Last March, my writing path took an unexpected turn.
The thing is, many historical writers “mine an era,” as my agent put it, meaning most of their books are set in the same time/place. Medieval Germany, Edwardian England, Civil War in the South, etc. Because I loved all of the research I did for my 1920s era novel, The Lost Girl of Astor Street, I anticipated hanging out in the Jazz age for the foreseeable future.
Early in March, as I was moving about my house, getting things together for our family’s spring break trip, I was listening to a Stuff You Missed In History podcast. It was a two-part episode about Executive Order 9066, which allowed the U.S. government to force Japanese Americans into concentration camps after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
I was fascinated by the history.
You’ve probably experienced the same thing I did that afternoon. As I listened, I had a spark of a story idea flit through my head. “What if there was a teenage girl who was in love with a Japanese American boy, and he was taken away?”
I felt really excited about the idea, but I knew better (or rather, I “knew better”) than to get too excited. 1920s was my era, and I had already pitched my next book to my editor, so as fun as this new idea was, I would have to wait a few years before I tackled it.
But barely two weeks later my agent sent me a text saying that my editor wondered if I had any WWII era story ideas.
I just stared at the message in disbelief. I mean, technically I had an idea, but…
I wrote back, “Kind of. I have a blip of an idea. But it’s really not much. I listened to a podcast about the Japanese American experience during WWII, and I wanted to write a story about that.”
She said, “Do some brainstorming and get back to me.”
Why just a sentence or two? If you’re anything like I used to be, the thought might make you groan. There’s a reason we write novels, after all. Here is why I make myself do this:
- My agent needs it for pitching to my editor, and my editor needs it for pitching it to her publishing house. The sales team needs it for pitching it to bookstores. And I need it when people ask me, “What’s your new book about?”
- It helps to guide the rest of the story development process. Having the heart of the story documented somewhere is very useful as I move into developing the rest of the plot.
When an Italian American girl’s sweetheart is packed off to a Japanese internment camp in the early days of World War II, she decides to tap into her family’s Mafia connection and venture to Alcatraz itself to try to bring the war to an end.
Even when I haven’t had a direct request for one, the blurb is the next step for me in the idea growing process. It’s a great way to explore what I think the story is going to look like, even if I haven’t yet done much research.
My early blurbs tend to be 2-3 paragraphs, though I don’t worry too much about how long they are. Mostly it’s about capturing the overall vision of the story. Here’s the blurb I wrote for my WWII novel:
Evalina Cassano is a senior in high school when Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. While she has always been tender-hearted, Evalina’s parents are surprised by how devastated she is over the attack and the Executive Order that soon follows. An order that makes it lawful to remove all Japanese Americans from the west coast and imprison them in concentration camps.
What Evalina’s parents don’t know is that over the last year, Evalina has fallen in love with Taichi Hamasaki, an American citizen of Japanese descent.
In a time when interracial marriage is illegal in California, Evalina and Taichi have always known that when their relationship became public, they would be fighting a battle. They just never realized that they would be divided in this fight, one of them free, and the other stuck inside the barbed wire fences of Manzanar Relocation Center.
This novel, tentatively titled Within These Lines, is a story about the gritty, exhausting side of love. The kind of love that seems to only invite heartbreak, but is tenacious and unrelenting all the same.
When I’m writing a historical novel, this is the point in the process where I have to stop for a chunk of research time. Next week, we’ll talk about the research process!