After a year of reading, taking notes, exploring, and thinking about my next book project, I have finally begun writing it. And after four days of solid drafting, I can say with great certainty that this book is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
For the record, I feel that way about every book at this early stage.
This is a very new sort of book for me, though: a history of science story for teen readers. It will be three times longer than any book I’ve written so far. It’s for an older audience. As if those weren’t daunting enough, it’s historical in nature. The main difference so far is that all the details I’m used to having in my head and in my notebook because of my days in the field shadowing scientists simply aren’t there this time. I have to find these details in other ways.
Let me give you an example. When I sat down to write about bushwhacking in an urban forest in search of Asian longhorned beetles, it was a fairly straightforward task. I’d actually been bushwhacking in an urban forest in search of Asian longhorned beetles, so I simply drew on my own visual and contextual memories of the time and place. I referred back to my notes as needed, of course, and I consulted the scientists I was writing about whenever I was unsure about something. But mostly I just wrote what I remembered. Writing about the 1962 Nobel Prize ceremony, my task for this week, has been a totally different process. I wasn’t there, man! I wasn’t even born until 1969! The only way to bring this scene alive for readers was to consult the historical record over and over and over and over until I’d found details that would help me paint it. What sort of details? Here are a few:
- I found a (too) short video clip of the 1962 ceremony. I watched it approximately forty-seven thousand times, extracting new details with each view: the sorts of clothes the women wore, the sorts of clothes the men wore, the number of children in the audience, the decor in the room, the order in which the royal family entered, the way the laureates looked as they filed onto the stage, the way they bowed to King Gustaf VI Adolf (for the record, John Steinbeck gave a very good formal bow; James Watson, not so much), and so on.
- I found pages and pages of online photographs of the event, and several of the books I’ve been using as resources contain reproduced images from the personal collections of the men and women in my story. Using these images and several different written accounts of the event, I was able to piece together the order in which the awards were bestowed and the order in which the laureates spoke at the ceremony and, well, lots of interesting orders. It was a crazy-fun 3D time-warp puzzle.
- I took a short video tour of the Stockholm Concert Hall, where the Nobel Prize ceremony was (and is to this day) held. This gave me a look at color schemes that were missing in the black and white video and stills from 1962. But are today’s colors the same that existed in 1962? Hmmmm. I don’t know yet. But while trying to find out, I stumbled on a copy of the menu for the banquet held after the ceremony. Now I know what was on the plate in front of my characters as they chatted up the King and Queen.
You get the idea. The research for this book is going to be fascinating, mostly fun, and very slow. After five solid days of effort, I’ve drafted a single 1000 word scene. It’s a pretty good scene, but at this rate I won’t finish the book until I am seventy-two years old.
But here’s the good news …
One of the things I realized this week is that the Nobel Prize ceremony is always held on December 10. WHICH IS SIX DAYS FROM NOW, PEOPLE. I’m still figuring out the logistics, but it looks like I’ll be able to stream some of the festivities live. So long as I can drag myself to my desk at 6:30am on Sunday morning, I can sit in Massachusetts and watch the laureates in Physiology or Medicine give their Nobel lectures live in Stockholm, Sweden. I’m not sure how much of what I see or hear will inform the scene I just wrote, but just the fact that I can do this at all feels incredibly cool and timely to me. And guess what? You can join me, if you like. Just click on that Youtube screen at the top of this post.
Have a great weekend!
