 Okay. Let's get started. For those who follow baseball, I sort of feel like I'm pitching for the Minnesota Twins this year in Game 162. They're 25 games out. I'm tempted to say it doesn't mean a whole lot, but it does. Okay. It's been a long season, a long residency. I thank you for bearing with us. Your brains are chock full of stuff. You're starting to transition to post-island, post-residency world. You have one foot here and one foot there. So I would like you to give me your undivided lethargy and ennui, and we'll go from there. Okay. I'm going to cover two books. I'll cover one book fairly fully, and I may get into a book that I just finished and talk about idea to book. This is clearly going to cover and overlap with some of the stuff that was in the panel a couple of days ago with Sonya and Karen and Rachel and Bill, okay, where they talked about how to organize the mess. This is sort of starting before the mess happens, I guess. And let's see. It's also kind of presumptuous of me in the one hand to tell you how to write your book or where to start with writing your book, but I'm a presumptuous kind of guy, so I will do that. And it's also something that I do reluctantly because we also, I like to guard my privacy as a writer. I can talk once it's there, and I can talk about your work, but I don't usually read any books of mine before they're done, completed and published. Occasionally do that, but I don't like to do that. It's private. I keep it to myself. It's like announcing you're pregnant when you're a day and a half pregnant, okay. I like to have the baby a little bit more formed. But both one novel is published and one novel is almost done and I'm revising it so I can talk about it. Okay, this is going to primarily be about writing a novel, but it'll cover other kinds of long prose documents like a memoir. And what we'll talk about, what I'll talk about is where do you start? Where do you start a novel? Okay, where do you get your ideas? How do you take those ideas and develop them into something more than idea? How do you shape a novel? How do you research a novel? How do you plot or storyboard or extend the novel idea? Okay, so we're really going from the early stages and I'll talk about my process. And as I said in my two workshops, and I do say all my workshops, the ideas I share with you are my ideas and my process and what I do. If you can glean anything from that, all well and good. But I'm not suggesting that these are the only ways or even the right ways. They've worked out for me. And sometimes they don't even work out for me. Okay, so I'm going to share these with you. If you have questions anytime during the next hour and a half, it's not really four hours and 20 minutes, please raise them because I don't have to cover any amount of material. I'd like you to go home with an idea in your pocket that you can help you tomorrow the next day writing your novel or long memoir. Okay, question. How many people have written and begun a novel? Okay, where do those ideas come from? Can we have a couple of ideas? I want to be able to put something on board. I didn't write anything all week. An image. The one thing they gave me didn't work. Anybody have a. So an image. Okay, what was that image? So you started with an image. Okay, how many other people start with an image of a character? Alex? Okay, that's another image. Protesting. Okay, Faulkner talked about Sound and the Fury, that that story started with the audacity of a young girl. Okay, climbing down a downspout. Okay, with her muddy drawers. Okay, and defying parents and convention and so on and as a little girl. And Sound and the Fury, one of the great novels of the 20th century started with that image. Okay, resting place. The story that I'm going to talk about first started with an image and I'll talk more about that in a minute. Where else do stories novels start? Image. A dialogue. Okay, so you heard a character. Okay, some of my stories started out with a line of dialogue. Anybody else line of dialogue? Many of my stories actually start with a line of dialogue. Robert Frost once said that if I'm lucky enough to get a great line, I work backwards and forwards from there. And that's the 97% perspiration, the 3% inspiration, all that stuff. And where else do we get stories from? So dialogue and image. How about incident or story? You hear story. Okay, almost all of my novels start with story. Something happened. Okay, I hear something happened. Let's say, and then I start and I start working with that. And I'll talk more about, for me, I search for story. Okay, so we got, you know, image, dialogue. What was the other one? Issues. What's a, Susan, what's an issue? Well, what's an issue? You had, was that an issue or an image? Issue. Okay. Okay. An issue. And for me, it begins with story or incident. Anybody start with characters? Okay. Yeah, sometimes you can start with character. I have not yet done that. I've done that for short stories, but I've not done it with novels. Okay, so for me, and I know lots of writers do start with character. Okay, and some, some of my friends start with an issue or an image. Okay, but for me, a story is what I have to find. I mean, let's start out with that, but I have to find what the story is, where I'm, where it's going to take me. I'm going to read a section of this book. And then I'll talk about where it came from. And it came, I'm reading this section because it comes close to home here. And, and I'll talk about what this novel is in a minute. After she finished at the shelter, right here, Elizabeth is driving back to work along the interstate, her thoughts on Fabiana. When she saw it up ahead, two actually, a matching set like salt and pepper shakers, a pair of crosses just off the highway between the shoulder and a service road that ran parallel to the interstate halfway up a little rise. They stood side by side facing west. How many times had she driven by this stretch of road without ever noticing them before? On something more conscious than a whim. She pulled off the next exit, crossed over the highway and drove back along the service road until she figured she'd reached the spot. She stopped and got out of her car. She walked over the edge to the edge of the road where a six foot high chain length fence separated the road from the highway. The crosses were just on the other side of that, of that hill, she thought. She cautioned herself, just what the hell do you think you're doing? But she disregarded the warning and went ahead and awkwardly clambered up the fence in her high heels and skirt. If anyone saw her, they'd think she was nuts. And maybe she was. As she lifted her back leg awkwardly over the fence, her nylon snagged on a sharp edge, and she heard a tearing sound and felt a sudden sharp burning sensation along her calf. She continued over the over and clambered down the other side. She saw that her nylons were shredded and that she had a cut running crosswise along her Achilles. A trickle of blood had already formed against her pale skin. About halfway down the steep grassy embankment were the crosses. She used her high heels like crampons to dig into the side of the hill. And she had to keep one hand near to the ground so as not to slip. The crosses were about 20 feet above the pavement. Below, cars and trucks roared by with a brutal ferocity. Their occupants' eyes, Elizabeth felt, locked on this strange scene unfolding before them. It occurred to her that someone might actually call the police. And then how would she explain what she was doing? Warned, her boss at the law firm, already thought she'd completely lost it and fire her. Yet once more, she ignored her own warnings and continued down. Reaching the spot, Elizabeth squatted in front of one of the two white crosses. From the looks of them, they'd been put up there ages ago. They were wooden, painted white, with dark lettering. Only part of one name was legible, Anthony something. However, it was obvious that whoever had put them up here had taken meticulous care in their arrangement. Someone had used the level and taken his time perfectly aligned. Same height and angle. They could have been crosses at Arlington National Cemetery. The horizontal sections had been attached with screws and the base had been secured into the ground with cement. When she touched them, they didn't budge at all. Felt as solid, as immovable as marble headstones. The area immediately around the crosses was set apart from the surrounding hillside by stones laid out in a crude circle. Inside the circle was an odd array of junk. Several melted candles, cigarette butts, an empty tequila bottle, a browned Christmas wreath, a ribbon with an attached bronze medal that was for the second place for some unspecified competition, a plastic doll with straw like hair and lusterless black eyes staring unblinking at the sky. Ashes where a small fire had been built. Despite the crosses, the disparate items conjured up a scene that was slightly pagan. I saw those at exit 82 right off the highway here. And the place that she starts is this place. And this place gave me the inspiration for she works part time at a shelter. I made this from this place to a shelter, but I knew it. I felt it. And I saw that cross many times coming up here before I had the idea. So if you are coming north on 95, if you look off to your right exit 82, there's a kind of a turn around. I actually got off the highway and drove around, climbed that chain link fence, came down the other side. I was not wearing nylons in a dress. So and and high heels and high heels and came down the other side and had to climb up. And I sat there and I looked at it and I took pictures. And that was the inspiration for that scene. Okay, so let's back up. Where did the idea for the story come from? Well, as I said, in this particular novel, my I usually search for story. And I have to have story before I can start. I can't have character, character will come. Okay, incidents will come. Dialogue will come. Okay, I have to have story for me. That's my that's where I feel comfortable as a novelist. About nine years ago, I was used to drive up to New Hampshire a lot. And I passed a very similar cross. And I kept saying what if many of my novels begin with a question of what if what if I stopped. And then what if I were the person who put this up or what if I were the person who died or what if what if what if and going past it many times I finally stopped. I stopped and I looked and there was a cross along this very rural highway rural highway in New Hampshire. And it was the first time I stopped. Has anybody ever stopped it? Does he across? Well, that's where the idea for the novel did I stopped there and I said, I looked at the cross. There was a name of a man. He was obviously a young father and husband who had died at this moment right here. His name was written on the cross. He had a picture that was laminated. Okay, and I've since seen hundreds of other pictures laminated on these crosses. And I looked at what was there and it started to form a story. Okay, he was a fisherman. He was a father. He was a son. Somebody had wished him goodbye. That was kind of interesting to me. What was most interesting where I started to get a thread of story? Was it someone? Not this man. The story was not the man. The story was his survivors, his loved ones. And I said I thought to myself, I asked the question, who would do this? And why would they do it? Why would someone after this person had died? You know, presumably he's been buried or cremated or whatever. And there's a place where that's marked. But somebody had the need to go home and buy the boards and put them together and paint them and and come out here with a shovel and sometimes cement cement and dig this up and have a ceremony right here at this place where he died. And with that, I started to say, what would happen if somebody felt that? What if it were me? You know, what would what would happen if we're me? And so with that, I started to get a sense of story. And then I started coming up with a woman that has lost her child, her only child at 21 years old. And I started to dig and find out more information. I suddenly realized that this was a national phenomenon that roadside memorials or have always been there, but they've been really big in the last 20 or 30 years all over the country. And I still I had a thread of a story, but I still didn't have a real story. And then suddenly I came up with two things. And the first was, Elizabeth, the main character, was going to meet a man on the side of the highway, me, who had stopped and done this. She was going to meet another man. She was going to meet a man. And this man was going to talk to her, ask her questions. Why had she stopped? What was she doing? And so on. And when he found out her son had died in a car accident, kind of a mysterious, meaningless, open ended car accident in New Mexico, when he told that he was going on a cross country trip to California, she has all these questions about his death, questions surrounding surrounding his death. He tells her you might get some, you know, some kind of spiritual salvation or at least bomb by going out to see where he died and just doing what I'm doing. Once I had that, I had story. Okay. And so for all of you, you need to think about when you're starting out, whether you start with character, you have an interesting character, or an issue, okay, or let's say a dialogue or an image, you got to take those and put them in motion. Okay. And what I always say, and you've, my students, Herbie, say this, that fiction, if you take the simplified version of what fiction is about, it's character in conflict over time. And I'll say that again. You guys heard me say character in conflict over time. So characters are important. People are important to stories. We have to know them. We have to be able to empathize with them. We have to understand them. They have to have desires and yearnings and so on and so forth. They have to be somehow compelling for us. They don't have to be good, but they have to be interesting. They have to draw the read. First, they have to draw us in. Okay. They have to draw us in. And then hopefully if they can draw us in, they'll draw a reader in. Okay. So character. And then in conflict, that character internally has to have conflicts, yearnings, desires, issues. And then there's external issues like a death. She didn't cause this death, but the death, the external accident, caused lots of things to go on. She feels terrible guilt. Okay. But once I had the death and once I had the fact that she was going to go on a journey across country to find out why he died, then I started, other things started to come. Once I pulled that thread from me of story, then I could start to see the kind of journey that my character was going to take. And I'm going to talk about journey a little bit more in a minute. Many of my characters go on a physical journey. Okay. And for me, that's a great kind of backbone. That's a great kind of structure to have. And then I follow them on their journey. Okay. Whatever. And I think all of our characters have to have some kind of journey where they are in a city and they stay in the city. They have to have some kind of journey that they're on. So characters in conflict and over time, there has to be movement. Okay. And we got to get our characters going sooner rather than later on that journey. So, and then once I find that stuff out, okay, then I start, as I'm starting to define story and maybe incident a little bit, sometimes the image, I start doing research. Okay. I start doing research. Now, let me ask you how many people again have written novels or long fictional narratives. What kinds of research have you done? How to cook? How to start a fire? Yeah, how to start a fire. Anything else? Yeah, weapons. Yeah. That's a good one. One of my novels is called Soulcatcher. And it's a novel set in the 1850s. And a man was a slave catcher. And if you're going to be a slave catcher in 1850, part of your requirement is to carry a gun. You're going to have to have a gun. It's like if you're dealing with a cop in 2016, or a soldier, you have to, that's part of their job. Okay. I could make a joke about cops now, but I won't do that. It's, but, you know, it's part of their job. It is part of their job. And so you have to find out what they do. What are some other research here? Location. Okay. For me, once I decided that my character is going to go on a long journey across country, I needed to, I need to do same thing. And so what did I do? Well, before I did that, I did lots of research locally. I took probably 50 or 60 pictures of these crosses. I jotted down what they, what they said, what was at each cross. You know, if I could find background information on these accidents, these, these desks on the sides of highways, I read a couple of books on this whole phenomenon. There are several books out on it. I went on to blogs, I went to webpages, I looked at all the things I could gather before I went on my field research. Okay. Now, Elizabeth, my main character is going to go across country. She's going to drive across country. Is the heat or air conditioning on here? I don't know. Cooler button. That would be a good choice. The warmer or the cooler button. So, once I decided my character is going to go across country, I had to go across country. And how many people have done what I call field research, going out into the field, driven to the year? Where have you gone? Oh, up in Maine. Yeah. Yeah, when you read that the other night. Yeah. I mean, that's, in fact, my first extensive research for a novel is in Maine. My first novel is about German POWs in Maine. And I went back up there 20 times. And I went back up to the place. I talked to the people. I was lucky enough to talk to people, actually lived and worked with the German POWs. They sent me letters, and I went to the University of Maine. I had a whole collection, a whole box of stuff that I could look over and use for setting, for character, for conflict, and so on. But for me, when I do research, whether it be a contemporary novel, and I do lots of research for both contemporary novels and for historical novels, I try to get what I call a feel for the fictional landscape. Okay? Not just the setting, but the fictional landscape. So, when I'm writing about a slave catcher in 1857, I have to know lots of things. I have to know where he is. I have to know about guns and horses, and I have to know about the laws of the time. I have to know everything, the whole fictional landscape. So, I know what he knows. Okay? So, I know what my character knows, and we have to be feel comfortable with that. And why do we do that? One reason is to feel comfortable. A sense of authenticity. When I talk about historical research or research for any novel, but in particular historical research, authenticity, lending a sense of credibility. Okay? Very similitude. These are the terms that people throw out. That you do the research that you can prove to your reader that what you say is correct, historically accurate, and so on. What else? Yeah. You not only want to make sure that your fiction is correct, historically, and correct, whether if you're dealing with a lawyer or a doctor, you get it right. One of my novels is about a doctor, OBGYN, and I was pleased when I got a letter in the mail back when letters were before email. A doctor said, have you delivered babies? And I said, I hope not, but yeah, I haven't. Well, he said, you convinced me that you can deliver a baby in a C-section. So you want to make sure that you convince the people that you are doing what you're saying you're doing, but also by doing research you gain details you can use. I talk about when you are putting in details in story or background. There's static background and then there's active background that interacts with character. Okay? For instance, the lawyer. You can sort of give them a job as a lawyer, but most characters and most people in life are part of who their career is part of who they are. So if a lawyer, they not only know the law, they partly are the law. That's their life, that's their livelihood, that's what they think about, that's what they talk about, that's who they are. So little details can open up not only the lend credibility, it can open up your character. So you understand your character even better. In Soulcatcher, at one point, he's loading his gun, and in those days you didn't take out bullets and put them in. You had to pour the powder in and pour the shot in and wedge it down and so on. And he even had to melt his lead to do that. Well, while he's doing that, it was a great opportunity for him to launch off into something else that touched him. This thing tied into what he was thinking and feeling and who he was. Okay? So it's very important to think about details. It's not just being historically or accurate in terms of your subject matter. They allow you to tie your character to something real and what he's feeling, what she's feeling, what she's thinking. Okay? Elizabeth, in this case, is a lawyer. So part of what she does is law. She works at a women's shelter, abused women's shelter. That's what she does and that's who she is. That's part of who she is. And what else, why else do we do research? Historical accuracy, credibility. We get details we can use. What else? It will. Absolutely. I'm going to talk about this other novel I've been working on and I finished, it's a German novel set in 1936 and I went to Germany. I went to Berlin and while I was there I took pictures. While I was there I had four or five scenes that show up in the book now. Okay? And I just was there. I could see it all. I could, you know, once I was there, I'd say, oh, he's going to come here and she's going to do this and they're going to do this and so on and so forth. So when you go out and do research, I would say as important, if not more important, when you're developing your story, the more research you can do, the more it'll give you ideas for scenes, for additional characters, for something in the setting that you can use, either plot-wise or metaphor-wise or whatever it may be. But by doing the research you do lots of things. And I do lots of book research. When I'm reading stories, okay, when I'm reading either other novels or just doing non-fiction research, when I'm reading something I'm saying, oh, I can picture that. I can picture that in my book, in my novel. Okay, as I mentioned before, my character is a my, maybe I did mention, my character is a Myler. He's a middle-distance runner in 1936. And I read tons of books on runners, both actual runners and the art of running. And by reading this stuff, I would start to get ideas on strategy. I looked at 50 or 60 films from 1932 and 1936 of the 1500 meter run. I would see how they would do things. I'd listen to the broadcast. So I got a sense of what my character would do. So I'm taking the research and not just making it so that it's correct, technically or historically, but I'm starting to get a sense of what my character can do. Okay, the limits that I can go. A few years ago, I was doing a story, and there was a courtroom scene. And I actually went to several judges, several lawyers, and I finally went to a defense attorney. And I said, listen, I have to have, here's the situation. My character comes into the courtroom and I want him to do this or this. What could I do? And he said, let me tell you a story. And he told me a story. And he said how, in his final summation, he pulled out of his desk pocket a toy gun. And he was doing to show that his client could have done this or the other person who is pointing the blame could have done this. And he told me that he was called back into judges chambers because this is illegal that he did it. But he did it and once he told me that I could use it in my novel. So research gives me what I can do, what I can't do, where I can play fast and loose with the facts. So there's lots of things. Hemingway once said that you want to do enough research so that you can leave stuff out. You want to know enough about your subject so you can leave stuff out. If you do a little bit of research, you want to pour it all in. It's like our freshman undergraduates when they're doing research paper. They do a little research and they want to put it all in so they extend how much they know. Well, if you're a good writer, you want to know everything you can about the subject so that you can leave stuff out, which is very helpful. You just put it enough so that it proves what you're suggesting you do. But for me, research gives me a sense of the fictional landscape. Where my character is and time and place, what he knows, what he doesn't know, what he feels comfortable with. And research is not just something I add on. It's really early on in the process of structuring the novel. Plotting it out gives me all sorts of ideas. All sorts of ideas. Let's see what else I can say here. The other thing, how many people use outlines or some sort of outline? Anybody? Dan? What kind of outline do you use? I try to go chapter by chapter. So, you know, the story, I kind of break it up into what I think are the chapters. And that kind of helps me gauge if something's too slow or too fast and where the action kind of happens. Okay, could you go over that again? This is before you're starting to write your first word of your novel. So, whatever it is, I'll try and plot it out by chapter or by section. Okay. And that kind of lets me have a through line where I can see where everything is and kind of find where things are lagging. So, when I look at it on the paper, if the climax isn't satisfying to me looking at it, then I know that that's where I have to go. But you take it all the way up to climax. Yeah, pretty much. Okay. So, one page synopsis. Anybody else do that? Throwing character to each character and alongside them. Yeah. Henry James used to write these long kinds of summaries, you know, 30, 40, 50,000 word summaries of his of his novel and also character summaries and character descriptions before he would start to write. You know, what I've been doing, and again, if this seems, it helps me, I've been going from a synopsis and some kind of more formalized outline into a storyboard. I've been using a lot of storyboards, right? I may start out and the storyboard for me, I'll start on a page. An idea will come to me. Let's say that idea about the crosses. And I say a woman's going to go across country to go to the place where her son died. Okay, that's the basic kernel of a story. And then I'll start writing more about that. Where does she start and where does she go? And I may throw in some dialogue and I'll start, sometimes with no more than a few sentences. And if the idea, as I start to research, it further fascinates me and I want to stick with it. I'll add to that and I'll add to that. And sometimes I'll get 20 pages of notes, okay, some dialogue and it'll just be sort of a story. I'm following her story. I'm following his story. And I'll jot down things over and over again and expand it. And at some point I'll start to see chapters emerge. There's a break here. There's a break here and so on and so forth. And when I get to somewhere between six and seven and eight of what I consider chapters and I feel a sense of comfort about where the story is going, then I'll jump in and start writing. And sometimes I'll even take that first chapter in my storyboard and pull it out and drop it on a page and go from there because I'll also put in dialogue. And we've talked about this in the workshop. I know Stacy was saying about not stopping when you're in your first draft. I don't stop here, but I don't consider writing yet until I actually start breaking the chapters. But when I'm storyboarding, I'll just start throwing out ideas and I'll throw out dialogue and I start to hear my character and I start to see my character. I'll see my character make in scenes. At the same time I'm doing this and it might be a month or two or three before I begin writing, I'll be reading. And during this research, I'll see more scenes. I'll see more details emerge. I'll see the character wearing something. I'll start to read about other characters and I'll start to see something there and I'll start to pour all of this into my storyboard, which might end up being 20 or even 30 pages long. But for me, as I said, I may expand it from a page to five pages to 20 pages and as I'm doing the research, as I said, this is adding to what I know about my character and about the fictional landscape. And then at that point, I start to break it into discrete kinds of things. And I have to have a sense. You talked about story or character descriptions, right? I don't really start writing my story until I have some sense of character, okay? The character is going to be defined and pushed as I go along, but I have to feel I know one or two of my main characters. How do I get to know my main characters? Well, those folks have been in my workshops. I do it through little things, especially through dialogue. I get to hear them. I get to hear their voices. If I don't hear their voices talking to somebody else, I don't really know my character yet, okay? Any other comments before I move along or questions that you might have? I know you're all hot and tired. No? Anything? Okay. Let's see. One other section that I'm going to read here, and this is a section I mentioned that I actually went across country. And by going across country, this section here that I'm going to read came right out of one of my pictures, one of the places I stopped. I think it was in maybe Arkansas. Elizabeth is driving cross country. She spotted a pair of crosses near the base of a sprawling white oak just off the highway. Despite the warning from the state trooper, she had been stopped before by a state trooper because she had been pulled over. Something about them piqued her interest, so she pulled over to take a look. The tree had a deep, deep but fading gash in its bark at about bumper level, which Elizabeth assumed was a healed over wound from the collision that ended the lives of the two people. She squatted and inspected the crosses. The first was twice as tall as the second. Along the horizontal slat, the slat was written, Janet Marie Holtz. While Monica Holtz adorned the smaller one, the two had died at this spot on September 5, 1998. Sisters, Elizabeth wondered, mother and child? The one named Janet Marie was only 17. Elizabeth calculated from the birth and death dates. But the other one had only a single date written down below the name, the date of her death. Written in small letters along the vertical section of the larger cross were the words, the kingdom of God is within you. Elizabeth stood there for a moment, pondering the scene before her, recalling that George Doucet had said that every disconso, these crosses, had a story to tell. Why did the smaller one have no birth date? I came across this cross, looked at it, took a picture, and I stood there wondering, why does one of the crosses not have a birth date? Why? It was a baby, and it was a mother who crashed into a tree, and she and the unborn child died at that point. This is real life, and I said this is too poignant and too powerful, and it's ready-made, and I just had to sort of lift it off there and plunk it down in my novel because it was exactly what she was looking for and what she had been looking for in this journey. When you do research, whether it be book research, textual research, or field research, there are these little gems that come to you. They come almost fully, you don't have to do much at all, and I think by doing that you start to get a sense. When I stood there looking at this, and Elizabeth is a mother who has lost her child another thousand miles away, and she's going to get theirs in another day or two, I thought this is very profound, because there's going to be a meaningful moment in her journey. She's making a physical journey, but she's also making a psychical and emotional journey, and this was something that was handed to me. If I didn't go on that trip, and I just tried to imagine everything, I don't get that. So that's why doing research early on, talking to people, reading letters of people, going out and seeing things, reading other books, you start to gather what's going to go into your novel. You're going to screen, you're going to cut out stuff. I took probably 200 pictures of these various crosses growing across the country, and there were some amazing things that I left out, and I was following Hemingway's motto that you know enough to leave stuff out. I didn't pour everyone in, only the ones that seemed most, but there were all sorts of stories out there that I could have written about, and I may write non-fiction-wise, but we want to get enough so we know our character, and for me, again, knowing my story, where I'm going, where I'm following. Okay, I'm going to move on from there to the next book, and we're probably going to finish it by three. The next book is a, any questions about that, or comments, anything you want to share? Karen, the letter? About the ending of the book. So I just wondered about that, and when you were talking about the research and stuff, that there was something that happened when you were doing the research that led you to write that ending, or kind of how it evolved, or if it surprised you as well, I don't know. That's a good question. That's a very good question. The ending that you see in the book is a different ending than what I got when I first started, but it's still down in the Southwest, it's still in New Mexico. I got that by doing research online, by reading other books, okay? I won't tell what that ending is, but yeah, it was something that came out of research, but in that case it wasn't the field research that I went to. And I went to this small little town in New Mexico. I changed the name of it, but it's based on a small town, and Elizabeth ends up there, and she has kind of an epiphany there, a couple of epiphanies there. She goes there, and I went there, and I stayed there and visited people, talked to people, but again, you don't get that feel by just sitting in a room and doing it. You know, there's so much research you can do online or by reading other things, talking to people. Sometimes you really got to get out and do that. By doing that, it's sort of, I had the structure of the book once I did that. Well, yeah, the sense of place is a very remote place. It's a very spiritual place, and I did get that. The very specific ending came out of something else, but close to that and related to that kind of, you know, in an early draft, it's where they dropped the atomic bomb, and I had worked in the atomic bombing drop there. It was right near, you know, not too far from the white sands proving ground, and yeah, it's right up the road. I went there when I was there, and I used that first, but that was something that I felt finally was something that I was doing research, but it didn't seem to work. So I ended up cutting it out and going in a different direction. It's interesting because I... Yeah, well, yeah, I think I tried to maintain that, even though the specific ending changed, but I wouldn't have gotten that unless I went down there. You're right. The other one I want to talk about, and I'll make this short because you... Oh, sure, please. Here's what I have right here. Okay? Here's... For the novel I just finished, here's the story that I started out with. Here's my story as it started. I later on took it and developed it into 20 or 30 pages. Story about an American Jew who competes in the Olympics, a German Jew who becomes American, in 36, okay, to go to Germany to get his girlfriend out of the country. Okay? That's where it started. It evolved from that. It changed radically from that, but that's where the story came from, okay? And then in terms of story boarding, you know, once I got the idea that he's gonna... Well, let me give you the background to it. It's a story in 1936 of a German Jew who's a runner. He's always run, and he's run for Germany in championships all over Germany, beating, you know, these Beckley and all these great Nermey and all these other great runners. And he competes in the 1932 Olympics, okay, in Los Angeles, for Germany. So he has a Jew running for Germany in 1932. He's in the finals. He stumbles and falls. Doesn't win. But he goes back to Germany thinking he's going to compete again. And where is the 1936 Olympics? Berlin. Berlin, okay? So he's running for Germany in Berlin in 1936. Well, as you all know, a lot of bad things happen between 1932 and 1936. He is kicked off, and this is all true. Once Hitler came to power as a national socialist, pushed Jews off of German sports clubs. They could no longer compete on German sports clubs. They had to only compete with other Jews, okay? They started, you know, imposing this kind of racial stuff. And it gets more and more difficult for him to compete. And then his girlfriend, his fiance, says she's fallen in love with somebody else. He leaves Germany, comes to America, okay? And then he competes for America, okay? And that's his thing. So in terms of storyboarding, I started out with the notion that a man was going to go back to Germany, okay? And compete against his former country, okay? And all there, he's going to run into a woman, Magda, his former girlfriend, who he gets a letter somewhere in the midst of his training to go back to Germany that she's been arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a camp, okay? And so he goes back there and his goal changes as he goes. That evolved. That evolved. But I wanted to read just a short passage and that storyboarding evolved and got longer and longer. It got more detailed. It got more detailed about racing, about history and so on. No, I do it on computer. And it was probably about 30 pages before I started to write. I had 30 pages of this story. And I didn't break it at first, but when I started to get enough detail, I said, oh, here's a scene or a couple of scenes and that makes a chapter. Here's a couple more scenes and I start breaking it up into more discrete units. And then those are not fixed. I can add things. I can combine things. I can cut things which I end up doing. But I have to have a sense of story and where my character is taking me and where I'm taking my character. So I'm just going to read a section here. And this is I went up to Harvard because he's now in law school in 1936 when this novel begins. He's a lawyer. He's a second-year law student at Harvard. And he's running. And he's a runner. That's who he is. So I wanted to start the novel with him running. So he's running along the river, the Charles. This is chapter one, Cambridge, 1936. Run, dirty Jew, run. The word still echoed in his head as he dashed through snow. An unexpected late winter storm that had swept down upon the city like a white scourge. Soil and flakes fell worriedly about him, collecting on the naked branches of the sycamores, lining the Charles and on the footpath in front of him. On the yellow leaves edging the grass as well as across Memorial Drive on the gray solemn buildings of Harvard. Snow gathered too on his watch cap and shoulders on his long, delicate lashes. Snow melted and ran down his cheeks. It sloshed about his worn leather running shoes stride, soaking the legs of his sweatpants. South of the river, Boston was shrouded in the sudden blizzard. Made to appear as something fantastical, dreamlike. Sometimes it all seemed that way to Max a dream. Sometimes he'd wake in his tiny apartment on Beacon and for a teasing moment think himself back home and churned a dirtle. He recalled the times as a boy when his mother would give him a five-fenning coin and run down to the market near the spray to buy some calves feet for supper. There were kosher markets just around the corner but they were more expensive and besides, the Grossmans weren't observing Jews. Hyam Grossman, Max's father, was usually busy working in a shop on Sabbath hemming trousers and sewing rips while his wife spent Saturdays ironing people's clothes on the kitchen table and Max, their only child, was like every other day out running on Saturday morning when most Jews were in temple. How are you, Mutka? Papa will be home soon, said his mother in German, stirring something in the stove that was her pet name for him, Mutka. But see that you don't go through the park. Don't worry, mama, they won't catch me. Am I talking to hear myself talk, child? She cried, turning and wielding a spatula at him for emphasis. All right, I won't, he acquiesced as he flew out of his sixth floor apartment and down the stairs, clutching the coin in his small hand. He almost knocked down hair-cats lugging his cord wainters toolbox then came into the ranks slipstream of Frau Wolf, the fish-wife an entire flight before he passed her by. Max dashed through the bustling noisy streets of Schoenenwerthel the Jewish barn quarter of Berlin, dodging pedestrians and trams and peddlers hawking their wares weaving among horses, lugging carts loaded with coal and lorries filled with ice, past shops and cafes and delis, the streets echoing with the sound of people calling in Yiddish to one another. He cut through back alleys, strung overhead with wash and people throwing out their dirty bathwater. Emerging on Orienbergestrasse, he passed the synagogue, slowing as he came upon Rabbi Donow to offer a respectful nod, then speeding up again before the man could ask why his parents hadn't been to Temple again that week. As he ran he tried to model himself after his hero the great Nermi, whom he'd once seen in a race at Grunidwall stadium. Like Nermi Max ran with his knees high his hands sawing the air back and forth in front of his body. No one had been able to beat the flying fin in 121 straight races. Someday Max saw it as he flew through the streets he would be just like Nermi the great runner respected the world over. So that gives you a feel of him running now but also tying himself into his past not so long ago. Okay research. The research for resting places was fairly slight compared to this. What can you imagine would be the research for a novel like this? Yeah I had to see the houses and amazingly and surprisingly many of the houses I thought when I got to Berlin and I had done lots of research before I got to Berlin I saw all those bombed out pictures of Berlin after the war in 1945 they were rebuilt but rebuilt from scratch so that many of the earlier pre-war stuff stayed up and so you had facades that were still the same old but particularly in some of the sections of the juice quarter that stuff and you get that from reading period pieces times a little German not too much because I what else Peter? And that's difficult because the great people like Glenn Cunningham and San Romini and Evensky they're all dead but to read books by them which I did books by on Glenn Cunningham all the great runners of the 1930s. Dozens of books there are hundreds of books in 1936 Olympics the most famous Olympics ever and I read about a dozen of them and I picked out a dozen and read political situations going on. I had to read books not only the great runners of the time but people like Brundage and the IOC and the people in charge of the international Olympics over in Berlin how the boycott that was attempted at the time I worked that into the novel if I didn't know that I couldn't do that and plus I'd be wrong by not knowing it I had to read books on running how runners train I had to talk to runners because I did that I had to read books on running injuries because at the beginning of the novel he's got a severe Achilles' tear what else what else do you have to there's also some of the regulations on when it can be outside when they can participate in it this is really unusual time 1930 before 1932 during the Weimar Republic it's one thing but 33 through 36 is a really uninteresting time because they're starting to apply the racial laws in 35 they certainly apply but even in 33 Jews who competed on teams as I said before could no longer compete and there's all sorts of stuff that happened there were several Jews American Jews that went to Germany and competed Marty Gluckman is one there were several basketball players who went there was one Fencer who was a half Jewish German woman a Fencer living in America and they put pressure on her to come back and compete for Germany so Germany could prove that they're fair and open to everybody there was a high jumper living in England who was Jewish she came back and competed and had the European record and by manipulating the books they didn't let her make it during the trials in Germany so you had to find all this stuff you had to find out what was going on politically the houses, the food I would athletes it was the first time ever that they had permanent Olympic Village I had to go to the Olympic Village I spent a day there taking pictures and walking through it it's a really remarkable and remarkably haunting place because right after the war the Russians took over so in one building for instance there are all these Germans with jack boots and their helmets marching and on the other side in this big auditorium there's a picture of Lenin going like this really remarkable that the Russians when they took it over didn't knock down the Germans marching it was this kind of almost like statues against the wall they didn't knock it down so there's all this historical stuff you had to find out that was going on at the time anything else? yes yeah a little bit a little bit I do that I read a book Marty Glickman who is Jewish and I read his book and the kind of pressures that he was under going there and Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller the only Jews that are on track team went and last minute they were pulled off the team and that's where Jesse Owens and Metcalf took their place and ran and Jesse Owens got his fourth medal and I read it and very few people know it is that the two Jews on the team were pushed off the team off the relay team and didn't get medals and clearly would have gotten medals if they had gone and I sort of used that as well what I'd like to do is just in five minutes I'll let you go think about, here's the question that I'll give you there's a following in a few sentences write down what's your story idea is and the kinds of research that you'll have to do or have done so far to make that happen before you start to write just take a minute and just stack those down okay let's hold it there I want you to be thinking about this over the next several months and certainly as you go back to your novel or start your novel I want to say just a couple more things before I ask for a couple of volunteers the importance of maps okay street maps, town maps if I'm writing an novel set in a small town I have a map when I was doing Berlin I had this massive map that covered one whole wall so I could follow where my character is going but I had to have a map in 1936 and if I had a map in 1932 it wasn't the same map as 1933 or 34 or 35 or 36 because Germany because it changed so rapidly okay and one of the main streets that I use right at the eastern end of the tear garden became Geringstrasse two years before that it was not that all the street names changed so I had to get a map that was accurate to 1936 and if I didn't I'd be off a street map and if you're making up a fictional place it's a good idea to draw it to actually draw the map where the houses are if you're doing something and put it in front of your desk if you have a desk where you can write that's very, very important how many people are doing historical research one of the best things I found over the last five, six years my stumble on this was newspapers.com and has anybody used that 99 a month to subscribe newspapers.com and you can type in a date a subject, a name and it'll come up and you'll get 50 newspaper articles or a thousand newspaper articles and it was the best thing because I could say what happened on March 30th, 1936 what was going on in terms of the Nazis boom it comes up and I get five articles like 20 or 100 articles and it's really amazing because you get an insight into what they're thinking at the time not what we're thinking now looking back but what they're thinking at the time and what I found most remarkable for me in this book was that so many people looked at the Nazis as dangerous in America other people looked at them as just kind of comical figures so there's this kind of wide range between being comical oh it's just a tail head kind of comic book kind of cartoons of Hitler prodding around with a little moustache but other people took them deadly seriously and it was interesting to find that at the time not just layered on with historical and if you're doing historical research that takes you back where the language has changed what I found helpful is that I got a dictionary during the period let's say for two of my novels set before 1850 1860 I had dictionaries so I could actually use particular words that they used at the time okay and you could just use a few just to flavor it to give it a flavor okay what are some of the ideas yes a while back which I probably got stuck on with calls I didn't want to do the research so I saw this image it was like a class and it looked like old timing black and white with a teacher with her children gathering around a mailbox and they were putting an envelope in the mailbox and so I thought maybe you know there's a child who had to move across the country or whether it was a grandmother and they continued the correspondence through letters and they had to move to come to some family secret so that I would have to research you know when did those blue boxes first go up what kind of transportation was available at the time if her dad was a banker what kind of situation might he have gotten himself into making her move across the country yeah and so when you start to have historical either about a relative or somebody in your town or somebody you knew and you start digging for historical accuracy you find more than historical accuracy you find thoughts and images and plots and chapters and scenes and dialogue and you hear people starting to talk I can't tell you the number of times I've gotten actual pieces of dialogue Avery Brundage was the guy at the IOC, a very anti-Semitic guy and I used his actual words in his letters in his speech okay when he's bringing the American Sold, American Olympic team over good another one any others Sean when a soldier in a privatized military company has his friend and spiritual mentor killed in combat he must trace his roots back to the world of Vietnam to help O.P. and his friend find peace so kind of research the operating procedures of PMCs the impact of combat scenarios on soldiers the social, economic, political and physical layout of modern Vietnam and for the spiritual aspect sort of like Maharatta Buddhism teachings so political religious cultural stuff historical stuff you can find out okay how about one more mine is a woman who has a mental breakdown of what she thinks are 3B I didn't really realize what it would be but I did learn about mental illness what types of mental illnesses there are I didn't know information about any cases of women who have been in the same thing but one of the biggest things I have understood in mental hospital procedures also what it would have looked like in some mental hospital would it actually look like because she would start with her inner room being strapped down because she was lost what does that look like what does it look like and if you can go to see one even old hospitals one up in Northampton when I was doing research for the garden of martyrs historical now was set in 1805 and 1806 and the trial was actually in Northampton, Massachusetts where they had the trials no longer there but much of what was there in 1805 or 1806 in the landscape and where they were hanged in the final scene I went there and I sat there and I looked where they would have looked where the two men who were hanged would have looked out towards Ireland where they came from but I find a great deal of interest and excitement beginning a novel when I'm doing research gathering things talking to people reading letters and again it's not just I'm starting to form the novel right there and I think instead of just doing my research and then I write my novel as I'm reading I'm taking notes and that's a scene that's something I can use this I can see this character and for me the novel starts to form as I start to do this initial preliminary work and it sort of shapes the novel and I keep doing some people say well when do you do research I do a lot of research up front so I get a feel for the novel I start to envision the novel I do research every single day you know name, a date a place, a food what are they eating and I do more research after I finish to just make sure it's right and correct so any final questions you've been a very patient group well and the old days are very hard and you go to specialized libraries to find old maps and make copies when I was doing A Brother's Blood this was before Google and before online stuff so I had to go to Maine I had to go to the actual camp or the POW camp where these prisoners were I had to take pictures I talked to people where it used to be back in the 90s they still knew where the camp was from the 40s University of Maine and as I said I got this big box and it had maps and it had all sorts of stuff it had journals of the German POWs it had a newsletter that I copied but now Lord you can jump online and map of Berlin 1934 and if you do a little searching you can find a map there I have a map of Berlin that goes every four years from 1890s all the way up to 1940s something and I was using the 32 one but I found that 33, 34, 35 changed so much I couldn't use that one anymore okay and I don't know if someone just saw this but our secretary in the English department I got this one map and she was making I just said can you make a bigger copy can you blow this up the next thing you know she's got this map that runs about as big as this room here and she's got this whole scroll and I ended up putting it on my wall from like 1934 and that was very, very helpful but their maps you can get online now you can look in lots of different places there's two guys at the university at Fairfield University, Jonathan Hodge he's like my main man I go there and they're just sort of waiting inside the door he needs some help especially a novelist, memoirist, poet, writer man they can't do enough for you so I go over there and play dumb and they do a lot of stuff and they'll get books for you and so on and so forth I have a lot of fun with research and don't look at it I gotta get over it to get to the novel that's when the novel takes shape spend some time, spend some good time plotting it out however you plot as I said I like to get five or eight chapters plot it out pretty detailed with dialogue, not just dialogue so that I start to get a feel before I start to write and so when I start to write I have a good sense of where the novel is going it's always going to change and that's inevitable and then when I finish the first five or six chapters I start plotting out more so I know where I'm going a little bit it's a messy as we said before on the panel doing a novel is very messy my approach may not be your approach you need to glean from it what will help you do your work there are a lot of pressures just like aesthetics you have to find what works for you and this program is designed to help you find what you need but it's a lot of fun to start a novel and the other thing about doing a lot of pre-work is that you're not sitting down saying the novel it was a dark and stormy night oh my god I gotta write a novel after this it's a lot of pressure but if you start to do it in small bits in June I feel pretty comfortable I got 30 pages of kind of an outline storyboard and I feel pretty comfortable I know where I'm going at least I know where I'm starting now I want to say any other questions I want to say thank you for coming this has been in some ways very painful for you I understand that last day you're tired I thank you for coming I've been tired myself I won't be here in the winter and I want you to write well and we have reception so thanks