Historical tends to be my bailiwick.
I do not often follow my characters off on tangents or change my story on a whim. I have an outline which I follow quite sternly...for a good long while. Then it turns out in some way to be insurmountably wrong and I am forced to re-think every component. Usually at this point I throw hundreds of pages away.
I am one of those authors who believes (perhaps foolishly) that she is in complete control of the story.
In the end, the best part of the whole book [The Nightingale ] to me was the research, reading about the courageous, ordinary French women who put their lives on the line to save others. It was really inspirational.
Honestly, I really didn't want to take on World War II France, but when I came across the story of a nineteen-year-old Belgian woman who created an escape route out of Nazi-Occupied France, I was hooked.
I had read a lot of books on World War II, but I didn't know that downed airmen had hiked over the frozen peaks of the Pyrenees Mountains in shoes that didn't fit, in clothes that weren't warm enough, with German and Spanish patrols searching for them.
The woman who led [downed airmen] was named Andrée De Jongh and her story - one of heroism and peril and astounding courage - became the inspiration for my novel.
Andrée De Jongh story led me to other stories of women who joined the Resistance in France. I found literally dozens of memoirs written by women who had become spies and couriers and helped to create the escape network. These women were like action-star heroes.
There were others, women with stories that were told in a quieter voice: women who hid Jewish children in their homes, putting themselves directly in harm's way to save others. Too many of them paid a terrible, unimaginable price for their heroism. And like so many women in wartime, they were largely forgotten after the war's end.There were no parades for them, very few medals, and almost no mention in the history books.
It felt like an oversight to me, something that needed to be corrected. They [women who hid Jewish children] deserved to be understood and remembered.
I see the emphasis on a lot of ideas and I know that's directed at me. [Megan Chance] come up with an idea, hone it, and write it. I come up with thirty ideas, flesh each one out, research each one, come up with characters, and then decide I don't like it.
I have to admit that WWII France was not at all on my radar for Kristin Hannah.
Coming up with the idea is the worst part of writing for me.
With The Nightingale, I had been kicking the idea around for years. I was frightened to write it because on the surface it seems so different for me.
Sometimes a story grabs hold of you and won't let go.
I simply couldn't walk away from [ The Nightingale].
To be honest, I wrote so many drafts of this book [ The Nightingale ] and changed the characters so many times; the real surprise is that I finished the book at all.
[ The Nightingale ]ended up being a huge undertaking - a daunting amount of research on a subject that many people know intimately, a country I had not yet been to when I first started planning the book, an entire war.
I'd extend an invitation to Lisbeth Salander. She would definitely shake the party up and get it started. I think she is hands down one of the most original, innovative, kickass female fictional characters ever.
My next guest [ for party with five favorite fictional characters] would be Scarlett from Gone With The Wind. I mean, come on, I have to know if she ever got Rhett back.
I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all.
