Starting a New Book

I’m about to start on a new book.

I won’t chat about what it’s about because I have long believed that talk­ing pre­ma­ture­ly about a project depletes the ener­gy I need to write it. Then, too, I don’t want to box myself in. I’m a strong believ­er in that remark by Robert Frost: “No sur­prise in the writer. No sur­prise in the read­er.” I trust in dis­cov­ery, indeed, serendip­i­ty, as part of my writ­ing process.

That said, there is a reg­u­lar process by which I will go for­ward in this new undertaking. 

Some books are sub­mit­ted as a com­plete first draft to an edi­tor. Some­times a first chap­ter. Or more. Or less. Maybe just a shared idea.

(I once went to a movie with my edi­tor, Dick Jack­son, and his wife. At some point, he turned to me and said, “You write good dia­logue. I’d like to see you write a book with only dia­logue.” That was the sim­ple ori­gin of per­haps my most unusu­al book, “Who Was That Masked Man Any­way?”)

In this cur­rent case I sub­mit­ted a sto­ry idea. Thus, right from the begin­ning there have been dis­cus­sions with the edi­tor about the book, but only in a most gen­er­al way.

It needs to be acknowl­edged that I have a large body of pub­lished work, so edi­tors know what I can (and can’t) do. That helps a lot.

Since this new work will be his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, I will begin by assem­bling a library of books on the sub­ject. For the most part, I use the inter­net to seek out used books. It is cheap­er that way, and I can track down out-of-print books. Indeed, I have often found books that have been dis­card­ed by libraries. 

I real­ly enjoy build­ing a col­lec­tion. (I am a for­mer librar­i­an.) One of the ways I select books is, as the books come in, by con­sult­ing the bib­li­ogra­phies in the books. It is as if you had many experts guid­ing you to rel­e­vant titles.

Then I begin to read, read, and read some more. Along the way, I will take copi­ous notes, in par­tic­u­lar details that can be illu­mi­nat­ing of time, place, and per­sons. I need to devel­op a sense of how peo­ple in this time peri­od thought and acted.

All the while I am think­ing about the sto­ry I’m going to write, how to begin, how to nar­rate it. Who are the char­ac­ters? What are they like? Their back sto­ry. What’s my sense of how the sto­ry unfolds? First per­son? Third per­son? Does it have a par­tic­u­lar voice? To what, and how, does the sto­ry all lead? What kind of cli­mat­ic end­ing shall it have? Much of this is all in my head. And “this” is endless.

In my ear­ly days I would try to devel­op an out­line. Now I keep every­thing in my head so as to achieve max­i­mum flexibility.

Since my sto­ry is root­ed in a place — a par­tic­u­lar envi­ron­ment — I need to plan on trav­el. When I was work­ing on the Crispin books, a trip to Eng­land and a trip to France rad­i­cal­ly shift­ed my think­ing and writ­ing of two of the books.