On Monday, November 19, I typed The End at the bottom of the last page of the fourth book in The City of Dreams Series. (And if you want to know why I’ve waited so long to blog about it on this site – that was the Monday before Thanksgiving, and I had eleven guests coming for the holiday.)
Though I didn’t know it at the time, that Monday was also the 144th anniversary of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. (Found out by accident when there was a mention of it in a newspaper article.) The reason that’s a little spooky is that the book begins and ends a few hours after the guns of that terrible battle are silent, in a hospital tent pitched at Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. Where, as no one who is a fan of this series will be surprised to learn, one Dr. Nicholas Turner is doing what the Turners have been doing since Lucas Turner arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam in 1661 in the first book of the series, City of Dreams; Nick Turner is pushing the art of surgery as far as the times will allow. And further.
Nineteenth century medicine plays a big part in this story, which takes place from 1834 to 1857 (the 1863 Gettysburg scenes are a bit of an added attraction that I promise will make sense when you read the book). The medical theme largely plays out at Bellevue Hospital, which was really, really scary back then (the mentally ill in cages, and a half-blind apothecary making what passed for medicine in a basement chamber of horrors). There is also a great conflict between religion and medicine, mostly centered on the subjects of anaesthesia and the truth (or not) of the germ theory of medicine. Plus, it wasn’t until 1857 that the medical faculty of the young New York University School of Medicine succeeded in getting the law rescinded which forbade the dissection of any cadaver other than that of a hanged criminal. Before then it was illegal to perform an autopsy on the grounds that it was an offense against God.
Other elements involving belief and non-belief burst new on the Manhattan stage in this same period. Evangelicalism challenged the supremacy of the more traditional Protestant denominations. And the single Jewish synagogue that had been founded at the time of Peter Stuyvesant became first two synagogues, then three. And by the end of the book there are thirteen, including the first Reform congregation, Temple Emanu-El. This is also the period when Catholic churches began growing like weeds in the cracks of the cobblestone streets, which stretched as far as the low 30’s by then. There were thirty-plus Catholic parishes in the 1850’s – mind you, there were over 300 Protestant churches - and in the 1830’s the first nuns were seen in the town. (Fascinating stuff – I’ll blog more about those first sisters some time soon.)
This bare-faced presence of “the papists among us” struck some as red hot evidence of sin, and one of the big bestsellers of the day was a book called Priests, Nuns, and the Confessional by someone named Maria Monk. What she had to say was exposed as the ramblings of a girl who had never been “right in the head,” as her mother put it, much less a nun, but the book kept selling anyway. So did another book that had a much greater effect on those turbulent times. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 100,000 copies in a matter of months, and there’s a probably apocryphal story that the first time Lincoln met her he said, “So you’re the little lady who started this great war…”
This book certainly won’t cause armed conflict, but I hope it will be thought provoking as well as enormously entertaining. You’ll be able to make up your own mind in less than a year. It will be at a bookstore near you in October 2008.
So what’s it called? DRUM ROLL!!! City of God, and that title was suggested by one of you, but I can’t find the e-mail so I can send him a bottle of champagne. Will this prescient gentleman who knew what I was writing about before I did myself please get in touch again.
Meanwhile, if you’ve been waiting for City of Glory in a snazzy new paperback version, it’s headed for the bookstores next week. “Riotously entertaining…” according to the Washington Post. Hope Santa thinks of it for some of those stockings.
One of the delights of the intense research required by writing a novel set in past times is discovering something that was earth-shaking news when it happened, but is now forgotten by all but professional historians. As I go forward with this fourth book in the City of Dreams series – wait for a new title announcement coming soon! – I’ve run into just such an event.
Do you know about the New York City fire that was the worst urban blaze since the Great Fire of London nearly two centuries earlier? Every one I’ve sprung this on so far, including my very historically knowledgeable husband and ditto agent, says no. Or maybe that they’ve a vague memory of reading something…
A year later six hundred of them had been rebuilt, the city had finally committed itself to a proper supply of running water and to constructing a huge reservoir at 42nd and Fifth (where the main New York Public Library now stands), and two of the most famous pleasure palaces of old New York went up as a direct result: The Astor House Hotel and Delmonicos.
Of course, for the Turners and the Devreys, this is a very personal tragedy…
When I’m not actually writing my own fiction, one of the things I do that I like best is to mentor other writers. I’m working with a couple right now who are truly wonderful, and when their books come out it will be my great pleasure to shout their praises to the skies and do whatever I’m able to help promote them and their work. I also, however, frequently run into others whom I believe to be trotting down a path that will end in frustration - often because of a misunderstanding about the intersection between fact and fiction.
A prodigious amount of research goes into the writing of a book set in an earlier time. All the shorthand that’s available to the writer of novels set in our own times, or even the recent past, is unavailable to the writer of historical fiction. It is not possible to call on shared experience. The job of that writer - my job - is to sketch in the world of the characters with enough care and detail so that you are able to picture them and their settings, despite the fact that you have no personal experience of - for example - the 1830s in New York City. That, however, is just one of the challenges. We who write these kinds of books have also to make sure that we do not let the history, all that prodigious detail we’ve spent so long studying and cataloging and obsessing over, does not get in the way of telling a crackerjack story that is first and foremost about the characters and the situations in which we’ve placed them. As readers we all care more about whether Pauline escapes after being tied to the railroad tracks then about the nature of the engine that powers the train racing toward her. As the writer I have to know about that engine, probably in a fair amount of specifics, but what I leave out is more important to guaranteeing a wonderful experience to you as a reader than what I put in.
This was brought home to me recently when I was reading the manuscript of a hopeful new writer of historical fiction and found that it’s huge (and virtually unpublishable) length can be blamed on his having fallen in love with his research. He knew how those people dressed and what they ate and where they slept - even what they smelled like. And he wanted we as readers to know that he knew. And we wind up plowing through endless detail saying ho-hum, where’s the story?
Another common error is thinking that the history leads, rather than the story. Here is what I wrote to another writer who has been worrying about whether she can bend the facts of the historical incident that was the inciting point for her novel:
I’m sorry I’ve gone so long without writing here. It’s because I’ve been writing elsewhere. As in creating a story. The fourth book in the City of Dreams Series - the one that now doesn’t have a title since I’ve axed the Promise idea and come up with nothing else - is well and truly underway. I may be through the first draft some time this summer. Getting stuck in like this has revealed some major whoppers in my original thinking. And those I haven’t spotted on my own have been brought home to me by you, the folks I write for.
First, I’ve gotten a handful of e-mails from the sharp-eyed among you who have picked up a truly terrible historical error in City of Glory. On page 109 one British officer agrees with another that they will press on, and that either Baltimore or Washington would be “their [the Americans] Waterloo…” Trouble is, that exchange takes place in August of 1814 - ten months before the battle of Waterloo in June 1815. How did I make such a gaffe? I do not know. I am nothing if not obsessive about historical detail. And I have a terrific editor who is herself very aware of history. And when she’s done with what the trade calls line editing, thinking about the story as a whole and making suggestions about same, the book (any book with a major publisher) goes through two different rounds of copy-editing. The first is about internal chronology, punctuation, grammar and the like. The second is proof reading for typographical mistakes. Over the years I’ve had the eagle-eyes doing both those jobs spot one or another kind of mistake and query me about same. In this case, no such luck. The egg-on-my-face was wiped off by no one. The responsibility is entirely mine and I hang my head in shame. The line will be changed in the paperback edition out next winter. And a huge thank you to Gary S. and the other readers who spotted the mistake and told me about it.
Next in the catalog of how easy it is to screw up: When I posted the matrix to the new book on this site (and submitted it to Simon & Schuster) I was gleefully calling the main Devrey character Joshua, and the main Turner character Christopher - to be known as Kif. Well, Joshua was another character in City of Glory, where this Devrey makes his first fleeting appearance so he can be developed in this next book. So he became Samuel. (The one I identified as the villain of the piece in an earlier blog). And I only recently realized that the character of Christopher (Kif) Turner is already in full blown print in the first book, City of Dreams. Right there in that family tree that so many of us labored over so painstakingly. (I cannot tell you what’s involved in proofing something like that…) Son of Andrew Turner and born in 1770. The character in this new book, a young man in 1832, is meant to be Andrew’s grandson. Do you know how many readers woud write me about that? The same name as his father maybe, but the same nickname… I made him Nicholas and he’s already working better on the page.
And here’s one I hope is not a mistake - City of Glory has been nominated for the David J. Langum Sr. prize in American Historical Fiction. Seems to me that my work is far too commercial for these folks, but I’m honored to be considered. Hope they don’t say oops… How did we make that gaffe?
Okay, most of the madness is over. For the time being I’m done running around to bookstores, and getting up at odd hours to do phone-ins with someone in Reykjavik (where, incidentally, one English language copy of my latest book is available at a dog sled stop in an ice field somewhere).
Time to go back to City of 4. Though I can stall a bit longer by telling you that a number of people very kindly sent e-mails to say they liked the idea of calling it book four in the City of Dreams series, and giving it another actual title. No idea what yet, but that’s a different kind of problem and much more manageable.
Now it definitely is time to write. And after this much time away, it’s really, really hard to do.
I was helped enormously by something I saw on PBS the other night. During their oh so boring fund raising drive, no less. The hook meant to keep you in place while they begged was a countdown of the top twelve favorite shows on Masterpiece Theater, and the shtick was hosted by Derek Jacobi. Of course I had to stay with it to see if my all time hands-down favorite, Upstairs Downstairs, made the cut. Bill said his favorite was The Forsyte Saga. Then he went to sleep, leaving me propping up my eyelids with toothpicks determined to know the result. (Yes, I know how stupid that is. I can’t help it. I’m compulsive about competitions of any sort.)
Hoo Ha! Comes the final four and the second most favorite was Forsyte, with number one being Upstairs Downstairs. And in the course of describing those two wonderful costume sagas to an audience among whom were probably many too young ever to have seen them, Jacobi, said two words that got me back to writing. Villain was one. Hero was the other.
I realize it sounds too elementary to be believed. Particularly from someone who’s been doing this as long as I have. But that just shows you how easy it is to forget the building blocks. Who I asked myself is the villain of 4? As soon as I posed the question I knew the answer. Samuel is the villain. Likeable, even sympathetic in some instances, but the villain of the piece nonetheless. If I don’t write him large enough in that regard, you are not going to enjoy the book. Very well, then who’s the hero? Kif, of course. Christopher Turner, the heroic doctor we meet on the battlefield at Gettysburg in the book’s prologue. Meaning I have to write larger a lot of the plot threads involving him. And give him a quest, and a mission, and obstacles.
Ah yes, I see it all now. This book is going to come together after all… Thanks to Derek Jacobi and PBS. Even their lousy fund drive. (Yes, I did give. I certainly owed them.)
Okay, here’s an idea… How about if I call these novels – I mean the ones this site is all about – The City of Dreams Series? Then I can title the individual books free from the “City of” moniker that I think of as the “son of Sam syndrome.” I like it. Could be I can sell the idea to Syd Miner, my editor, and she can sell it to Simon & Schuster’s marketing department. But I’m trying it on here first. Is it good for you? And my thanks to Diana Gabaldon. It was glancing at a list of her books that gave me the idea. (Outlander was the first title, then it became the name of the series.)
And as I tackle the February events promoting CITY OF GLORY, I’m still struggling with the bridge between writing and talking about writing. I’m thrilled with all the great feedback for the new book, of course. And I love meeting and talking with those of you who so kindly come out to these events (not to mention send e-mails, etc.) but none of it allows me to withdraw into that nether world where spinning a story takes place… At least not to go there and stay long enough to make the magic happen.
But I have hope… This gig at Rocky Sullivan’s Pub in NYC (on Lexington between 28th and 29th - which would have put it deep in the Manhattan wilderness in Holy Hannah’s day!) on Wednesday, February 21st seems to be the last for a while. So if you’re in or near our City of Dreams and care to meet up, and maybe down a Guinness in honor of the Women of Connemara, sure and it’s that glad I’ll be to see you.
…to the top twelve scorers in the Prize Quiz elsewhere on the site. We’ve sent you all e-mails requesting your real-world addresses, and signed copies of City of Glory will be arriving very soon.
And while we’re in celebratory mood…
I got a lot of congratulatory e-mails from friends, family, and fans on the ninth January, which was the official launch day for City of Glory. And that’s the only way the occasion was marked. It wasn’t even the book’s best day thus far on Amazon. (Simply one account among all the others from the publisher’s pov, but the only “store” where authors can know instantly how they’re doing - at least in the sense that copies are being sold. What mysterious logarithms govern the movement that hourly tracks the change from 22,000 to 14,232 to 734 and back to 57,062 is a close kept secret.)
Launch parties given by publishers are a thing of the distant past. Everyone has finally conceded that it’s a foolish way to spend limited promotion money. As for walking around the bookstores to see the book on the shelves, that’s enormous fun the first few times it happens. After a while you realize that what you should be doing on these visits is introducing yourself to the store’s manager, and offering to sign copies of your book. In other words, working. Because as an author, promoting your book is definitely part of your job. Stores love to have “signed by the author” copies available - they keep special stickers to slam on the front of any book so signed -and the staff who help you through the process by bringing stacks of books to whatever corner they’ve found for you will remember you if you make an effort to be appreciative. (As indeed you should be; you’re making extra work for them however nice about it they may be.) What you really want to achieve from this exercise is to encourage what’s called hand-selling, the real magic in the marketing grab bag. “Oh, do you know there’s a new Beverly Swerling…” you want them to tell their customers. That’s worth a lot more than any number of popped champagne corks, I assure you. And if you have the special pleasure of seeing that the major chains have put your book on a table at the front of the store, these visits are particularly gratifying. (I’ve been fortunate to get that treatment for City of Glory and I know how much it means. In fact, it’s the result of a long dance the publishers’ reps do with the book buyers starting well before the book comes out. The competition is fierce - even though publishers have to pay for this placement - and you should kiss the feet of the reps who achieve these miracles for you.)
But all that said, the real secret of marketing books these days is the Internet. On which I’ll have more to say later. Meanwhile thank you to all who took part in the quiz. We’ll think of a new one pretty soon and get another contest going. And for all who noted the launch date, I deeply appreciate it.
PS
All this talk about marketing and I forgot to mention two gigs coming up in the next ten days or so!
I’ll be at Borders in Springfield PA at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday the 18th. Giving a talk and reading a bit from the book, and of course signing copies. All I know is that it’s the one with the 1001 Baltimore Pike address. I’ll get the name of the mall and post it here later today.
And on Wednesday the 24th I’ll be at the Barnes & Noble in Astor Place in NYC. Same time - 7:00 p.m. - reading, talking, signing, all as usual.
Please come! And if you learned about it here at the site, do be sure and tell me.
I started writing and publishing long enough ago (other publishers, other names, other story) to remember when it was common to speak of this as a “gentlemen’s agreement” business. Meaning that a handshake was as binding as a signed contract.
Quite apart from the non-p.c. aspect of the use of “gentlemen” to mean all writers and all publishers, that seems a quaint concept in the litigious twenty-first century in America (indeed, in the West). But there is a very important sense in which it is still true. The use of the phrase belongs to a time when few writers had agents, but even now when 99% of them do, the “my word is my bond” aspect still applies to at least one part of the process. When an agent and an acquiring editor say, “Deal!,” it is indeed a deal. So while the contracts department may take weeks to churn out the legalese agreed to in the negotiation - even when it’s all boiler-plate it seems to take them weeks - and the check usually doesn’t show up until many, many more weeks have passed, it is indeed rare for that original commitment to be in any way abridged or abrogated. When the call comes to tell you the book is sold, it is indeed sold.
So it should come as no surprise that while information about the next book in the tale of the Turners and the Devreys in old New York has been on this website since the October launch, I actually signed the contract with Simon & Schuster only recently, and the ”on signing” payment showed up in my bank account just days past. That aside, I knew the deal was in place and that I was definitely to write the book last September. As for the book itself - I did the research over the past year, and during the summer wrote the first 20-or-so-percent of the story and the matrix that I do instead of an outline. (See City of Promise - terrible title and so far nothing better has surfaced - at the Novels section of this site for more on all that.)
The point of this year-end ramble is that once 2007 is well and truly here I must return to Mai-lin and Christopher Turner and Samuel Devrey. I must navigate that enormous leap that is one of the most terrifying imaginable, no matter how many books you have written - the jump across the chasm between the story in your head and the one on the page. And I must take that leap while I am still deep in the process of talking about (i.e. promoting though I hate the word) City of Glory, which is officially born on January 9th, though we started shipping books to bookstores the middle of December. And while my contract says I have until January of 2008 to turn in the completed ms, I have promised my editor that I will try to have the book done well before that. And remember, this is still a business where one’s word is one’s bond…
So, in the New Year, it begins and I must court the writing gods yet again….
I hope 2007 is a successful writing year for all of you. (And for me, she adds, fingers crossed. Because there’s never any guarantee the magic can be summoned once more…)
Remember all that ruckus about A Million Little Pieces? The author said it was a memoir so readers assumed it had to be true, then it came out that he made some of it up and a great many people felt horribly betrayed? What you may not know is that the author and his agent had first tried to market the book - or at least the concept - as a novel. And in an article in the AR&E newsletter, Talking Agents, I said that was a normal discussion for an agent and writer to have - should I do this as a novel (which, remember, is always fiction - you are far too intelligent to use that horrible tautology fictional novel) or as a biography or what? Sometimes the answer is make it a memoir. Usually you cover yourself with an author’s foreword in which you speak to the things you maybe fudged or names you changed, etc. The author of Little Pieces didn’t do that, leaving everyone with a very bad taste in their mouths. Particularly since the book sold a gazillion copies and made millions. But his agent dumped him, his next book contract was cancelled, and if we hear from him again it will be something like If I Did It Here’s How I Would Have, etc. With probably the same result. (And I don’t know what happened to the millions earned from A Million Little Pieces. Though I heard that OJ was supposed to give back whatever part of the advance he’d been paid so far.)
All this came to mind because I saw in this morning’s Washington Post that Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) has written about a Sudanese refugee whose story he very much wanted to tell. As the Post explains it, one of “thousands of young refugees from the civil war in southern Sudan, which broke out in the mid-1980s and continued until peace was finally negotiated in 2005.” Some of whom now live in various parts of the US, as does the young man in Eggers’s tale.
Though the subject of his story was cooperating with him, Eggers was convinced he could not write this book without “fictionalizing” some elements: making up conversations he could not have heard and had to imagine, conflating some time lines, describing things that were happening outside the point of view of the young man about whom he was writing… So he did it as a novel, explained what he was doing in the requisite foreword, and the critics can make of it what they will. As can the much more important reading public.
This story is, if you will, the mirror image of the Little Pieces debacle. It is facts employed to serve fiction, and thereby arrive at a higher and much more real explanation of truth.
In my view, that’s what all fiction is supposed to be. And historical novels more than the rest of fiction. Such efforts are not “distortions” of history as those who denigrate the genre claim. They are certainly not honeyed versions of history. No novelist worth her typing skills would ignore the big dramatic confrontations in favor of some sort of fluff. That’s the sort of thing that gets you comments from editors and agents such as: You’re allowing all the drama to happen off the page… You never actually engage the reader in the conflict… Etc. (And it’s probably legitimate in historical romance, another genre entirely and not what’s under discussion here.)
A good historical novel is an exciting story told against the background of a period of time in the past. You can play with that formula in many different ways - indeed that’s what the creative imagination is supposed to do - but at base it is what it is and won’t change. In the course of telling the story of your characters and their love and hate and greed and heroism - all the stuff that makes up all our lives - and playing out the plot threads you’ve established, you also illuminate the big and small truths of another era. And maybe surprise some folks. The huge part slavery played in the history of New York for one big thing. The fact that the street grid - as in 42nd and Broadway - was in place in Manhattan by 1809, for one of the smaller.
Finally note the phrase plot threads above. If you’re reading this blog because you’re a budding novelist writing in any genre, put them on a big sign above your computer. Above the one that reminds you that all writing is rewriting. (Not me, G. B. Shaw.) YOU HAVE TO HAVE A PLOT. A novel may not be a memoir. But no matter how critically important the characters, it is definitely not a biography.
…but I have learned something. Blogging can be - no, not addictive - but one of those things that reproaches you by sitting in the back of your mind saying “you really must attend to this.” As in pay the bills, get that stuff to the dry cleaners, call that old friend you haven’t heard from in ages… Do something about the blogs. Plural yet. No, I realize, I am not nuts as I posited in that first post. What I’m doing is looking for another bolt hole. Something to do instead of write.
One of the most important lessons for novice writers is that writing is really, really hard. It is as if you are trying to cross a huge chasm because something you want desperately is on the other side, but to get it you must launch yourself into space and make an enormous leap of faith. Hard and scary. So you find reasons not to do it. Blogging is one of the more seductive.
You would think that by now I’d have learned how to quell the bad angels. I have not done so entirely - I doubt any writer has - but I can offer a few hard-learned techniques that usually work.
I must be nuts. I agreed to put a blog on this site.
I know I don’t have time to do what bloggers are supposed to do…
write every day, interact instantly with their readers, get deeply
involved in all the niceties and specialties and inter this and that of
bloggerdom…
It won’t happen.
I’m a full time working novelist (you know that, else why would you
be at this site in the first place?), I act as a consultant for my
husband’s business at http://www.agentresearch.com -
I do the Customized Fingerprint Reports that put writers
together with agents, I blog some there, I mentor a very
few talented new writers. SO WHY AM I DOING THIS?
Because I love talking about writing. The magic of it.
The way when it’s going well it’s as good as anything gets in this
life. Yes, I do mean anything.
Sometimes the agony of it. How hard it can be to make the
picture in your head get on to the page. How screwed up the
business of publishing often is. How luck plays a huge part in
all of it, and is something you cannot control. How neurotic you
have to be to want to make a living by closing yourself
up for hours, alone in a room, staring at a blank
screen. Very neurotic.
So that’s what I’ll do here, talk about writing. The other
blog is for agent stuff. This one is about the doing of the
thing.
And you’ll forgive me because right now I’m going to tell Mel the
Wonderful Webmaster (henceforth to be known as MtWW) to turn the
comments off on this page. If you really want to get in touch,
check out the contacts page and try my e-mail. I’ll answer if I
can.