Interviews with Authors

Katherine Neville is the New York Times bestselling author of The Eight, A Calculated Risk, and The Magic Circle, to name a few. Her newest novel, The Fire (Ballantine Books 2008), has hit bestseller lists all over the world.  JRW is thrilled that she’ll be speaking at our upcoming conference on October 9-10, 2009. Get Your Word On editor Laura Jones recently interviewed Katherine via email.

LJ: Your first novel, The Eight, was a quest that revolved around a 200-year-old chess game. At the time the quest novel was an out of fashion genre and chess lacked glamour. What inspired you to revitalize the genre and add mystery to the game?

KN: Yes, for some reason, the Quest novel went into a long and deep decline after the First and Second World Wars. The literary types were more into Existentialism and angst, or partner-swapping in the suburbs. But I confess, I was really bored by those books. I craved the swashbucklers and pirate novels of Rafael Sabatini and Alexandre Dumas. And, as it turns out, I discovered that there was a reason for that. At a very deep level, it seems, we all resonate to the quest: the story of someone seeking something higher and finer than himself.

Then again, when I started studying writing seriously and I went back to our earliest literature, I realized that the Quest novel is actually our oldest form of storytelling – not just Jason and the Golden Fleece or Parsifal and the Holy Grail, but the Gilgamesh -- the saga of the King of Sumer -- which is the earliest story that we still have in print today, after thousands of years. That's the kind of story I've always loved to read, and that I still love to write.

As for chess -- it has never lacked glamour for me! The entire idea of a cosmic game played out by masters on a human level has inspired writers from Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game) down to J.K. Rowling, in the first Harry Potter.

LJ: How long does it take you to outline your novels? How long does it take you to write them, and then do you stick closely to your outlines or break free from them occasionally?

KN: I don't actually outline. It would be very hard to outline my books, even after the fact, because they aren't sequential -- the modern and historic plots are interconnected at many different levels. The first book I ever attempted to outline was The Eight -- but only twenty years after I wrote it, so that I could keep track of where and when things had happened while I was writing the sequel, The Fire. What I do to keep track of my complex plots and multitudinous cast of characters, is to use an historic timeline for the real historic characters -- what they were doing when -- and a "bubble chart" -- which we call, in data processing, a "data flow diagram" -- to track their interrelationships. When I speak at writers' workshops, I sometimes bring examples of these aids along with me to show other writers. I try never to flash them around while I'm on book tours, though. I don't want to scare readers into thinking they have to take an aptitude test before reading my books! (In fact, as many of you know, the hardest part of writing a book is actually making it a pleasure for others to read it!)

LJ: Did you draw on the personalities of real people in order to create your fictional characters?

KN:  Yes -- most famously, early on I asked all my former boyfriends if I could use them in composite characters, as the heroes, and they all agreed! Since those characters are now the most popular, their "role models" must have gotten plenty of mileage out of that over the years!

But what most people don't realize -- until they've tried their hand at writing an entire work of fiction -- is that the writer must actually be inside all of the characters.  We must know how they think and feel, what they like to eat, how their skin feels -- even with the real historic figures, including the villains! There is no way to create a living, breathing character without knowing him or her from inside out. I knew that Talleyrand bathed twice a day and what kind of silk he preferred against his skin; that Marat's skin was so rotten he was asked not to sit beside his colleagues in the Assembly; that Hitler hated the smell of Christmas trees because his mother died looking at one; that Napoleon loved the scent of rosemary which grew up the front of his grandmother's house in Corsica ... those are the kinds of details that make characters so alive they almost jump off the page.

LJ: Now that you are established as a successful writer do you find that research is easier - more doors are open to you- or more difficult because people fear what you might reveal?

KN: It's easier by far now -- ever since I stopped relying upon histories, biographies and researchers -- or research "aids" like the Internet -- to collect my information. Now I use experts. For one thing, experts love what they do, and love it enough to have spent their entire lives becoming an expert in it.  For another thing, their assistance is usually free!  And the surprises never end.

One example, is that I was chatting with the director of the archaeological digs at Butrint, Albania, who is an expert in Ali Pasha and the War of Greek Independence. He'd discovered from correspondence between Ali Pasha and Lord Byron, that Byron had purchased a "secret weapon" which he had arranged to have constructed here in America as a gift to Ali Pasha, and to have it smuggled to him in Albania.

I thought that the National Rifle Association, here in Virginia, might have the answer to what was the secret weapon. When I subsequently phoned up the historian of the NRA, and gave him the details and the dates of this transaction, he found what the weapon must have been -- one of the first repeating rifles -- and he sent me a photo and invited me down to the NRA to see an actual example of one! That's what I call fun research: where everybody benefits by learning something new, and the reader of the novel is the final beneficiary!

LJ: Have you ever had to discard a manuscript and begin again with a fresh new idea? If so did you eventually return to that manuscript or regard it as a learning experience?

KN: Not exactly, because my books don't really begin with an idea.  Each starts with a question to which I myself want to know the answer.  Like with The Eight: "What should be done with scientific knowledge that can either be dangerous or beneficial to humanity?" But then I don't try to answer it for the reader.  I just let the characters explore the pros and cons of different paths and we can all make up our own minds in the end.

As for throwing things out, however, while I was in the midst of writing The Fire, my editor, Mark Tavani, mentioned casually one day that while he loved the plot and characters, I had to "get rid of all the puzzles" and get something new. I was connecting to themes I had introduced, decades earlier, in the prequel, The Eight -- things like Fibonacci numbers, Pythagorean theorems, the eternal spiral, the Golden Mean ... "But that was twenty years ago," Mark told me. "Everybody else has used them by now, long after you did it!" Omigosh, that's right! I told him. And I don't even like to look like I'm copying myself!  So I had to surgically remove every puzzle, red herring and McGuffin from The Fire and come up with something completely fresh and new. It cost me an extra five months -- I was late on my contract, something unimaginable -- but it was really worth it. For one thing, I discovered in the process that my book knew more than I did about what it needed to be!  Learning experience? I should say so! I'm grateful -- but I hope I don't have to do it again! Whew.

LJ: What would be or is your ideal writing environment?

KN: No question:  It's my old treehouse on an estate in Sausalito, California, overlooking San Francisco Bay -- there's no TV, computer, radio, telephone -- just the sound of the foghorns, the wind in the eucalyptus trees, and the seals barking. I lived there for ten years and I wrote my first two novels there, while working by day in San Francisco.

Maya Angelou (who shares a birthday with me: 4-4) once told me that she kept a retreat like that, too, to write her own works. So I always had a fantasy about going back there.  Then, on this recent book tour for The Fire, just last autumn, I met the people who own the property now. And they've rented the tree house to me for a year or two! I spent this July there. I'm planning on writing big chunks of my next book there.  Thank you, Maya, for planting the seed!

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