Susanne Dunlap

I’ve written about this before. About books being turned into movies or TV series, and the choices the adapter has to make. So why am I revisiting this topic?

Partly because I’ve just finished watching the BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. I’ll confess it: I’ve read every Jane Austen novel, most of them more than once. Yet I willingly watch every film or TV adaptation, not just once, but usually multiple times. The Pride and Prejudice series with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle remains my go-to self-indulgent marathon. I think I know every word of the script, and every moment where it diverges from the book and I don’t like it.

I will watch the new Anna Karenina, having already seen two or three other adaptations, and being of the opinion that the book is one of the finest novels ever written, and no truncation of it for TV or film can possibly do it justice.

Then there are the Count of Monte Cristo adaptations (Gerard Depardieu is my favorite one), and so on and so forth.

So what is it? I know how the stories end. I know what to expect from the characters.

For me, it’s that the authors have made the characters so real that not only can I clearly imagine them and empathize with them, but I want to see them in the flesh. I want them to become real. Reading provides one, deeply satisfying, way to experience character and story. But watching—be it on a screen or on a stage—provides another that is satisfying in a different way.

This isn’t just a personal opinion. It’s actually backed up by science.

As to reading, an article from about a year ago in the New York Times explained the neuroscience behind our experience like this:

What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.

…The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.

When it comes to watching, we all know that our brain is not as engaged. Here is what the Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts says happens when you are really engaged in a movie:

When you sit and watch that way, some special things happen in your brain.  At least they do if you are, as the psychologists say, “transported.”  Or, as I would say, if you are really “into” the movie, “lost in it.”  Four, at least four, odd things happen.

You cease to be aware of your own body.  You’re tired, you have a head cold, your back aches–you forget all that.

You cease to be aware of your environment.  You don’t pay attention to the people around you, the exit sign, your seat.

You don’t doubt.   You believe in unrealities.  You simply accept what you’re seeing even if it’s totally improbable: hobbits, quidditch, Mickey Mouse, Spider-Man.  You have what Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

You care.  You feel real emotions toward things that you know perfectly well are not real, that are mere sparkles on a projection screen.

At least you do these things if you are transported.  Why?

The short answer is, because you’re just sitting and watching.  You have shut down your brain’s systems for acting.

The difference in neuroscience is stark. Several parts of your brain are engaged when you’re reading. Other parts are engaged when you’re watching. Both can make you laugh, cry, become angry.

You can’t stop those emotions.  Why?

Because they are coming from a more primitive, sub-cortical part of the brain, inside and back of your sophisticated frontal systems.  You are responding from your limbic system, a group of structures that form the inner border of the cortex.  This is a brain region we share with other mammals (and, if you don’t think animals have emotions, you’ve never owned a dog or cat).

Personally, I relish the experience of fiction in both those ways. And I feel fortunate to live in an age where it’s possible to do so.

I confess, I’m not a huge fan of erotica. Mainly because I’m more interested in story than sex. But Jamie Brenner’s retelling of the D.H. Lawrence classic offers—like the original—a lot more than just titillation. It’s a wonderful story, well told. And the sex scenes—OK, I’ll confess they were hot!

I caught up with Jamie recently and asked her some questions about this wonderful book. Although it’s not historical fiction, I think that the endeavor to recast a classic somehow relates to historical. So I hope my readers will bear with me! Anyway, here’s Jamie/Logan.

Did you have any anxiety about re-imagining an classic erotic masterpiece?

I didn’t have anxiety because I really believed from the inception of the idea that Lady Chatterley’s Lover held legitimate parallels to our time for me to work with. And while the original was shocking in its eroticism, I didn’t try to compete with that in Miss Chatterley. While there is plenty of sex in Miss Chatterley, I knew there was nothing that could compare to the shocking effect of the sex in the context of that original publication. But what I did want to explore, and felt that I could explore in a timeless way, was the emotional and physical challenge of being in a romantic relationship that has ceased to be satisfying – emotionally and physically. And how when you’re in that place, it is very easy to be tempted by a stranger who seems to offer a quick fix.  I believe Connie Chatterley is just one in a long line of women who have faced this particular dilemma.

How did you settle on the world of Miss Chatterley, the high-tech, Silicon Valley ambience? In what way does it compare to Lawrence’s original setting in aristocratic England?

That’s a good question. Surprisingly, the setting was one of the first pieces of the  puzzle that fell into place for me. I read about a study that said a large number of women would choose to spend more time on Facebook than have sex with their partners. The image of that – thousands of women choosing to sit in front of screens rather than be intimate with their husbands or boyfriends or lovers – was devastating to me. It was just such sad commentary on what technology is doing to intimacy – that the devices and apps that are supposed to keep us “connected” are actually driving a wedge between us and the people with whom we are supposed to be the most intimate.  So I thought of the original problem in Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Cliff’s impotence – and I made technology and our screen addiction the “impotence” of our time. This is why I decided to cast my Cliff as a technology mogul.  In the original setting in England, you had the class conflicts – you had the artistocrats like Cliff and his friends who lived a “life of the mind,” and then you had the salt-of-the-earth people like Mellors the game keeper. I was able to establish a similar dichotomy in Silicon Valley – the people who make billions on technology sitting in front of their computers, and the new surge in extreme fitness and the trainers who are paid to help people get out from behind their desks and reclaim control over their bodies.

What was your biggest challenge in writing Miss Chatterley?

The biggest challenge was deciding how to use the supporting characters such as Ivy Bolton and Tommy Dukes. While the dynamic between Connie and Cliff had parallels to the original couple, I realized I had to use much more creative license with Ivy and Tommy – and I did. Writing the modern versions of these characters turned my biggest challenge into my greatest joy creatively. Ivy and Tom gave Miss Chatterley all the juicy drama I could write into the story. It became Lady Chatterley’s Lover meets Scandal. So much fun!

What led to the decision to publish it in four parts?

I had written a serialized novel called The Gin Lovers with St. Martin’s Press, and I really enjoyed telling a story with multiple places for cliff hangers. I feel this format really heightens the experience of conflict and drama for the reader.  This was especially true for writing Miss Chatterley, because each “episode” highlights a choice Connie has to make on her way to either saving her relationship with Cliff, or leaving him.

The original Lady Chatterley is a lot about class conflict. Do you think such a thing still exists in American society? And is the new elite of tech titans creating a new class structure?

I think class conflict absolutely exists today – as much, if not more than – at any other time in our nation’s history.  There’s a great book about the way this conflict effects our decisions and perceptions of our own happiness called Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. Status Anxiety really breaks down the psychology of class conflict, and it influenced me a lot as I wrote Miss Chatterley. This status anxiety – subtle in some characters, very blatant in others – is the backdrop to the unfolding romantic drama.

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Thanks so much Jamie! Want to buy the book? Get it here!

Just like every other reader, when I talk to an author, I want to know about her writing process. It’s a topic that comes up again and again  in conversations, and that has been on the top of my mind since the most recent meeting of my critique group.

So when I woke up at 3:30am (or actually, when my dog Betty woke me up at 3:30am) and couldn’t get back to sleep, I started thinking about process, and what the different approaches are. I came up with a simile: Writing a novel is in many ways just like creating a work of visual art—at least in terms of approach. Just as different artists choose different media to work in, different writers need different paths to completing a novel. For my purposes, I’m using representational art as the example, since a narrative is more representational than abstract.

This is an elaboration on the duality that is usually put out there: plotter or pantser.

Bear with me for a moment as I explore this here. At the end, I’ll tell you which “artist” I am.

Writer type 1: The Painter

We all know the cliches, of course. But dig a little deeper and see that there is a process similarity that some writers cling to in creating their works of fiction.

For instance, a painter might start with a sketch. The outline of a subject that will ultimately tell the story of the work, that will lead the viewer’s eye to the right places to make a coherent, meaningful picture. The sketch is then filled in and amplified, adapted and colored. Light and shadow add depth and meaning.

The corresponding writerly process for me is someone who outlines, who has a relatively clear image of the structure of her novel before actually fleshing it out with characters and actions. The plot, the motivations, are carefully crafted to hang on the framework in the novelist’s mind, or even on paper.

I imagine that having this structure frees a writer to delve deeply into characters and subtleties. For some reason, I think that a lot of what you might call character-driven novels could start this way—unless they don’t. My caveat is that there are infinite ways to arrive at an end result, and I’m probably oversimplifying. But the mental exercise amused me and might be useful, so here it is.

Writer type 2: The Architect

To build a vast structure that holds up requires enormous planning ability. Even more than painting, a writer with an architectural view of her story I imagine must spend a great deal of time on the preliminary stage, building the foundations, so to speak, gathering the materials, testing them out.

Architectural writers (and I’d love to know if I’m even close to right about this) are people like Leon Uris, Edward Rutherford, Ken Follett. In fact, Follett’s Pillars of the Earth demonstrates an architectural approach both literally and figuratively.

That’s not to say that spontaneity is lacking in writers who take this approach. Just like house building, materials can surprise you. But to achieve a vast panorama that encompasses a time period, or a life, seems to me to take this kind of architectural planning.

Writer type 3: The Sculptor

There are two subgroups here: those who start with a solid material and carve away the excess to reveal a subject, and those who start with a lump of something malleable and manipulate it to reveal a subject.

The first kind fascinates me, because it’s so unlike me. The example I can think of is a fictionalized biography. There, something exists in its entirety, but perhaps its details are not apparent. I picture a writer using a pen like a chisel, digging away to get at a truth hidden inside the material.

Or perhaps even more broadly, this is the kind of writer who spews out a rough draft, and only starts to see what the story is as she goes back in and cuts and shapes and whittles. The end result may bear very little resemblance to the original draft, but wouldn’t exist unless that original draft had been created.

The other kind of sculptor is something I can relate to. It involves starting with an amorphous lump of something: a character, a setting, a historical event, then just going to work on it, pushing, prodding, adding more clay when it’s needed. The trouble with this is that I think it’s easy to end up with an incoherent mess. But that’s what editing is for. And for me, this approach permits a great degree of flexibility and spontaneity.

Writer type 4: Collage or Mosaic

A wonderful author friend, Kris Waldherr, recently described the way she starts a novel. She puts notes and scraps of ideas about characters, scenes etc. on pieces of paper, then posts these on a bulletin board or spreads them out on a surface. I love this idea, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything that way. Her method lets her assemble the narrative with a lot of fluidity of structure.

And like a mosaic, the story might not be truly visible until almost all the pieces are in place. This, I imagine, makes the gaps obvious, allowing a writer to knit scenes together where necessary.

I think this approach might work for writers who go around with a notebook and jot down conversations they hear, or describe things in the world. A lot of writers do that. I confess, I don’t.

I have no idea if this is just insanity on my part, but I’d love some reaction from writer friends about whether you relate to any of these “types” I’ve identified. As may be obvious above, I’m the sculptor with the lump of clay. It doesn’t always work out for me: my creations can crack in the firing/editing process and I can be left with nothing. But it’s what I do.

Writing historical fiction is an act of both creation and re-creation. We do our research, we read accounts, we explore visual references.

But I sometimes forget, even though making the past come alive is one of my primary goals, that so much of history is based on memory, on what people remember about events that occurred in the past. History is almost never written in the present tense. The exception is in photographs, mute records of events that occurred during the time that photography was an option. And of course, now, video and film.

The idea of history as memory is particularly present to me. I’m here in Florida on my father’s 90th birthday. Yesterday I asked him about his earliest memory, and he came up with this: sitting between his parents on the front seat of their Model T Ford, in around 1925 or 1926, driving somewhere near Hertel Avenue in Buffalo.

The idea that his memory could be a tiny piece of history is what started me thinking. He’s lived through the depression, World War II, the Korean War. He was in the navy at the end of World War II, a radio operator, but stationed in the Philippines after all the fighting was over. His story is a very different one from the many heartrending, bloody accounts there are.

He’s seen many administrations change, technology gallop forward at an unbelievable rate (our conversation started with him looking at his new, 51-inch plasma TV and recalling the first TVs that he watched in the early 50s), and so many advances in medicine. He was an adult during WWII, when penicillin was being developed, and when the first atomic bombs were dropped. As a radiologist, he embraced new imaging technologies and the evolution of nuclear medicine.

In the hospital in Lewiston, NY, where he practiced, he once x-rayed O.J. Simpson when he was still on the Buffalo Bills football team. He used to ride his balloon-tire bicycle on hundred-mile jaunts with his friends.

It amazes me that my own father, who has all his faculties and still lives alone in his own house in Florida, is a source of information about history. His stories could easily form the basis of several great historical novels. But he’s just my dad, a constant who has been there for me at many rough points in my life. I’m very grateful that he’s still around to share his wisdom and love with all of us.

And I’ll enjoy getting all the living history I can from him.

This is a topic my writer friends and I come back to again and again. Now that the publishing industry has basically been turned upside down by the revolution in how people consume books, what is the job of the agent? I’ll start by outlining what it used to be.

1. Act as chief negotiator between author and publisher

An agent, in traditional terms, is the one who offers your manuscript to editors at publishing houses based on his/her knowledge of what different editors and imprints are looking for, and on the trust that has built up over the years between them. An agent is/was a gatekeeper for editors that would otherwise be deluged with submissions to plow through. Your manuscript has/had a much better chance of being contracted to a publisher if it goes through a reputable agent’s hands first.

2. Filter out manuscripts that are not ready for primetime, and foster those that almost are

A good agent (like mine!) not only says “no” to writers who aren’t there yet or who never will be, but identifies the spark of something in a rough effort that needs a little tough love to get it to the next phase. A good agent recognizes a unique voice, or a compelling story, warts and all, and can at least point a writer in the right direction to get a manuscript ready for submission. It’s up to the writer to accept the criticism and do the work after that. I honestly credit my agent, Adam Chromy, with teaching me what really makes a good novel, and forcing me to read and study resources that would hone my writing craft.

In my opinion, these two qualities are still vital in an agent. But there are more challenges now that make an agent’s work much harder, and push the boundaries of what an agent needs to do.

3. Help a writer strategize about the best path to market

This is definitely new. There used to be only one path to market: publishing by a major house to get bookstore distribution and advance reviews. Now—the doors are wide open. This is both exciting and terrifying, especially to the likes of us who have been through the traditional publishing mill before.

Here are some examples of the questions that need answering:

• Should a debut author self-publish for e-readers and develop a loyal readership first?
• Should a novel be published in one chunk, or should it be broken up into installments, like a TV series?
• Hardcover/paperback/ebook—what’s the right combination and the right order?
• Social media and marketing: more and more, a great strategy even before the novel is sold can make a huge difference. What publisher wouldn’t like to see a ready-made readership?

Now, I’m not an agent. I’m speaking from the point of view of someone fortunate enough to have one who is intelligent and creative about the challenges facing writers today. But I am speaking as someone who, having been published, is now virtually starting again. It’s virgin territory for me out there too.

My point is this. If you’re looking for an agent, of course make sure you’ve got the first two qualifications covered. But don’t be afraid to talk about the industry challenges, and press for ideas about the third qualification.

The ultimate goal for everyone is still the same: bring good books to market, for readers who are as eager as ever to consume them—just a little more varied in their methods.

Anne Easter Smith is the author of a series of books about the Wars of the Roses and the house of York. She is a staunch defender of Richard III, and a wonderful writer, whose evocative tales bring the period and the characters to vivid life.

Her new novel, Royal Mistress has just been released. She’ll be touring in the northeast, reading and signing books. Her tour schedule can be found on her website, and I encourage anyone who can to go and meet this terrific author and lovely human being. Here’s Anne!

When did your obsession with Richard III and his period begin?

In my early twenties–a long, long time ago–I read Josephine Tey’s “The Daughter of Time,” in which Tey’s usual detective protagonist spends the book in traction trying to solve the mystery of who killed the princes in the Tower from his hospital bed. Tey was convinced Richard was not the culprit and this flew in the face of everything I had been taught about Richard III, and I was hooked. Thirty years of researching him later, and with ten years of working as a features editor at a daily paper, I was itching to tell my version of the real Richard. I’ve always read historical fiction ever since I was a teen, so I knew what I liked to read so set out to write something I’d like to read.

Can you comment on the recent discovery of his bones in a car park?

Not without whooping I can’t! Since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, Richard’s bones were thought to have been lost. One rumor that persisted was that they had been thrown into the River Soar and the sarcophagus used as a horse trough. We know now, there was no sarcophagus. His body was just laid in a simple grave under the nave of the Grey Friars monastery church, and the small monument that Henry VII eventually paid to have placed in the church disappeared over the centuries. It was a bloody miracle that on the first day of the dig, paid for by the Richard III Society and carried out by the University of Leicester archeology department, they found the skeleton that would turn out to be Richard. The chair of the department is said to have sworn to eat his hat if they found Richard. I think someone baked him a chocolate one! What it has done that is important is to have renewed interest in this much maligned king. Perhaps now, his Tudor reputation will be redeemed, and he will be viewed in a more realistic light than the murdering monster Shakespeare depicted.

You’ve already written four wonderful, detailed novels about characters surrounding the period of the wars of the Roses. Do you think you’ll ever run out of stories?

Actually, it’s five! ROYAL MISTRESS is just out and tells the story of Edward IV’s final and favorite mistress, Jane Shore. Her tale is so compelling that it has generated plays, poems and ballads in our literature down the centuries. She was known as Edward’s “merriest” mistress, but we know, as well as having a clever wit, that she was passionate and very beautiful. What more could you want in a protagonist? By the way, Richard III is a major character in the book.

What’s your writing process: post-its, outline, pantser?

Pantser??? Am I missing something? I have had to write an outline for my editor as part of my contracts, but when I go back and look at them, I am astonished how they changed as I wrote the books! As I write about real people, the historical timeline ends up being my skeleton and I will not deviate from the history, but how my characters move from event to event is up to me. I have a large chart on my wall on which I enter everything I find out about a character as soon as my research digs up a date. It is a lifesaver when you want two of them to meet and you realize one is in France and that begetting a child at that moment in time wouldn’t have been possible.

What’s the funniest thing a fan has ever said to you?

I wish I could say I had a funny question asked like Philippa Gregory told an audience she did once: Where did you buy your shoes? But I did have an amusing encounter at a reading in a library in Albany NY. I was walking around greeting people as they came in and sat down–I feel less nervous about giving a reading when I have made a personal contact with a few people–and I saw a woman come in, dragging her son with her. I went up and introduced myself and admired her courage in bringing her 10-year-old to a talk about 15th century English history. “Oh, but you have it wrong,” she said. “He dragged me–he’s your biggest fan.” I was gobsmacked but then panicked. “You do know there is a lot of s-e-x in my books?” I mouthed over his head to her. Before she could answer, he shot back: “Oh, don’t worry Mom, I just skip over those parts.” What a lovely kid–totally hooked on English history. Hope he’s there when I return in May!

What is your biggest challenge in writing?

Pulling myself out of research–I can dig and dig deeper until I forget the time–and the other is knowing when to stop writing! My first book was more than 900 pages long when I finished it, and I needed three years and help from my daughter and a friend to get it down to 600! Even then, my agent thought she wouldn’t sell such a big book from a first-time author but she managed to hook Trish Todd at Touchstone who threatened to make me cut a lot, but in the end she made me edit one scene and that was it!

Name a few of your favorite books (I’d never ask for just one!)

Let me get the classics out of the way first. “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen and “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens. If I have even one iota of the brilliant character-study skill of those two giants, I’d be so happy. In my favorite genre–historical fiction, of course: “Katherine” by Anya Seton is my all-time favorite. Loved “London” by Edward Rutherfurd, “Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett, and the first historical novel I read about Richard III, “We Speak No Treason” by Rosemary Hawley Jarman. BTW, loved your YA book about Florence Nightingale!

[Thanks Anne!]

If you could be anyone in the time period you write about, who would it be?

I assume you would want me to keep my gender? Then I think I would choose to be a daughter of a wealthy merchant in London, like my newest protagonist Jane Shore, but unlike Jane, I’d like to be the apple of my father’s eye so he’d be sure to marry me off to someone I liked, again unlike Jane! Being in the same class at that time in Florence or Venice would have been even better.

Thanks so much for letting me waffle on here, Susanne!

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Thank you Anne! You can get Royal Mistress in the usual places, including Amazon. Rush out right now! And here’s a video of Anne talking about the book.

My guest today is novelist Deanna Rabourn, whose award-winning Lady Julia Gray series features the exploits of a genteel Victorian sleuth.

Her new book (out today!) is set in an entirely different time period, and spans the globe from 1920s London to East Africa. I asked her some questions about her book and her process as a writer. Enjoy!

Tell us a little about yourself: How did you get started writing historical fiction?

I actually don’t remember a time when I wasn’t making up stories—and in love with history! I knew I wanted to write historical fiction before I ever went to college, so I double majored in English and history. I wanted to have a thorough grounding in both before I tried my hand at writing a full novel.

I finally took the plunge when I was 23 and had just finished my first year of teaching. I re-read JANE EYRE and was moping around afterwards because I missed the characters, so I decided to create my own. I wrote 120,000 words in six weeks, but I had a novel. It now lives in a box in my attic, but it was a good start. I wrote another six or seven before I hit on SILENT IN THE GRAVE, thanks to some excellent advice from my agent. It took me fourteen years to get published, but within the first year, I was under contract for six books. I haven’t looked back since!

Your new novel, A Spear of Summer Grass, takes place during one of my favorite periods: the 1920s. Why did you choose this period, and how did you avoid the “roaring 20s” clichés?

My publisher wanted me to take a break from my Victorian series and the brief I got was, “Write anything you want. Literally.” So I started brainstorming based on the things I read about for pleasure. When I’m writing, I end up pretty submerged in my research, so I always make sure whatever I’m writing about is something I really enjoy reading about.

I’ve always been fascinated with the Happy Valley set in Kenya—a group of colonials who did some serious misbehaving. The set got started when it was still British East Africa and kept going until the 1940s. They got up to all sorts of mischief—drugs, adultery, murder. It made for fascinating reading and gave me a perfect starting point for creating my flapper heroine, Delilah Drummond. As far as clichés, I think they cease to be clichés when they are part of a fully realized character. If all Delilah did was bob her hair and do the Charleston, she wouldn’t be very interesting. But Delilah cuts her hair as a deliberate act of separating herself from her past when her husband is killed. Her flapper identity is part reinvention and part a natural progression for a willful woman who has decided to do exactly what she pleases and damn the consequences.

A wonderful twist is that your glamorous heroine ends up in Africa, in Kenya. What effect does this setting have on how you treat the period and on your heroine’s growth as a person?

It would have been impossible for Delilah to change materially if she were still making the rounds of the flesh-pots in Paris and London and Buenos Aires. She has to come face to face with something bigger than herself—in this case Africa—to finally confront all the baggage she’s been hauling around. It is the first time she’s able to stop running away from herself and figure out what really matters. There is nothing petty or silly about Africa; it’s raw and immediate and larger-than-life, just like Delilah, and something in her responds to the land in a way she hasn’t responded to anything or anyone in a very long time.

What’s your writing process: post-its, outline, pantser?

Both! I start with a synopsis that I write up for my publisher and which I subsequently ignore. I know the framework when I start—I know I’m starting at point A and will end up at Z, and I will know what D, L, and R look like, but the rest of it is a mystery. If I pantsed completely, the lack of organization would put me fetal under my desk with a cocktail, but plotting completely would make me equally mad. To me that takes all the spontaneous pleasure out of writing. So, a combination of the two works best for me.

What’s the funniest thing a fan has ever said to you?

I recently received a photo from a reader in Australia who got a tattoo of a line of code from SILENT IN THE GRAVE. Not exactly funny but certainly unexpected!

What is your biggest challenge in writing?

Knowing that I’m never going to have enough time to write all the books I want to write.

Name a few of your favorite books (I’d never ask for just one!)

Too difficult to narrow it down just to books—and I’m liable to change my mind by tomorrow!—so I’ll give you favorite writers instead: Jane Austen, Elizabeth Peters, Agatha Christie, E. M. Delafield, Daphne du Maurier, Monica Dickens, Baroness Orczy, Mary Stewart, Stella Gibbons, Dodie Smith.

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Thank you so much for your wonderful answers, Deanna! I can’t wait to read your new book !

Writing is an act of faith. I can think of no other way to describe it. You sit down, imagine a setting, things that happen, characters, complications, motivations, and you start putting words together that you have to believe will convey all that to a reader.

And if you have a combination of talent and craft, somehow it mostly does—albeit not always equally well.

The thing is that as a writer, you get better at the craft tricks and techniques that make a story blossom before a reader’s imagination. Talent is probably hard to improve on, and we all have our limitations. You can overcome a lot by really understanding craft, however.

With all that, there is something important to learn that has to do with neither craft nor talent: you don’t see everything. Period.

At least, I don’t see everything. Perhaps there are great writers out there who don’t occasionally overwrite, or make mistakes of tense or point of view, or use the same word or phrase three times in succession without realizing it, or introduce a flat character for convenience’s sake. I applaud them, if they exist.

For me, though, there is nothing quite like the scrutiny of an outside reader to make me see how far my writing is from perfect as I struggle to get that first draft down on virtual paper.

This is a little celebration of my wonderful writers’ group. Those six or seven pairs of astute eyes and ears make the things that I am blind to so obvious that I come away saying, “Of course!” That is truly the best kind of critique: the kind that you know all along in your heart, but are too blind to see staring at you on a page of your own carefully chosen words.

So my advice to all writers: find readers you trust, and see through their eyes. It will make your writing stronger.

I’m so pleased to welcome author Lauren Willig here today! Her new book, The Ashford Affair, hits bookstores this very day. You may know Lauren as the author of the Pink Carnation series, about spies in the Napoleonic era. I asked her some questions here:

Tell us a little about yourself: How did you get started writing historical fiction?

I blame it on E.L. Konigsberg.  When I was six years old, my parents gave me a copy of A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, her slightly tongue-in-cheek novel about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine.  I fell in love with both Eleanor and historical fiction.  My first work of historical fiction was a sequel to the novel, told from the point of view of Eleanor’s—entirely fictional—horse, Beau Noir.

That was the end of my experiments with equine narrators, but the historical fiction remained a constant.  When I was eight, I discovered Jean Plaidy and Norah Lofts; a year later, Victoria Holt and Margaret Mitchell.  Each spawned various manuscript attempts of my own.  (None of which, will ever see the light of day.)  I’ve been writing historical fiction ever since.

You tackle the challenge of two time periods in this novel—the present day and the early 20^th century. What were the tough parts?

Bizarrely, I found the modern harder to write than the historical.  I tend to think of writing historical fiction as a form of method acting.  I immerse myself in the sources available to me, particularly contemporary diaries, letters, memoirs and fiction, and use those to create a composite character, someone steeped in that culture and entirely different from myself.  I was fascinated by the impact of World War I on the people I studied, on the effects of shell shock and rapid societal change, and by the strange, expatriate world created a continent away in Kenya by displaced aristocrats, seeking to replicate an idealized feudal past—jazzed up with cocaine and gin.

Writing the present day portion posed a greater challenge, particularly when it came to accuracy.  I’d set my modern story in 1999, so it was simultaneously contemporary and not.  It was before the widespread adoption of the internet, before smart phones, before Facebook, before so much that we take for granted now.  I spent some time researching the odds that my heroine, as a senior associate at a law firm, would have an early model blackberry.  By the time I started at a firm as a summer associate in 2004, the blackberry was already taken for granted.  Keeping my 1999 world accurate was far harder than the 1920s.

Have you been to Kenya? If not, how did you do your research? Are there lots of references and photos available to help?

My travels to Kenya were effected purely via journals, letters, biographies, maps and memoirs.  I would have loved to have been able to go before writing the book, but, as I’ve written about at more length elsewhere, on location research for historical novels can be a mixed bag.  The world changes and moves on; what we see when we visit is often not what would have been there at the time.  I’ve been nearly mown over by mopeds in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, trying to figure out just where the Abbaye Prison would have been, and mourned over the blue plaque that’s all that’s left of Tyburn Hill near Marble Arch in London.  In many cases, even the climate has changed, so our own observations on the feel of the air or the quality of the light may not be what our characters would have felt.

Even when I’ve spent considerable time on location (as I did for my books set in England, France, and Ireland), walking the same streets my characters would have walked, visiting their homes or the homes of those akin to them, I’ve found that it’s often most reliable to work from writings of those who did experience what my characters would have experienced, to mine their letters and memoirs for the visual and sensory details that I need.

Of course, whenever possible, I take those research trips anyway!

Your Pink Carnation series (an impressive 10 novels!) has the common thread of British spies, with suspenseful plots. What made you decide to take a try at something different?

The Ashford Affair was one of those stories that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.  After spending a considerable amount of time playing with Napoleonic spies, I’d been toying for some time with the idea of trying my hand at something different, but I always assumed I’d go back in time, rather than forward: my undergrad degree is in Renaissance Studies, and my graduate area of expertise was sixteenth and seventeenth century England (with a particular focus on the English Civil War).  Since I’d handed in my ninth Pink manuscript early, earning myself some discretionary time, I intended to use some of my yellowing dissertation notes as the basis for a seventeenth-century set novel—and then a friend gave me a copy of Frances Osborne’s The Bolter.

I was deeply intrigued by her tale of the much-married Idina Sackville, who racketed back and forth between Jazz Age London and Kenya, acquiring and shedding husbands along the way.  I was even more intrigued by the intro, in which she commented that she hadn’t known that Idina was her own great-grandmother until her teens.  It got me thinking about how much we assume about our own families and how little we know.  Especially in a time of tumult, like the aftermath of the first World War, what sort of complications and secrets might ensue?

The next thing I knew, I had begun work on the novel that became The Ashford Affair… and found myself wallowing in descriptions of Edwardian great houses, World War I nursing, and 1920s Kenyan coffee plantations.

What’s your writing process: post-its, outline, pantser?

I’m a partial pantser.  My books tend to be very character driven, which means that I spend my first few chapters working by trial and error, getting to know them.  In my latest book, The Ashford Affair, I spent months playing around with different tones and styles before I felt that I’d found the right way into the book and the characters.  Once I’m launched, I try to outline four or five chapters ahead.  That way, I have a sense of trajectory, but I still leave room for my characters to take the plot in directions I might not have anticipated.  It’s not the most organized system, but I’ve learned that it’s the one that works best for me.  My few attempts at trying to outline everything in advance led to a lot of frustration and scrapped chapters!

What’s the funniest thing a fan has ever said to you?

I’m always amused when I get emails directed to “Lauren Willig’s assistant”.  I’m my own assistant, chief cook, and bottle washer.  I do have a web mistress who does the actual programming of my website (I’m too much of a Luddite to manage that on my own), but otherwise I’m a one stop shop: I answer my own emails, mail my own packages, and, despite a complete lack of any graphic design skills, painstakingly design my own bookmarks.  I do love the image of the glamorous novelist, lounging on her chaise longue, feather boa nonchalantly draped around her neck, with her secretary taking dictation and running packages down to the post office, but the reality couldn’t be more different.

What is your biggest challenge in writing?

Sitting down at my computer every day and forcing myself to wrestle the perfect story in my head into the imperfection of the written word.  I always know exactly how the story should go, complete in every way—until I try to translate it onto paper.  And then, suddenly, things get messy and nothing goes quite as I thought it would and the words are leaden and the characters are wooden and I discover a sudden, burning need to check my email or do my laundry or bake cookies or schedule a trip to Timbuktu.

I find that the solution is generally caffeine.  Lots of it.

Name a few of your favorite books (I’d never ask for just one!)

Oh, goodness, there are so many!  Gone With the Wind is a long time favorite, as is Karleen Koen’s Through a Glass Darkly (she brings the early eighteenth century so vividly to life), Judith Merkle Riley’s The Oracle Glass and The Master of All Desires (historical fiction with a humorous twist), M.M. Kaye’s sweeping epics, and any of the mystery novels, contemporary or historical, of Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels.   My keeper shelf has a fairly eclectic range of genres on it: from L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle to Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting to Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle to Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg….  I have a more complete list of my favorite books over on my website, www.laurenwillig.com.

If you’d like to learn more about my books or read an excerpt of The Ashford Affair, please stop on by my website (www.laurenwillig.com)!  I can also be found procrastinating on my Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/LaurenWillig

Thanks so much, Susanne, for having me over!

You’re most welcome, Lauren!

I think it’s fair to assume that every writer has the same goal: producing the best possible book/story/poem she can. The problem is, how? Worse, the “how” seems to change over time—at least for me.

As I ease my way back into the herculean task of writing a novel, I’m finding that what used to work for me no longer does. When I first started writing, the most natural thing for me was to fill pages and pages with words, to get it down, make things happen, get the story going. I would open the file and start typing after quickly reviewing what I wrote the day before.

Now, I’ve lost that fluidity. Maybe lost isn’t the right word. Maybe I’m just entering a new phase, and I shouldn’t look upon it as a loss, but as a deepening of the process. That’s what I have to tell myself in order to keep going, whether it turns out to be true or not.

But I think it probably is true, for a number of reasons. I have learned so much from my triumphs and my failures, from what life has dealt me (even though I started writing seriously only ten years ago after decades of dabbling), that when once I could stand with a basket and collect the words as they fell from my imagination, now spilling rounding them up to go into a waiting computer file feels like raking leaves in the wind, all chaos and unpredictability.

Even more frustrating, I feel less and less satisfied with that first draft than I used to. The holes, the shallow bits, the cliches, the repetitions—they leap off the page and laugh at me just when I’m feeling good about having written, say, 500 words.

My dissatisfaction goes deeper than that, though. I find myself struggling to infuse a scene with difficult truths—truths I might have avoided not long ago. I sincerely hope that this is a sign that I’ve grown as a writer, that I’m at last ready to delve into my own anxieties and insecurities to make my characters and my plots ring true to a reader. I hope, and I fear that it is.

Because that, for me, is the most difficult thing of all: Facing the demons of my past, both real and imagined, coming to terms with my shortcomings, the ways I have been cruel or thoughtless, the moments of anguish, the horrible suspicion that I caused something bad to happen inadvertently, or that I let down those who needed me most.

In fact, I used to believe that I wrote historical fiction in part because it’s so far removed from my personal reality. I once had to write an essay that touched on my own life experience. It nearly killed me (and thank you, Victoria Zackheim, for being such a patient editor on it!) I wanted to run screaming from the metaphorical room.

While I believe that there is a little of me in every heroine I’ve written, I confess to a dollop of wish fulfillment. Certainly placing them all on the threshold of life absolves me from having to face the cruel realities of being past one’s prime. And being in control of their fates in a way that one is never in control of one’s own is reassuring—and cathartic.

So I hope my readers will join me when my next book is ready to be launched into the world, and realize that I have pushed myself in ways I never thought I could, perhaps give me a little understanding because of it.

It’s difficult. It’s the hardest thing in the world for me. But I have to do it.