Interviews with Authors

JRW: How do you decide what actually makes a meaningful story as opposed to a mere retelling of historical events?

Kukla: For me, the essential element in finding and telling a good story is getting at the thoughts and personalities of the men and women whose actions comprise the historical events themselves. Beyond that, it helps that I’ve been studying history for some forty years, so I guess I’ve developed an eye for the specific incidents that a writer can use to convey larger abstract matters. (The microcosm that illuminates the macrocosm.) For example, the French Revolution (in the run-up to the Louisiana Purchase) was a hugely significant world-changing event – but if a writer were to rely just on that kind of abstract statement, your readers’ eyes glaze over and you’ve lost ’em. Luckily, though, I found a story about the German poet Goethe, who was traveling with an Austrian regiment that was defeated by the French Revolutionary forces in their first successful major battle. Around their campfire that night, the young soldiers turn to Goethe for some words of wisdom after their loss. He says that Today the world has changed. So by telling that story in four paragraphs at the beginning of my chapter, my reader gets a good story and Goethe gets to say what I needed said.

JRW: Do you travel much in order to research your books? Do you follow the routes of explorers, search through their homes, or read their personal correspondence?

Kukla: My research focuses intensely on the personal correspondence and first-person accounts of the events I’m writing about. I think finding their voices helps me bring their personalities alive. If humanly possible I prefer to consult original documents in archives and libraries – but of course one must often resort to microfilm. Published volumes of papers are available for some of the major figures – Washington, Jefferson, Madison, etc. – but even then I sometimes seek out the original manuscripts. It helps to have worked in research institutions since the 1970s, and I’ve developed a knack for deciphering difficult handwriting. And I should mention that in the decade since I began work on the Louisiana Purchase, many significant collections of correspondence and newspapers have become accessible online from the major research libraries.

I traveled quite a bit for my 2003 book about the Louisiana Purchase – A Wilderness So Immense – but maybe not to the places people might expect. The main motive for the U.S. wanting Louisiana was not for the western land that comprises the western (Missouri) watershed of the Mississippi but rather to control the city of New Orleans as the coastal seaport downriver from the settlements in the Ohio River valley. I had visited Lake Itasca as a kid and lived in New Orleans during the ‘90s, but telling the story of the Louisiana Purchase as an event in world history meant writing about developments in London, Paris, Haiti, and Madrid. I didn’t have the time or money to visit them, so I studied guidebooks and city maps until I got the geography right. I visited all the locations in Louisiana, and while doing research at archives in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, I sought out places in the Ohio watershed that only a historian could love: The confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois – of the Missouri and Mississippi just north of St. Louis – old French and Spanish river towns like Cape Girardeau and New Madrid. I thought it would be good to drive the Natchez Trace, though I ended up never mentioning it in the book.

For the next book, because Jefferson met Maria Cosway while he was ambassador to the court of Louis XVI in the 1780s, I explored virtually all the places in Paris that he mentions in his account books. The site of his residence, now near the Arc de Triomphe, is marked by a marble plaque in an alley next to some big circuit-breaker boxes. And I have sought out the homes of people who figure in my books. I visited virtually all the sites associated with Mr. Jefferson’s Women – except a house in King William that is still on my to-do list. Some notable places from the Louisiana Purchase story include George Rogers Clark’s home near Louisville (with its simple but splendid black-walnut woodwork), Robert Livingston’s Clermont on the Hudson, and a church in Charleston that was the site of a notable oration on the first anniversary of the Purchase.

JRW: Do you outline your proposal prior to writing the story?

Kukla: My best outlines have been written on napkins – especially cocktail napkins. That said, for commercial non-fiction these days the contract process is based on your agent presenting prospective editors (and their marketing-department colleagues) a shortened version of the story in the form of a 25-to-70-page proposal. Every writer I know HATES them (we’d much rather jump into telling the full story) but the process of writing a proposal does force you to figure out how you’re going to tell your story in a book that people want to buy and read.

JRW: Have you ever suffered from writer's block and if so how do you deal with it?

Kukla: Things may be different for fiction-writers, who have the luxury and curse of making things up. But in writing history and non-fiction, I find that when I’m at a loss for words it is because I haven’t figured out what I want to say either because I don’t have all the information I need or because I haven’t thought about it thoroughly enough.

If the problem is insufficient information, then you need to fill in the blanks - without succumbing to the danger of substituting the fun of research for the hard work of writing. (You can always find some interesting tangent that lures you away from the keyboard, so when you’ve answered the questions sufficiently to tell your story you need to get your ass back in the chair and pound out some words.)

If you have the information but haven’t fully digested it, the best thing is just to pick someplace in the story and start there. Two chapters into the Louisiana Purchase book I was “blocked” in the sense that I wasn’t entirely sure which part of that complex story was right for chapter three. But I knew that eventually I would need a decent biographical sketch of James Monroe (a major figure in the story), so I started on that, figuring that I could always use it somewhere later after I figured out what should go in chapter three. Well naturally once I got into writing about Monroe, I began to see how I could go to the next part of the story, and the next, and the next.

I was also trying to open each chapter of that book with a pertinent and interesting short episode to set the theme for the chapter, as with the Goethe anecdote I mentioned earlier. While writing the first half of the book, I would finish a chapter and then suffer two or three days of utter panic as I tried to figure out how to start the next chapter. About halfway through the book, though, I learned that if I relaxed and thought hard for a day or two about where the story needed to go next, something would come to me – and it always did.  In my experience, if you’ve really done your research and worked hard to think things through, the words will be there. I think that’s the experience that the ancient Greeks had in mind when they spoke of the Muses.

JRW: How long does it take to research and write your books?

Kukla: Research always overlaps into the period of active writing, but in general the Louisiana Purchase took three years of research and two of writing. Jefferson and women took two or three years of research and about eighteen months of writing.

JRW: Can you sum up your life in six words?

Kukla: Six words? How about, “Sorry. I tried. But nothing worked.” I’ve never been good at Haiku either. Maybe it’s a quality of mind or talent – maybe its why all writers envy the really great poets – but my temperament seems to be that of a story-teller not a poet. I don’t know whether that led me to the discipline of history or whether its been accentuated by four decades as a working historian. Even in conversation I’m often tempted to answer questions with anecdotes or stories – maybe that’s respect for the complexities and ironies of life, or maybe I’m just wary of timeless abstractions.

More information at www.jonkukla.com

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