One of the things I love most about writing is research. I suppose I’ve always been this way –wanting to know what came before and why – but it wasn’t until my years spent in graduate school and then studying for my PhD (full disclosure, I’m ABD), that I embraced the long hours in the library: Finding the right book, that led to the next book, that led to another. Reading a passage that tied together strands of thinking which took me in new direction or solidified what I’d been pondering. My heartbeat quickened. My sense came alive. I love it!
The road from research to a finished project, at least for me, is a long one. I’m not a fast writer. I like to check multiple sources before I feel comfortable moving forward and writing. For example, in my current manuscript, PROOF, I address the post-World War Two American landscape and our country’s awareness, and lack of awareness, as to what happened to the European Jewish people during the war. I’d read multiple sources referring to the Kovno Ghetto Diary, written and hidden during the war, and knew I wanted to engage with it in my novel. But it wasn’t until I found a copy of the diary, published in 1990 by Harvard University Press (the first published edition appeared in Israel in 1988), and read through it did I feel comfortable (there’s that word again!) and confident enough to do so.
The list of books I read while writing this novel was long and varied, as you can see. But how else does a writer write about the past?
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