What is the structure to a chapter?  Ideally each chapter will cover an event, a character, or a story line with internal cohesion.   Its first paragraphs often stake out the new territory of those things.   It’s middle portions relate to those first paragraphs and build with details and progress of the overall story.  But how should a chapter end?

Should it try to loop back to the beginning paragraphs and complete a story arc so that the chapter is internally complete?  Should it act like a cliffhanger a la The Da Vinci Code, a sort of door-slams-shut and no-way-out nail bite?   Maybe, if you are writing chase scenes.

Perhaps the end of a chapter should not end much of anything so much as the scene of a child waving goodbye on the way to summer camp, a hint of reminiscence for what led everyone up to that point tinged with hope, anxiety even, or fear for what lies ahead.

A good rule of thumb when editing manuscripts is to read three chapters at a time.  Consider whether the first of the three concludes by hinting, implying, or threatening some event that is postponed until further notice.   The succeeding chapters can either build on that unresolved question or begin a different story line while, at the same time, weaving in issues, characters, or events from the first of the three chapters.   Readers get a great sense of reward by picking up a character, story line, or event that was hinted at several chapters previously.   But, if there is no break from the end of one chapter and the content of the next, or if the chapter is internally complete, the story telling falters.

In The March, Doctorow’s novel of Sherman’s march through the South, a chapter begins with Sherman’s telegram to Lincoln:  “I beg to present to you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition.  Also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.”

The novel had already marched us from Atlanta to Savannah, had burned houses, buried men and horses, freed slaves, torched plantations, pillaged women, and created baggage train camp followers.  The capture of Savannah, intact and with spoils, was a welcome relief.  Doctorow then wrote the chapter with Sherman in Savannah, planning to attack up the Carolinas,  where the novel will lead.  But, in concluding it, he told us that:

“At the end of the evening Sherman went to his rooms mellow with wine and feeling more relaxed than he had in days.  He was humming the overture to The Flying Dutchman. Some newspapers were newly arrived from Ohio.  He lit a cigar and, expecting to  amuse himself with the local gossip, sat back and read in the Columbus, Ohio, Times, that Charles Sherman, the six-month-old son of General and Mrs. William Tecumseh Sherman, had died of the croup.”

Doctorow’s map of impersonal death and destruction had led us to Savannah, as we knew it would.  It pointed to the end of the war, as we know it will.  It is that middle of the treasure hunt that reminds us that between the beach and the palm trees there are twelve dead men on a  dead men’s chest.  The war that Sherman had taken to the south had taken Sherman as well.  The prize, the end of the war, would come, but even he began to pay the price.  He, however, and we, would go on.

Writing is an art, not a science.   Even the most linear of works, such as a high school chemistry textbook, must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.   It is that middle part that must keep the reader hunting for the nuggets of your prose.

Write your thousand words, and end them with a hint of what’s to come.  Good luck.

Jack

I’ll be with Rich Simpson on Our Echo Network Radio on D-Day.  Sandy Lawrence lined this up when it became known that Rich’s mother lives in Air Force Village on the edge of San Antonio. My dear friend, General Paul Myers, former Surgeon General of the Air  Force, lives in Air Force village.  He wrote a very kind jacket note for Engaged in War and appeared to speak at the book launch.

June 20-23:

I’ll be speaking at the Historical Novel Society annual convention in St. Petersburg (the one in Florida, not the one in Russia) on the subject of how to go about doing research for historical fiction.

June 22:

I will speak and sign at the Old Tampa Book Company in Tampa Florida from 2:00 to 5:00 in the afternoon.  It is the go – to independent book store in Tampa  - St. Pete and specializes in rare and used first editions.  I am really looking forward to the visit.

I hope to see you along the way.

Jack

But did I read any page-turners?  If a book on the nightstand keeps me up all night, it is a 100 watt hottie.  If I read the same paragraph four times and the book hits my nose, I’m just trying to milk light out of a dead bulb.  No watts, and down it goes.  Most books are in between.   And, I’m happy and sorry to say, this month has a bit of both.

Just finished:

Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst.   Furst writes novels of low level World War II European spies, more or less ordinary people who find themselves dragged into something extra-ordinary.   His first novels, Night Soldiers, the Polish Officer, others, were magnificent.  As the brand wore on, the stories became a bit less so.   By the time he wrote Spies of the Balkans, a tiresome tale of outsmarting the Germans in Greece, I was worried.  Now, with Mission to Paris, we have the unlikely experience of an author imitating the style of his former self, Furst imitating Furst.   He gives us a famous movie star in Paris who decides to spy for the US because he is approached by the Nazis through a socialite hostess while he is filming a movie where he falls for the refugee prop girl where….  Never mind.  Read the early ones.  This one is not up to his skillt.   Dead lightbulb.

Monte Cassino, Peter Caddick-Adams, is a history of the Allied attempts to break out of the Neapolitan beachheads to penetrate the Gustav line in 1944, a wrenching and not-oft-told account of the Italian campaign that resulted, on the one hand, in the fall of Rome and, on the other hand, of the unnecessary destruction of Christendom’s oldest and most revered monastery, the Benedictine abbey that since AD 539 had stood high above the Liri Valley.  Americans, Texans certainly, know the history from the perspective of the suicidal attempt to cross the Rapido River that destroyed the 36th Infantry Division, hand in glove with the tragic landings at Anzio.  Caddick-Adams writes the entire account of the British, French, Polish, Indian, and German units as well as paying full homage to the Fifth US Army.  It is a fine book.   The only drawback is the pardonable difficulty in keeping all the numbered and nicknamed units sorted out as you turn page after page.  The only thing  he is not is Rick Atkinson.  90 watts, or more.

Lagnappe!  Cajun for ‘unexpected gift.’  I got in an extra read:

Chickenhawk by Robert Mason.   This is a pilot’s eye view of the Viet Nam war from the right seat of a Bell 212 Huey flying in the Happy Valley, the Drang, and all points of Hell from An Khe and Pleiku in 1965-1966.  I could  not put the book down.  Mason drops us into places that can he can fly us out of only by using the main rotors as weed eaters to cut the enveloping canopy.  We watch in disbelief as his friends are shot out from under him and others die from survivable hits when his unit is not given flak jackets, then ride with him in the wreckage back to a pad for his crew chief to hose out the sad remains of what hours before had been young Americans.   Page by page his soul degrades as the demands of helicopter warfare in a constantly changing  zone destroy everything he cares about except, perhaps, staying alive.  Read this book.  It is exceptional.  100 watts of halogen.

On the Nightstand:

Am reading the much vamped Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne, a 2011 Pulitzer candidate.  It is a history of the best horse cavalry in history, who happened to be Comanche Indians of the American plains.   A favorite early tease suggests that their range was so vast and so fast that a group of Mexican or Texan families eating dinner in San Antonio would feel completely safe by reading a report that the Comanches were known to be 400 miles away, the equivalent of Oklahoma City, when in fact such a modest distance rendered them exposed to immediate and serious threat of invasion, kidnap, and violent death.  Oh my, keep reading.

Over on Channel 2 I am reading the novel Ironfire by David Ball, a novel of the very real battle for Malta between the Knights of St. John, defending, and Suleiman, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, attacking, in 1565, an event that left Malta in Christian hands and precluded the complete domination of the Mediterranean by the Islamic armies of the Middle East and North Africa.  So far I can say that Malta appears to need more fresh drinking water, a lot, and that the brother and sister who are the principals are lucky to be alive.

In the Queue:

Capital, by John Lanchester.   He is the author of A Debt to Pleasure, a wicked satire that every author should read to in order to learn about pace and character development.  High hopes here.

The Greater Journey, by David McCullough, author of 1776, John Adams, and many other fine American histories.  High hopes here, too.

Comments?  Contributions?  Bring us your tired, your hungry, and your recommendations for good reads.   That’s what this site is for, to share good books with good friends.

See you soon,

Jack

A controversy developed. Some argued that the remains should be taken to the nearest town for burial in a public cemetery. Others insisted that, the graves being so old that they were neither mapped nor recorded, the decedents must have lived and died in a religious time and, therefore, should be buried in a church yard.

Writers’ Exercise:  Use the third person possessive to write a description of this dilemma.

Tried it? Okay, here’s the solution:

Answer:

Where should be the Corps’ cops’ copse’s corpses’ final resting place?

The dilemma doesn’t have anything to do with the bodies – just bury them somewhere. The dilemma is when and how to use ‘s apostrophe’ in plural nouns and nouns that end in ‘es.’

If it ends in ‘s’, use an apostrophe, not ‘apostrophe s.’

If it ends in ‘se’, use ‘apostrophe s.’

Corps’, not Corps’s    (True even if it is ‘Jones’)

Cops’, not Cops’s

Copse’s, not copse’

And, of course,

Corpses’, not corpses’s

Sorry about that. But, with any luck, it will stick in your head and you will find yourself muttering it in your sleep and while sitting in the audience listening to dull speeches.

Jack

PS:  This blog was first published in Dispatches, the Military Writers of Society of America digital news magazine, under the Writing Forums.  You should visit.

In case you have forgotten, or if this is your first time to visit On the Nightstand, I let you know what I am reading, what I have finished, and what’s next.   That alone should get the  books into the New York Times Literary Supplement.  However, On the Nightstand goes beyond and rates the books with an objective, fair, and reasonable score — watts.   A real page turner is a 100 watt book because it keeps me up all night.  A 20 watt book…. well, that takes a bit longer.   And watts in the middle?  Anything from 40, 60, 80 watts.   And, every great once in a while, there is a halogen.  So, here we go:

Just finished:

Rogue Betrayer, by John Monteith.  This is the tale of a CIA agent who is sent to extract revenge on two rogues who had stolen an American submarine, only to find them just as a Pakistani Agosta class submarine disappears.   Monteith is an ex-sub man himself and writes an exciting story of cat and mouse and rat and snake.  80 watts and waiting to read the next one.

The Normandy Diary of Mary-Louise Osmont, introduction by John Keegan.  This fascinating book is a real diary, kept by a French woman who lived between Caen and the British landing beaches in Normandy.  ”I ask the sergeant not to take down the walls on the property to find the necessary materials.  Very nicely he promises they won’t.  In fact, it is Mrs. Deforge’s wall that is  called to the sacrifice.”   Her home and farm were occupied by German soldiers from 1940 on and was a battleground between German and British troops during and after D-Day.   Shown often in Normandy:  The Great Crusade on television, her home is now a frequent stop for WWII pilgrims.  100 watts.

On the Nightstand:

Mission to Paris, Alan Furst.   Readers of the first four or five of his spy novels know that when he is good, he is very very good.  Readers of the last one or two, particularly Spies of the Balkans, know that he also can be not so very very good.  The flyleaf says this novel involves a Hollywood film star whom the Reich wants to co-opt for its propaganda machine.   Fingers crossed as I pick up one of those new curly fluorescent bulbs for the nightstand.  Stay tuned.

Monte Cassino, Peter Cadick-Adams.   This is a non-fiction history of the wildly destructive battle for Monte Cassino in 1994 in which the decision is taken to destroy the Sixth Century Benedictine Monastery that guards the route between Naples and Rome.  The Gold Standard here is Rick Atkinson, Day of Battle, an extremely well-written account of the fledgling US Army fighting its way up through Sicily and the spine of Italy under the command of Mark Clark.   MC is by a British author so the book promises to be a wider history of the ten armies rather than the frequently narrow account of the US Fifth.   High hopes.

Stay tuned as those last two get their light bulbs and the next few take their places in the queue.   And, don’t hesitate to add.  That’s what this site is for, an exchange of books, reviews, and general admiration of my clever system.

Jack

“That’s not writing; that’s typing.”

Jack Kerouac was on the wrong end of that review, one spoken by Truman Capote but, nevertheless, a review.

If there is anything more contentious than the relationship between author and critic it would be the relationship between author and book reviewer. So, as an author, you have be honest about what  you want in a good review. In truth, you want it to be about the book, not (much) about the author, and not (ever) about the reviewer.

So, what does one of those well-written reviews look like? It’s pretty simple, really. A well-composed review has about four stages.
1. The lead line: The review should state not only the title and author but also the publisher, ISBN, and price of the book. If you are writing the review, this doesn’t seem like too much to ask since the book is sitting right there in front of you.
2. The reader line: Reviews should help readers decide whether to read the book.  A  reader line moves that along by placing the book within a field or genre, such as “Army at Dawn is a history of the fledgling United States Army in the European theater of World War II.” “A Debt to Pleasure is black humor, a novel of revenge of the kind dreamed of by younger brothers everywhere.” Most readers know after just that introduction whether to stop or continue.

Now, for a bit of chicken-egg: The next two components should emerge from the murk of every review but the sequence is for the reviewer to decide.

3. (or 4): The summary line: The review should summarize the book in sufficient detail to provide a fair glance of what lurks between the covers. Reviews of novels should describe the setting, scene, principal characters, and at least a hint of the conflict within the story. Reviews of non-fiction work should describe the subject matter.
4. (or 3): The contribution line: This bit separates the men from the boys, the Brownies from the Girl Scouts, the Cessnas from the space shuttles: What does the book add to the literature in the field? Mention at least a couple of the leading titles in the genre and compare the reviewed book to them. Or is the book a new addition to the author’s list of work? List some of the author’s other works and discuss how the new one fits in with the author’s known style, merits, or the nature of his (her) body of work. This means, of course, that the reviewer has to at least read something from the leading titles in the genre or, (dare I ask too much?) read some of the author’s other works, preferably before writing the review.  This is often referred to as the part of the review process that is’separating the vacuum from that which merely sucks.’  Even so, if the review is to have any credibility, it should be plain that it knows what it’s talking about.

A couple of don’ts.   It isn’t too hard to see which reviews are honest efforts and which have been written as favors.  Don’t further devalue reviews by writing one-line summaries such as ‘Great read,’ ‘s/he can write!’ or (my favorite) ‘5 stars!’ Amazon has already done enough to make every word ever uploaded into a gold star on someone’s way station en route to the Pulitzer. And, the review should be about the book, not tell the review reader to make a decision because the review writer says to trust him.

What about the nasty stuff? Reviewers are, generally, inferior to the rest of us. To be perfectly honest, no review ever gets it entirely right. But, if you are called on to write one, don’t back away from critiquing the mistakes, the hanging story lines, the unexplained or undeveloped characters, and the outright mistakes. Criticism is painful, but not fatal.

In the end, keep in mind that it’s not supposed to be personal, like this one, attributed to a writer for a New York paper about a book by Ilka Chase:
“I enjoyed reading your book. Who wrote it for you?”
“I wrote it myself. Who read it to you?”

Sometimes the velvet glove slaps back.

Good to see you. Now, back to the daily thousand words.
Jack

Entering a literary contest is a bit like eating oysters, or riding a vertiginous loop-de-loop at the carnival, or taking a nip of baby food.  The experience will make one queasy, the rewards are uncertain, and somewhere in the middle of the exercise there is a moment of embarrassing self-clarity in which one realizes that what at first sounded like a good idea will most likely end in one of two ways — bragging rights or, (statistically more probable),  something short of what was sought.  In literary contests that most often is in the form of bitterness,  directed quite rightly at the faceless myrmidons who in this instance would not know a well-written short story from a dark and stormy night.

But there was something else about your having entered the  A Novel Approach contest: you did something new.   I salute you.  The judges and American Authors Association salute you.   You indeed did win.

You left your comfort zone  to write something … different.  Rather than write the same type piece that you ordinarily would do when you pick up pen or processor, you in this case wrote against the length of your work having been set by someone else.  The topic of your paper was anchored by two sentences that had to play some role in your work.  And, most importantly, by working around two pre-written sentences, you had to adapt your turns of phrase and style to blend with something written by another.

In short, you ventured into the unknown.   You did not put down your pen when the temptation reared its head.  In the end, you renewed your faith that doing that which does not make you kick the laptop or break the Bic makes you stronger.  In the end, you made yourself a better writer for your effort.  Admit it — it was easier than you thought it would be.

A final remark, and then Glory.   We were very happy to see so many entries but especially surprised and pleased at the number from young people (or alleged young people — no one asked for birth certificates).   We decided early on to add a Youth Division.

The entries, both Youth and Overall Divisions,  were very, very good.  I was privileged to read a number of them (with nary a word to the judges and, in most cases, with anonymity).   I was never asked to be a judge but now say with complete confidence that if I am asked in the future, I will decline.  To judge which composition was more original, or clever, or the best story arc, or the best conflict, or dialogue…   No, thank you.

And now, for the envelopes.

Our SECOND RUNNERS UP:

Youth:   “Real,” by Angel Solorzano.

General:   “The Fox,”  by Julie Eger.

Our FIRST RUNNERS UP:

Youth:   “Lost Hope,” by Kayla Her

General:  ”A Proper Fit,” by Brooke Fossey

And our GRAND WINNERS

Youth:   “Walking from my Past, Toward my Future,” by Sarah Tran

General:  ”Cooper’s Bird,” by Rob Morris

Congratulations, indeed!!  Hear, hear.   Thank you so much for your hard work and fine compositions.   I hope to see each of you in a literary conference or somewhere along the way and to hear from you the joy of reading your piece in Dispatches.

Now, this parting note:   Entering contests is also like eating oysters.   The first go is not for the faint of heart, no matter how it ends.  It is the second go that counts, the doing of it again when you’ve gotten over the first time.  For writers, no matter how it ends, you know in your bones that you will do what writers do — you will write, again.   For that we are grateful and to that, we say…

Write on.

Jack

And, writers show us the world that they have created. Writers put themselves out there.

I hope you enjoy A Novel Approach. The ideas we have shared are not the ‘right’ way to do anything so much as thoughts and examples to consider when making the choices that a writer must make to move beyond the subject, the verb, the sentence, and the paragraph. We have done that. Now it’s time for you to do what writers do. It’s time to apply the ideas we have talked about for the last year or so.

Are you ready?

Write a piece of between 1000 and 1,500 words in length. The only rule is that it must use both of the following sentences.

1. The land fell away from the road, leading to a row of elm trees, beyond which lay the unknown.

2. He (or she) held it in one hand and reflected on the shocking speed at which his (or her) fortunes had turned around, a longed-for moment that, even as it registered on him (or her), ceased to be a goal and became a memory.

That’s all there is to it. Will you write a story about soldiers, explorers, lovers, runaways? Is your tale that of a map, a compass, a scalpel in a cardiac surgery, a clogged fuel line to a carburetor?

That is for you to say. A writer can write that story. I look forward to reading yours.

Oh, yes. What do you do with it? Why not enter it in a literary contest, enjoy some fame and prestige? Put yourself out there. That is what you writers do, isn’t it?

How? Take a look at the most recent posting under ‘Blogs’ on JWLBOOKS.com. If you share it, your story will be entered in the First Annual A Novel Approach Literary Contest. That site will tell you where to send your story, what will become of it, and a few comments about the format.

In the meantime, thank you for sharing the literary journey with me. I wish you the best for your story.

I wish you the best for your literary career.

Jack Woodville London

Jack Woodville London and the American Authors Association announce the First Annual A Novel Approach Literary Contest. Please join us in this celebration of your creative writing.

Here are the rules.

1. JWLBooks has published on-line the writing series A Novel Approach. Consisting of twenty-five chapters, and twenty-six after today, each episode is a different discussion of topics that writers use to move their work along, from such basics as sentences, paragraphs, and clauses to the concepts of story arc, conflict, dialogue, and research. They are free for you to read and use. Just click on the tab for A Novel Approach and read away. If you are new to it, I hope you enjoy the series as much as I enjoyed writing it (even though there were the few awkward moments, such as being mistaken in a movie theater for either George Clooney (I didn’t mind) or Danny DeVito (hmmm) as I composed a chapter while waiting for the movie to begin.

2. A Novel Approach now invites you to show the world what you can do. Just write a creative piece of between 1000 and 1,500 words. It may be on any subject you wish to write. It may be fiction, essay, opinion, fictive journalism, biography, or any other genre or form you choose. However, there is a catch. There’s always a catch.

3. Chapter 26 of A Novel Approach, sets out two sentences that must be used in your submission. The sentences may be used at any place you choose. They may not be altered, although the second sentence allows you to choose the gender. You also may choose to enclose either or both sentences in quotation ellipses if you decide to use them as dialogue in your piece.

4. The entry dates are from January 1, 2013 to February 28, 2013.

5. Judging will be blinded. Your submission should contain a cover page (not counted as part of the word total) that contains the title, your name, contact information, and genre (such as fiction, essay, report, biography, travel, or other). The submission itself should contain only the title, preceding the story. Any submissions that contain the author’s name or contact information within the story will not be judged.

6. Use Word, WordPerfect, or PDF, and show the word count at the bottom.

7. Submit your submission to maria@AmericanAuthorsAssociation.com.

8. Submissions will not be returned.

9. Winners will be announced on March 17, 2013, by notification from American Authors Association and in MWSA Dispatches. The Grand Winner will be submitted to Dispatches for publication.

Thanks for entering and for enjoying A Novel Approach and JWLBooks.

And now, show us what you can do!

See you soon.

Jack

Part Two:

“You are to start tomorrow as their maid. If you do well, you will be paid eight stuivers a day. You will live with them.”
I pressed my lips together.
Don’t look at me like that, Griet.,” my mother said. “We have to, now your father has lost his trade.”
“Where do they live?”
“On the Oude Langendijck, where it intersects with the Molenpoort.”
“Papists’ Corner? They’re Catholic?”
“You can come home Sundays. They have agreed to that.” My mother cupped her hands around the turnips….

This brief passage is from The Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier’s novel about the haunting Dutch girl who gazes at artist Vermeer from beneath her blue and tan scarves. Little enough is known of Vermeer, much less of the unknown young woman who sat for a then-scandalous portrait, regarded then as an erotic image dressed in clothing associated with impure thoughts and acts. How did Chevalier learn enough about her to write the novel?

She didn’t. No one knows who the girl was. Chevalier instead learned enough about Vermeer and his world to write it, and to make it very believable. Let’s look at a few passages of what she wrote, then go behind her words in an exercise to illustrate how a novelist might proceed to do research for such a story with so little to lean on. While this may not be her precise research trail, it is the method.

1. Life of Vermeer. The starting point is to consult general resources, even as simple as Google and Wikipedia. From these one can learn Vermeer’s correct name, the generally accepted dates for his birth, death, and where he lived and worked. These lead quickly to major details of his life, family, and his relatively-few pieces of art. The danger of relying on these sources too much is, of course, factual errors.

Once the framework of background information is in place, research must go to more informative, detailed, and reliable sources. An Embarrassment of Riches, Schama, 1988, for example, portrays the emergence of a wealthy nation caught up in the wars of religion and a city that hosted aristocrats, leaders, artists, and scientists in its practical canals and divided classes, the kind of background that would enable an author to pry out the world in which the story will be set. Vermeer’s World, Netta, 1996, provides detail of Vermeer’s own art and that of contemporaries as well as details of Delft and its citizens, Vermeer’s patrons, and daily life.

2. “…you will be paid eight stuivers …” The question isn’t so much ‘What are stuivers?’ as ‘How did she learn what would be a maid’s wage in stuivers in 1665?’ This is exactly the type of necessary research that goes unnoticed by the vast majority of readers but which gives the story such depth that it invites them to become invested in it. Details, such as money and the wages of the labor class, give credibility that a reader may accept without thinking about them. A primary source record of such information would be original tax records of farms, markets, breweries, city taxes and the like to stratify purchasing power among workers of different trades, a task that might stifle some novelists working in a foreign language. In almost every instance such work has been done for them. In Griet’s case, her wages can be dug out of De Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1992, and Saltow and Van Zanden, Income and Wealth Inequality in the Netherlands, 16th-20th Century, 1998. Such scholarship is the spine of good research.

Whoa! Why so much hard work? This is getting complicated. This, then, is the fork in the road, the point where the writer makes a decision: ‘Am I writing a historical novel or just a yarn?’ Wikipedia is easy; tax records are not. If the decision is to do the easy one, proceed to write a yarn and, by all means, enjoy doing it! After all, the result will be a book that might be set in another era and might appear to the uncritical readers as if all the elephants in the story’s room of historical details do spout water from their trunks. But….

There are a couple of reasons why the hard research has to be done. First, the ‘twenty pages’ rule is that if someone reading the book doesn’t buy in to the story for any reason, including sloppy history or inaccurate details, s/he will give it no more than another twenty pages before dumping the book in the Good Will box. Second, and this really is more important, an ongoing and constant immersion in the accurate history of your story will do more to put you, the writer, into the place, period, and culture of the time than any back and forth hunting for facts on the internet will ever accomplish. The ‘write what you know’ maxim will bear fruit, but only if you know it, and only then will a rich and believable world flow from your pen or word processor.

That is a lot for just the first two steps. What’s next?

3. Keep track of what you learn. Set up an index system to keep track of your research. Make a system that works for you, whether on 3 x 5 cards, printed bits in a 3 ring binder, the ‘favorites’ bar on your computer, or a combination of them all. Use lots of tags on book pages to quickly help find your way back to something important. When feasible, keep the research books, articles, and pamphlets on your shelf since many of them will be constant reminders. The books, at least, should have their own indices and references. Now, back to the shovel.

4. “Oude Langendijck, where it intersects with Molenpoort….”
Stories with a sense of place flow from a three part strategy.
A. Maps: Vermeer’s Delft, like many ancient cities, was well-mapped by the mid-1600’s, so part of the strategy is to find and use maps of the period. Detailed street maps of the mid-1600’s by Dirk van Bleyswyck and Bleau that are so well-drawn one can locate Vermeer’s house. The Pope’s Corner, the market, churches, canals, mills, almost everything that Vermeer would have known, can be located.
B. Art: Period specific works give accurate texture to fiction. Vermeer’s own paintings of The Little Street and A View of the City of Delft are essential. Other art, such as Vrel’s rock-cobbled streets, wooden windows, and tiled roofs from A Street Scene and an anonymous contemporary drawing of St. George’s Gate and the jail in the city’s west wall, are evidence of and a reminder that Delft was a tiny walled city. Such art reveals the color and texture of clothing, the arrangement of homes, markets, and churches, tools of life such as brooms and spoons. Your story will come alive.
C. Site visit: If a place is important enough to write about, it is important enough to know personally. Walk where your characters walked, look at the buildings they knew and learn what took place inside them. Feel the rain and see the filtered light and your mind will form that become second nature to you. Much of Vermeer’s Delft is intact, and going there opens several doors that reading alone can not do. Hence,…

4. “Papist’s Corner? They’re Catholic?”
There are some things not appreciated until you personally grasp the waypoints that shaped the story of your characters. Vermeer’s Delft was a chilling stew of conflicting religion and morals that means very little when mentioned in a history book but becomes a heavy presence inside the walls of Nieuwe Kerk, Delft’s Catholic church of the 1600′s where he walked every day as a child and was buried – somewhere- when he died. This leads to the realizations that there is an Oude Kerk, the Protestant one, and that Vermeer’s morals were embroiled in the religious wars that engulfed Delft and Europe for hundreds of years. These facts led to the point made by Griet’s question to her mother – “They’re Catholic?”
Chevalier made brilliant use of this moral dilemma, the poor Protestant maid and her supposedly wealthy Catholic employer, a struggle that she used to set up the artist’s precipice –painting for his patron’s money while also painting Griet, a dubious subject in an emotionally charged sitting, for art. Such core conflicts can be learned, revealed, or enhanced on the ground much more effectively than reading book after book of the Hundred Years’ War.

5. “It throbbed when van Ruijven caught me hanging up sheets…”

Research into the dark side is just as important, perhaps more so, as the details of daily life. Chevalier’s dark side is a patron, Van Ruijven. Scholarly articles, such as Vermeer’s Clients and Patrons, by John Michael Montias, The Art Bulletin (Mar. 1987) can shed great light on the peripheral characters in your story becaus they draw on real people who were interesting largely because they were themselves caught, or at least accused, of doing something they should not have done. Tracy Chevalier undoubtedly found enough in the biographies and monographs of Vermeer’s patrons to lead her to write of one of them having a voracious appetite for other people’s wives and children. Learn as much about the villains as the heroes.

6. Museums. The last strategy for reality-based research is to inhabit museum collections of the work and personal items of times, places, and people of interest. The Vermeer Centrum/ Center in Delft, like most such museums, has such Vermeer artifacts and an exit shop with books, posters, and similar items that may move research onward. Such places can be unexpected treasure chests of both items and print research.
Open air, or nature, museums (such as the old town of Williamsburg, Virginia) are collections of entire houses, streets, barns, offices, shops, mills, taverns, and their contents, often with people baking bread, forging steel, cutting crops, shoeing horses, making cheese, and sewing, all using original tools, dishes, and implements. An hour watching people cook, eat, and work at everyday occupations, such as at the Dutch Open Air Museum in Arnhem, can enable writers like Chevalier and you to write about the preparation of meals, beating tapestries and polishing furniture, and tending crops and animals just as if you had lived through your story. Be generous with your camera and use your index system.

Wrapping up: The sentences we studied did not come first — they came last, long after research had unearthed support for every detail. A bonus of such research is that it not only gives veracity, it always yields ideas for new story lines and details for back stories that probably were not on the outline when the idea for your novel first took shape.

This is what makes your characters and their stories become real to you. When you reach that stage, the story you write will be real to your readers.

It really works.