Putting her latest book in historical context with Gabaldon's bestselling series, Kearsley told us, "A Desperate Fortune takes place during Jamie Fraser's father's generation. I always told myself that I would never never never never never write a Highlander because Diana's already put her stamp on that. When Hugh my Highlander walked in, I said, 'No! He's going to be shorter. He's going to have dark hair. He's going to be a Lowlander...' all the time thinking 'I can't believe I'm writing a Highlander!'
"There's always a lot of research that never makes it into the book, but you need it to create your characters. I went looking into the watchmakers of Inverness at the time, and you can get into the guild books. You can see who was practicing, what the ages of their apprentices were, what sort of life they had, and this is how I created Hugh."
Diana then wanted to know about Sara Thomas, the character in the contemporary storyline who works to crack the code in the Jacobite journal.
"I have a few people in my life who are very close to me, and they have Asperger's," Susanna said. "Asperger's has almost become 'hip' now, but I've wanted to portray a character with this syndrome for a while now. One of the people close to me is female, and one of the things I learned in my research is that Asperger's is harder to diagnose in females because they tend to be much better mimics.
"All the Aspys in my life like The Big Bang Theory, but they don't like the fact that Sheldon Cooper is always the punchline. I wanted to portray a much more realistic picture of people with Asperger's syndrome."
"Well, Sam, you can..."
After Kearsley mentioned that she sees "a book like a film in my mind while I'm writing," Diana remarked that A Desperate Fortune is "a very deeply emotional book, but you don't realize it until you get to the end."
"I like to use real people whenever possible in my books," Susanna said, "but I'm more interested in the common people because they're the ones who really made the history. There's a quote at the end of Henry V-- and I'll probably start crying-- where Henry is brought the news of the victory at Agincourt, and he asks for the names of the dead. Three or four lords' names are given, but [catch in her voice] those aren't the names Henry wants. He wants the names of the common soldiers who fought and died.
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| Susanna Kearsley |
"I love to be able to bring these voices back. I feel a great responsibility to these forgotten voices-- to make them right."
The only historical character Susanna feels a deep connection to is James VIII of Scotland (James III of England, Bonnie Prince Charlie's father) because she's been writing about him since he was fifteen. "I have watched him age, and I have read all his letters. He was a phenomenal man, a great soul. He has been so maligned by historians that I get very angry. When I write him, I use his own words."
It was wonderful to see how knowledgeable Kearlsey is about the history of the time and how much it matters to her. A couple of minutes later, Diana Gabaldon had her own catch-in-the-throat moment in telling us about her then fifteen-year-old son Sam who at that age read fantasy exclusively. Diana was busy at her keyboard when Sam looked up from his book and rather wistfully said, "I wish I could really do magic, Mom." Diana stopped typing, looked over at him and said, "Well, Sam, you can. It's just much harder than most people think." Wise words spoken by a woman who creates magic at her keyboard.
The Writing Life
Both writers agreed that good-bye scenes are the hardest to write. Kearlsey told us of one such scene she was writing. When her husband came home, he discovered her at her keyboard, her neck wet because she'd been crying so much. Without missing a beat, he called out to the children, "Come on, kids, we're going to McDonald's!"
Both women also tend to write in a more or less linear fashion-- from the beginning to the end-- unless "something's broken." Kearsley said, "I'm a former museum curator, so I'm used to working linearly. And music has started playing a part in my writing when it never has before. I also don't think I'm through with Hugh and Mary [two main characters in A Desperate Fortune] yet!"
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| Diana Gabaldon |
Diana told Susanna that she's often been asked what her writing space looks like. "I don't have a writing space," Gabaldon said. "It's all inside my head. What about yours?"
"I do love organization, but my writing space looks like an episode of Hoarders," Kearsley admitted to much sympathetic laughter in the audience.
She continued, "I also find that I need the physical things around me-- like rocks from various castles that I've written about." Looking at us all, "Don't tell Customs!"
Diana laughed and said, "If the beagles can't smell it, you can bring it in!" (Which made me wonder if beagles were going to out me in the fall when I return from Scotland with a bunch of sea shells....)
As a museum curator, Kearlsey was involved in the repatriation of many Native American artifacts, and as she spoke, I realized that I could listen to her talk about this one facet of her life for hours.
Both women are passionate about the accuracy that can be found in historical fiction. "History is not what happened. It's what was written down," Gabaldon said. Kearsley nodded in agreement, saying, "Historical fiction writers are just as careful-- if not more so-- than historians."
When asked what inspired them to write about the Jacobites, Gabaldon said that "It was a really old Dr. Who episode where the doctor picked up a young Jacobite in a kilt." When we all stopped laughing, Susanna told us that it was a true history book, Playing the Scottish Card by John S. Gibson.
As the evening drew to a reluctant close, one fan told Kearsley how much she'd enjoyed one of her books because she was completely thrown by the twists and turns of the plot. Did Kearsley always know how the story was going to turn out before she started writing?
"No, I really didn't know how that book was going to turn out," Kearsley admitted, "which horrifies my engineer father. How can you write a mystery and not know who the villain is? Oh well, you know, Dad.... I had a book once where I thought I knew the bad guy, but the dog liked him, so I knew that wasn't going to work!"
What a fantastic evening! Although I tried to include as many of the best bits that I possibly could, I didn't want to write something the size of War and Peace, so please head on over to Livestream if you'd like to watch the entire event!
