

In my last post I told you what I was doing, and in this one I’ll try to tell you how I’m feeling as the publication date for FINDING EMILIE approaches.

It’s scary.

The process of writing a novel is so involved and lengthy that I swing through the spectrum of emotions over and over. Then, in the many months between finishing the final round of revisions and waiting for publication, I put FINDING EMILIE out of mind. I was making many appearances for PENELOPE’S DAUGHTER, finishing up novel number four (THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD), and doing some preliminary work on novel number five–plus teaching full time and doing some other projects, including serving as managing co-editor of two anthologies. FINDING EMILIE was, bluntly, the last thing on my mind.

About a month before a book comes out authors receive a box of finished copies, and when that carton arrived a few weeks back, the emotional roller coaster began for me again. I can’t describe the feeling of pulling back the flaps and seeing rows of one’s own book staring back. The cover is not a surprise–by then I’ve seen it often–but the bulk of the whole thing (I don’t know how else to say it) is a most pleasant reality check. I took a few out of the box and photographed them for–what else?–Facebook before curling up on the couch to leaf through a copy. Here it is, I said to myself. It’s finally, well, alive.

Then you wait. The time a book sits in warehouses and storerooms waiting for the publication date is pretty tough. I want the book out in the world now, but I’m also worried about what will happen when it is. What if people don’t like it? What if they write mean spirited or silly reviews on Amazon? What if they secretly (or not so secretly) decide that it’s okay, but not as good as my other novels? What if this? What if that?

I’m not sure what this worry is about, really. A number of people read the book in galley–a few reviewers, a few friends, a few fellow authors. Everyone has been very positive, talking about how reluctant they were to say goodbye to my characters and how vividly I’ve portrayed the world of Enlightenment France. “You like it?” I say, doing a Sally Field second Oscar speech imitation. “You really like it?” They smile, nod, or if they are at a distance, write reassuring e-mails that I read again and again.

Just today I found out that FINDING EMILIE is an Editor’s Pick in the next issue of Historical Novels Review–the biggie in my field. They like it–they really like it! I feel the weight coming off my shoulders. Maybe I can stop worrying now, since ALL the feedback is good–very very good.

This particular wait came to a strange, truncated end when I discovered the book went on sale on Amazon a few days ago–a week ahead of the pub date. All the countdown, all the talk of going out next Tuesday to celebrate seems suddenly moot. I’ve survived again, and now, the wait for blogger reviews begins. It’s like the time between leaping off the high dive and hitting the water, but I’m at this point more curious than scared.

I’d love to hear from you! Drop me a note when you’ve read the book, and better still, post a review on Amazon, B&N or someplace else. Writers are nothing without readers, and if you were here right now I’d thank you sincerely and deeply for all your support, except I’m chewing my nails and can’t talk at the moment.

If you are in the San Diego area, please join me and eight other area authors at the launch of our new endeavor, SAN DIEGO WRITING WOMEN, on February 19, from 6-9PM at Hair Drezzers on Fire, 3463 Adams Ave. in San Diego.

Here’s how we describe ourselves: “We are nine authors who are passionate about what we do. Some of us write for a living, yet all of us scramble to find the time to finish our books — between research trips to Borneo, Greece and death row, stand-up comedy shows or reproductive surgery on horses. A few months ago we started blogging here about the writing life. Now, we want to celebrate the written word with you in person, read from our latest books and launch our mission of sharing our combined knowledge and experience with readers, writers, and aspiring writers everywhere.”

The event will be a lot of fun, with wine and hors d’oeuvres, live music, and short presentations by the authors. So far close to 200 people have responded to the invitation posted on our blog. If you would like more information or an invitation to the event please RSVP to crother@flash.net. The event is open to the public, but for planning purposes, we appreciate your contacting us for an invitation.

Here are the other members of San Diego Writing Women who will be introduced at the Feb. 19 reading:
• Caitlin Rother: After 19 years in the news business, Rother left her job at The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2006  to make a living as a full-time author. She teaches writing at UCSD Extension and is working on book No. 8, about the John Gardner case. Caitlin will read from her new crime book, “Dead Reckoning,” the story of how a former child actor turned con man and hermaphrodite wannabe tied a nice married couple to the anchor of their yacht and threw them overboard — alive.
• Jennifer Coburn: Coburn is the USA Today best-selling author of four “chick-lit” novels and contributor to four literary anthologies. Her first novel, “The Wife of Reilly,” is in development for a feature film. “Tales from the Crib” is in development for TV. Coburn has written for newspapers across the country and is the recipient of journalism awards from the Press Club and Society for Professional Journalists.
• Divina Infusino: Infusino is the author of “Day Trips from Orange County:Getaway Ideas for the Local Traveler,” the writer of “Rock Gods,” a rock ‘n’ roll photography collection, and co-author on “The Love Response,” a mind-body wellness book.
• Sharon Vanderlip: Vanderlip will read from her new book, “Hedgehogs.” A veterinarian, she has provied veterinary care to domestic, wild and exotic animals for more than 30 years. She served many years as veterinarian for the UCSD School of Medicine and later as chief of veterinary services for NASA. Vanderlip has written more than 20 books on animals and pet care.
• Kathi Diamant: Television celebrity Diamant left a career in broadcasting to follow her dream to tell the story of Kafka’s last love, resulting in her award-winning book “Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant.”
• Kathy Jones: Jones taught Women’s Studies for 24 years at San Diego State University and published books on feminism and the politics of the women’s movement. After writing “Living Between Danger and Love,” a memoir about the murder of one of her students, she left the university to pursue a writing career.
• Georgeanne Irvine: Associate Director of Development Communications for the San Diego Zoo, Irvine also is the author of more than 20 children’s books plus numerous magazine, newspaper, and Web articles. Her most recent work is the coffee table book, “The Katrina Dolphins: One-Way Ticket to Paradise,” the true story of eight dolphins from an oceanarium that were washed out to sea during Hurricane Katrina and dramatically rescued.
• Judith Liu: The author spent 30 years conducting personal interviews and hunting through dusty archives to research her book, “Foreign Exchange.” The narrative revolves around two women — one the author’s mother who attended an American Episcopalian missionary school in central China, St. Hilda’s School for Girls, and the other, an American woman who went there as a short-term teacher in the 1930s. Their lives intersected at the school during the brief time of peace in China. Set within the context of the school’s history, their tales provide a snapshot of China and its educational system before the founding of the People’s Republic.

We all hope to see you there!