Living The Tuscan Child

RHYS BOWEN: Every time I give a talk I am asked about my research. How do I research long ago and faraway places? Well, during the next two days I'll show you some of my research from this year's book and next year's upcoming book.

Whenever I can I try to go to the physical place. I can read every book on Tuscany, visit museums, look at photographs but nothing give me the real essence of the place like walking down a narrow cobbled street, listening to raised voices, a radio, a baby crying.. with the smell of garlic and baking bread and the sound of pigeons cooing under the tiles of the roof. And when I'm in a place I'm always finding things that surprise me, small things that will play a big part in my book.

So I'm sharing with you some of my photos that became parts of The Tuscan Child.
This is the hill town of Castellina in Chianti, where I have taught my writer's workshop twice now. I wanted to set The Tuscan Child here but I found out that the allies had recaptured this part of Tuscany in the month I wanted to set the story. So I had to move it further north and find a setting that exactly mirrored it. Not an easy task and several days of staring at Google Earth!

But here is my inspiration for San Salvatore in my book:

And this is the town square where Joanna is invited to join a group of men for a drink when she arrives in the area:

And is directed to Paola's farmhouse through a rather spooky tunnel cut in the side of the hill (old defenses. 

And ahead of her she catches a glimpse of Paola's farm:

And arrives at the farmhouse: (which now just happened to be our hotel, nicely modernized inside)

So you can see how a story took shape just from wandering around a small town and seeing what it had to offer and where it spoke to me. And of course I had to learn about the food as well....

So Reds, how do you form your stories from your research?

Reds on Themes

RHYS BOWEN: I have been doing a lot of interviews and podcasts recently. Most of the time it's the same questions... what made you choose World War II? Why did you leave your series? Will you go back to Molly etc etc.
But recently one interviewer asked, "Why do you keep burning your characters' clothes?"
This completely threw me.
"I don't think that I..." I started to say, then I thought a little more and added, "You're right. I do. I've burned Molly Murphy's clothes twice now. Once when a bomb was thrown at her house and once during the San Francisco earthquake. And I've burned Lady Georgie's clothes too, at a Hollywood mansion.

Someone doing a PhD thesis on my writing in the distant future will see this as a Leitmotif--a theme that runs through my work. I can see it now: PhD thesis on the motif of burned clothes in the writings of Rhys Bowen.

So this made me wonder why I burn my character's clothes. I think the answer in both series is that my heroines started out with nothing. They had to battle poverty and being alone in the world. So when they reach a level of prosperity and stability I have to take it away from them. Which makes me go on to think "Is this a reflection of how I see my own life?"  Do I worry that as I reach prosperity and stability it will be taken away from me?

I used to be quite afraid of fire. When I lived in a third floor London flat I used to lie in bed and worry about what things to save if the building caught on fire. Now I'm actually more relaxed about material things. I have most of my photos on the cloud, ditto my writing. I'd save a few items of jewelry and my iPad and computer and phone but not worry about the rest. Perhaps I have reached a level of stability when I don't worry about things being taken taken away from me.

And this also has me wondering about themes in my work. I didn't believe until recently that I've ever started out with a theme and built a story around it. I think The Tuscan Child is the only book I've consciously developed around a theme... which is healing through food. Mostly I just want to tell a good story. I want my readers to live vicariously in the past... in the 1930s or in old New York City, or among the aristocrats in WWII. But now I'm thinking ahead to my next stand alone novel that comes out in February. It's called The Victory Garden and again it's a story about healing oneself through healing others. OMG... I'm becoming a serious novelist with themes!

So now I want to know from my sister Reds: do you ever begin a book with a theme in mind? Have you ever had an underlying Leitmotif? If anyone writes a PhD thesis on your work, what will it be?

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: The first thing that comes to mind is the fact that my heroine, Clare Fergusson, has had at least three or four cars destroyed in the course of eight novels (so far.) I can perhaps attribute this to the fact that Ross always got the new car, and I always drove the older/used/clunker set of wheels. When I hear something scraping or rattling under my chassis, my mind goes to a bad place.

I actually often start with a theme in mind: HID FROM OUR EYES, for instance, is about the mentor/student relationships men have that substitute for father/son relationships. Then I have to figure out how to slip a murder or three in. There are also books where I'm quite deliberate about the imagery-in OUT OF THE DEEP I CRY, many of the metaphors, similes and descriptions evoke water.

But the themes that my writing reveals about myself? That I don't know. I think there's a reason why literary analysis is a different job than authorship. Can the creator of the work every see past his or her own assumptions? After all, near the end of his life, Ray Bradbury insisted FARENHEIT 451 wasn't about censorship...

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I once interviewed the brilliant David McCullough, and asked him "Do you have a theme when you write your books?" And he answered: "Yes, I do. And I write the books to find out what it is." So I am totally in that camp. Usually. But TRUST ME started out to be about truth. And how we decide what's true. And what "true" even means--is it true because we believe it? Can we have our own truth? Can there be two true versions of the  same story? There can, right? And even scarier--what happens when there's no way to know?   I am so pleased with how it came out. 
And, as it turns out, thats what I always write about. Not surprising, I suppose, since I'm a reporter. I think about it every day.

LUCY BURDETTE: I always have themes in the back of my mind. For the new book, one of them has to do with immigration. And there is a constant thread about the meaning of food and cooking. And family--who is your family and what does that mean?

The strangest moment was a question I had from a very good and insightful interviewer about two years ago. She said, "I've noticed that all three of your protagonists have fathers who are missing either physically or emotionally, or both. I wonder if that comes from your life? My answer was an unqualified NO. My dad was so sweet and warm and funny and supportive...he did not fit that mold. So why did I make my poor characters suffer?? Conflict, I suppose, right?

INGRID THOFT: I always have a theme in mind, which is reflected in the title of the book, but the theme can evolve and show up in unexpected ways when I’m writing.  I like questions and intersections:  To whom do you give your LOYALTY?  To your family or your own values?  What is the true essence of your IDENTITY?  Nature or nature?  What is the price of BRUTALITY?  Millions of dollars or a healthy brain?  And are you guilty of DUPLICITY?  Do you profess one value, but practice another?  My WIP is also centered around a theme, but I’m not quite ready to divulge it!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Hmmm, this is such a good question, Rhys. Although I often have topics I want to explore in a novel, I'm not usually deliberately trying to express a theme. But I think what does underlie all of the Duncan and Gemma books is an emphasis on the importance of family--families that are made by choice even more than the family one is born into--and the strength of community.

JENN McKINLAY: Do shenanigans count as a theme? Cause I'm all about the shenanigans. I don't believe I have a deliberate theme in any of my books, but I'm sure there is a commonality in all of my titles that includes humor as a coping mechanism for life's hard knocks, the power of friendship, and the strength of character required to do the right thing which is usually the harder thing to do.

The Lure of Mysterious Objects.

RHYS BOWEN:
TI've always found it amazing that writers see each other as stable-mates and not rivals. Barbara O'Neal and I share the same agent and the same Publisher (Lake Union) and she writes the kind of book I adore..clues from the present unlocking mysteries from the past. And she has a fascinating personal story to tell. So I'm handing over to her right now:

The Lure of Mysterious Objects

​by Barbara O'Neal

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Inheritance is an odd thing, isn’t it? 

When my British partner’s mother died, we headed back to the small Kentish village where she lived to sort out the estate. It was the muddiest January in decades, giving us ample time to go through the toys left over from childhood and all the dishes. The usual things.

Until we got to a little writing desk packed with all kinds of things left over from the time my partner’s father spent in Ceylon, before it was Sri Lanka. Dad was born and raised there, even married his first wife before the British were ousted and returned to a land where none of them had ever lived.  

I knew this backstory, of course. The wife died and then Christopher Robin’s father remarried and he was born of the second marriage. But I only have bare bones, no matter how many times I delicately came at the subject. They’re all British and well-mannered so no one was ever interested in sitting down and pouring out the whole story to me. Most of them don't know it, but those who do are not interested in telling it. 

Which only makes it more mysterious, right?  Also, I am a writer and a former reporter. It's my job to get the story.  

When we opened that desk and found all those artifacts, I almost literally swooned. The little key opened a tiny door where I found a set of carved elephants, enough for a necklace and a pair of earrings. Who wore them, I wonder?  


No one seems to know.

A drawer contained a fantastic mirrored tablecloth, intricately embroidered and so well kept the the reds are very bright still, all these years later.  I found a box of tiny elephants, one dressed with a silver harness and maybe an aquamarine jewel. 

Who loved these things? What was life like, back in Ceylon, on the tea plantation? What did they do? How did they live?  It always seemed to me that no matter how right the revolutions in India and Ceylon that ended British rule (and of course it was), it must have been so very strange to go back to a cold, northern land when you’d spent your life in the tropics. They must have missed it. Wouldn’t you?  

No one else wanted all those things or the desk, so I brought them home (shipped them via slow boat from England to Colorado), and here they stay. The carved trays are polished and hung on my walls. The elephants are lined up with little pools of water made of quarters by my granddaughter.  

All of their mysteries remain entirely mute. I've never been able to find out anything more about them, but I do love to think about the former owners of these beautiful things.   

 A couple of years later, I fell into some BBC reality shows about the country estates that are falling into ruin because they’re so expensive to keep up. Which mixed and brewed with all my questions about Ceylon, and a book was born.

In The Art of Inheriting Secrets

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Olivia Shaw is a sophisticated food editor who discovers after the death of her mother that she is heir to a crumbling estate in a village in England.  She travels back to see if she can discover the reasons her mother lied to her all those years, and unravel the story of the house.  I fell madly in love with Rosemere Priory and the small village of St. John’s Cross, and the Anglo-British family whose story is irretrievably tangled with her own.  I hope you might enjoy it, too.  

RHYS: Barbara's book is published this week. I am certainly dying for my copy to arrive! And Barbara has offered to give a signed copy to one lucky commenter today.