This week, I’m joined by award-winning historical fiction writer Alan Brennert. Alan explains the differences between revising work for screenwriting versus novels, how he infused his historical novels with cultural awareness and sensitivity by accurately capturing the language, how he navigated a change in editors between novels, and what it’s like to be edited by his wife. Plus, he breaks my entire heart by sharing his misadventures with copyediting.
Music: Harlequin by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3858-harlequin
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Show Notes:
https://www.facebook.com/AlanBrennertAuthor
Robert Crais: https://www.robertcrais.com/
Sarah Bird, Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen: http://sarahbirdbooks.com/books/
Cathay Williams: https://www.nps.gov/people/cwilliams.htm
Carter Scholz, The Amount to Carry: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1448233.The_Amount_to_Carry
Jonathan Lethem: https://jonathanlethem.com/
Kafka Americana: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/146861.Kafka_Americana
Transcript:
Ariel: Hi there and welcome to Edit Your Darlings, a podcast that tries to take the sting out of editing by talking with darling authors about their experiences. I really want to know what the story is behind that story.
Alan: Well, you can ask me that, and I’ll be happy to tell you. One of those instances where my TV career sort of was informed my literary career. I was writing for China Beach, and I was writing an episode, which was about the tunnels that the Vietnamese had that the Vietcong used to sort of evade the Americans. Some of the information that I had gotten on Vietnamese culture and mythology was great but I couldn't use it in the episode. So I wound up using some of it in this short story which, ironically enough, turned out to be a Nebula Award winner. I got one for Best Short story.
Ariel: So you took a darling and turned it into an award.
Alan: I did. That's a good way of putting it. I haven't done it since then, unfortunately.
Ariel: I'm Ariel Anderson and today I'm joined by Alan Brennert. Alan’s historical novels include bestsellers and award winners Moloka’i, Honolulu, and Daughter of Moloka’i. His work as a writer-producer for the TV series LA Law earned him an Emmy and a People’s Choice award, and he has been nominated for...let’s see here... more Emmys, the Golden Globe Award, and the Writers Guild Award for Outstanding Teleplay of the Year. If that weren’t enough, he received a Nebula for his short story “Ma Qui,” and he’s worked in other mediums like adapting a story for the Alan Menken musical Weird Romance. What a legacy! Thank you so much for making time to talk with me, Alan.
Alan: Thank you for inviting me. It sounds like you have a pretty cool podcast here.
Ariel: So my book club is on fire about this episode because we read Daughter of Moloka’i, and we all wondered, how did you choose what perspectives and historical tidbits to include? It had to have been so challenging to balance that historical accuracy with cultural awareness, because you've portrayed Hawaiians and Japanese Americans so intimately, and then you paired that with the fictional aspect to shape a good story while staying true to those characters. And on top of all of that you wrote quite a lot from the point of view of a child, especially in Moloka’i. Did you have any help with that? How did you know what to include and what to leave out and who to listen to for feedback?
Alan: I'll try to address the various parts of that question. As a general rule, the one thing that I've sort of learned from writing these books is that culture can be a way of revealing character. You can show how the culture shaped your, your character whether the original protagonist or subsidiary characters. And that's a good way of knowing what is necessary and what is extraneous. In general though, to learn about how I learned to balance these things, I have to go back to my very first historical novel, which was Moloka’i. It was a very, very challenging subject to research. Originally I decided that I wanted to tell not just the story of Rachel, who is taken to the settlement at Kalaupapa, but also the story of the settlement itself, the history of it starting in 1866. So originally I had three flashback chapters to Halleola and Keo—her husband—Keo’s first days on Moloka’i. And in the first section of the book they alternated with Rachel's first chapters. At the end of this two-year project that I had embarked on, I had a big whompin’ 700 page manuscript.
Ariel: That's publishable. That's publishable, that’s fine.
Alan: Yeah, I knew it had to be cut, but I just, I couldn't tell. I was really too close to the story to tell, at least right at that point, what to cut. So, I sent it to an agent, Molly Friedrich, who was recommended by my friend Robert Crais, who's a suspense novelist and former TV writer, which is how we knew each other. And she loved it. She wanted to send it out immediately. She sent it to about a half a dozen different publishers, but the editor who responded most enthusiastically to it was Hope Dillon from St. Martin's Press. I have to do a shout out here to Hope. I owe my career in historicals to her. She passed away a couple of years ago, much too early.
But she was the one who could see in this 700-pound kitchen sink, that there was a story there that could be told, could be successful. And when we spoke, the very first thing she told me was, you have to cut out the three flashback chapters. They are slowing down Rachel's story, and Rachel is the one we care about. So of course as a writer my very first response to that is, Do you have any idea how much research I did on those chapters?! So you know, feign the arrow through the heart.
And it took me a few days to sort of process that. So I looked at what I really found was the most important stuff in that... in those chapters, which was essentially Halleola’s interactions with Father Damien. And I wanted to keep those in the book, so I found a way I just used... turned it into a conventional flashback within the chapters dealing with Rachel, so I was able to keep most of what I felt was most important. While at the same time dropping about 140 pages.
And in the course of shaping that over two subsequent rewrites, I have learned how to trim back on some of the extraneous material. For instance, hard to remember that my agent Bali, once said to me, Alan, we don't need to know the Hawaiian word for seaweed.
Ariel: Ooh, what is it? Do you know it?
Alan: I can't, I can't. It's not in the book anymore.
Ariel: I need to know it now.
Alan: Well, you'll have to look up a lot because there are several different words for seaweed, because there are several different kinds of seaweed. My recollection is that there were seven or eight different kinds and I just settled on one of them. But at that point, as I said, I was getting... I was I was throwing stuff in, because I wasn't quite sure, you know, how much you need to lend authenticity to a story, and I learned fairly quickly that a little of this goes a long way. I was always very careful when I used a Hawaiian word to either use it in context so that people would understand it or to use the English translation, immediately after. So if somebody said keiki, I would then say keiki, comma, child comma. And then I didn't do it again after that figuring okay you've been told once what it means, you know, you can always go back and look.
So it was a process of discovery, realizing how much you needed to give a feel for the environment, you know, for the time, for the period, and how much was necessary to really show the world that shaped your characters. And finally after about another year of rewrites and revisions, not all of which we agreed on...
I'll give you one example. Hope was actually a very, very perspicacious editor, but she was the self-described bulldog in that she would, you know, really if she thought something should be a certain way, she did not let go of that. Having worked in television. I was pretty good at holding on to a bone myself, and I don't think she was quite prepared for that.
The only major thing we disagreed on in Moloka’i was the scenes showing the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. I felt it was very important to show. Hope said, “I, I don't really think it's, it's that important, Alan. I think you could cut those scenes.” And I said, well, Hope, don't you understand? What is happening to Rachel... the Hawaiians are having their land taken away from them, even as Rachel is being taken away from her home. I said it's a metaphor, it's sort of an inverse metaphor. Well Hope was unimpressed by my use of literary metaphor, said “I still think we need to cut that” and basically I just had to wear her down. And that was one of the things that my Hawaiian readers all remarked on and saying you know, “I'm really so grateful that you included the overthrow of the monarchy” because that was such a traumatic event in Hawaiian history. And such a great injustice, that they felt that it had been given short shrift before, and whatever other novels were written about Hawaii. So I was very glad that I sort of hung on, didn't give in with her on that, but you know, I agreed with her more times than I disagreed with her and I thought that we had a book that we were both pretty proud of.
Ariel: Yeah, I think it was a really good choice to leave the monarchy in because that was a little bit of Hawaiian history that I was kind of familiar with because I had recently like within the last year gone to Honolulu and learned about all of it, and a few of the members of my book club had no idea that any of that went down.
Alan: Yeah, most people don't. And I didn't get into this book but the annexation was actually illegal. The truth is that it was really, it was very, it was unjust. Oh, and now let me get back to the other part of your question. I forgot, you talked about the children. I was a child once myself.
Ariel: Oh really? Tell me more.
Alan: But I was an only child, so that only took me so far. Fortunately, my wife as four siblings. So I learned pretty quickly about sister-sister relations both her and from other friends. And as an example of one of the things that I got from somebody else. There was a scene in the book where Rachel's father has visited and now he’s going away, and she says to him, “Papa, don’t go. I need you all the time.” Well this was actually something that a five-year-old niece of ours said to Paulette many years ago. The niece is now forty, she’s not five anymore, and I’m not naming her because she would be horribly, you know, mortified to hear this, but she said that when Paulette was ready to go back to Washington, DC, and Paulette said, “That is the type of thing that only a child would say, you know, you have to use this.” And I agree, and I'm perfectly happy to take credit for anything that I put in my book.
Ariel: You mentioned that you took some experiences from your screenwriting days and were able to use it to bolster yourself as an author working within the publishing industry. Let's talk about how those processes differ between television and books: who has the final say, how much editing work goes into it, and then, which process did you prefer?
Alan: Well, edit is probably a very mild term to describe how a script... what's done to scripts in Hollywood. Yeah, there is a story editor. I have been a story editor, and I wasn't so much an editor as I was the guy that they had on staff to rewrite the scripts. I'll talk to you first about what my experience was. As a freelancer you go in your show. You know, they've read some material by you or you’ve worked with them on another show, or whatever, and you pitch ideas, or they pitch you ideas, and you often would then wind up writing a script, and you get notes from the producers. And in most of my experience, the notes that I get from producers, they’re usually pretty solid. The notes that you get from the studio and the network, you know, not so much.
But then there's a point at which the staff writer has to take over. And it's at that point that the staff writer has to incorporate notes from the network, from the studio, from the actors, from the director. This is all a normal part of collaboration. The pages come back to the freelancer as revised colored pages. The first one is blue and then the second ones are pink and yellow, and I swear on some shows we did so many rewrites that I should have gone up to ultraviolet. You’d get a lot of revisions, and most of the time, there's not always a lot left except the bare bones of the story. So, a freelance writer, you go into it knowing that you're going to be, you're going to be edited and you’re going to be rewritten. And that's why so many writers want to go on staff.
But the really satisfying thing about a staff. I went from being a story editor, up to being a a supervising producer, and I was even an executive producer on one pilot that I wrote once, but you do have that input. You do have much more... I wouldn't say control, but you have you have input, you have feedback into how your shows are going to be produced, because when I was on Twilight Zone, I was involved from casting to rehearsals to music scoring.
We had a process called music spotting, where you sit down with the composer, and they go through the film and you say okay well I think, we need music here, I think we need music here, or he says, I think we need something to bridge this scene. So it's a lot of little meetings that all add up to a TV show, and hopefully a good TV show.
As a novelist after 20 years, the thing that that did that you begin to longing for, is the fact that when you're writing a script, TV script, you're writing basically a blueprint for the show. You start out with a slug line, you know, “Interior room, day,” and you don't go into very much description unless there's something important in it. But when you're writing a novel, you are not just the writer, you're the actors, you're the director, you're the set decorator, you're the wardrobe stylist, you're the hairstylist, you're describing everything. And there are times when I just looked to heaven and think, “Isn't there a department head that can handle this for me?”
They're two very different media. They have their own boards, the biggest reward of writing novels, is that you can point at it and said, say, I wrote this. You know, every word, I wrote this. I had final say on what went into this book. I don't have to say, Well, yeah, that, that scene over there that was rewritten by the executive producer, or oh yeah, there was a good speech here that I wanted the actor to say but he didn't want to say it. So they each have their rewards and they also have their drawbacks.
One interesting anecdote I want to bring up: after my editor Hope passed away, she had, she had lived by taught her daughter Molokai. And then passed away a little after the time that I handed in my first section of the book. And so I was assigned to new editor Elisabeth Dyssegaard, who was actually as good an editor as Hope. But, but different. She had not read Moloka’i. So she was looking at the sequel as something that had to stand alone for her, as somebody who has read the first book. And that was actually what I really intended to the book.
And Elizabeth was an interesting editor. She would occasionally give me notes that surprised me. One of them was a scene when the scene in which Rachel takes Ruth to meet the nun. They go to her apartment, she answers the door, you know, she goes, “Oh my God, Ruth,” you know, and then they walk inside, she offers them some tea, she brings the tea over. My editor Elizabeth just went through and just slashed out individual sentences and sentence fragments, so that we went directly from, “Hello Sister, you know, it's Ruth,” to them sitting there drinking tea and talking.
Ariel: Yeah!
Alan: And I looked at that, I went, Oh my god it's, it's a jump cut. I of all people should have realized that this was the way to do it! But I had so gotten used to describing every frickin little thing in the story that I forgot to think like a screenwriter what I needed to think like a screenwriter.
So I just wanted to give that as a little shout out to Elizabeth. She's been a great editor and really helping to bring the book over the homestretch.
Ariel: Yeah. Two follow- up questions there. One, you were assigned a new editor, so you didn't get the choice?
Alan: Well, I didn't really know any of the other editors. Hope had worked on my first three books. The editor in chief just sort of decided that Elizabeth would be a good match for me, just like, like a matchmaker. And it turned out he was right. We had very similar sensibilities. She actually was a bit more of a line editor than Hope was and wound up making a lot of trims like that jump cut trim that cut back the wordage to a point where I think Daughter moves more sprightly than any book that I did since maybe Honolulu. So, so yes I did not get a toy but I did get approval, I mean I had to... I talked to her and got a sense of who she was. If I'd have a problem with that, they probably would have honored that.
Ariel: There was an element of luck, and then also kind of a leap of faith that, yes, this will work.
Alan: Yes. The very first notes that she gave me, and I found this rather charming: The previous book, Palisades Park, I had done with Hope. We were just exchanging files, we had Track Changes turned on, she would go through, she would say, you know, “I think you should cut this, I think you should change this,” whatever, and I would go yes, no, yes, no, yes yes yes yes, whatever. Elizabeth basically Xeroxed the script with her, her notes on it, sometimes just a big slash mark through an entire paragraph, which I took to mean “you need to cut some of this,” not “you need to cut all of this.” I would cut what I thought was necessary and that would be fine with her. And but she had kind of an old-fashioned feel to the way that she approached editing than I appreciated.
Ariel: And then the other thing that I wanted to bring up: you mentioned that she insisted that Daughter of Moloka’i had to stand on its own, and my book club chose Daughter of Moloka’i. So, reading the first book Moloka’i was optional, and one or two people didn't go back and read the first one, and it still made sense to them, so that was successful.
Alan: Our work here is done.
Ariel: I read Moloka’i as an audio book, and then read Daughter as an ebook. And I was, I was really glad that I made that choice one because it helped get those pronunciations into my brain. Two, I was curious about how much say you had in your, your narrator.
Alan: Well, I really didn't have much of a say on Moloka’i. But I was totally okay with it because when I saw her credits and when I saw that she grew up in Hawaii, I figured she’d be fine, and they do actually give you a little bit of audio, but I can't remember whether I heard the audio on the first book or not. I think by the second or third books, they were running that passed me. I got to cast the audio book of Daughter of Moloka’i, which is a good feeling.
Ariel: Yeah, I just wonder, if I was an author and I had this vision of how my book sounds, and then not to have a say in what the narration actually comes out being—oof!
Alan: Well, there's a lot of things that authors often don't get involved with. I only.... I can't even remember whether I have cover approval in my contract. I think I must by now! My publisher was always happy to show me the covers beforehand.
My wife was at a Target once. A woman came up to her and said, “Do you think it's wrong to buy a book just because you liked the cover?” She was holding a copy of Moloka’i, and my wife said, “Oh no, absolutely not. That's a perfectly good reason. And by the way, I’ve read that book.” So I've been very fortunate with the covers that I've gotten for these last four books.
Ariel: So, since you've mentioned her a couple of times—this is one of my absolute favorite things to talk about; I don't know how I keep coming across authors who have so much to say about it! But you told me that your wife is one of your editor?
Alan: I like to call her my in-house editor. She is the first one to read it. My wife is in fact a professional editor, she was an editor for the National Geographic Traveller magazine, and for McGraw Hill, she edited textbooks at McGraw Hill. She hasn't been working in editing the last 10 years or so, but she still has those skills. She's very good at reading and seeing things that are contradictory.
My process is that I write a chapter, I go back, I do some revisions for myself, and then I print it out and then give it to her. And Paulette reads it, she makes notes on it, and the notes are always very, you know, very good notes. Sometimes it's just grammatical things, sometimes it's elements of style, and sometimes it's just stuff that, you know, I don't know.
So she helps with all sorts of things and her only complaint is that one of these days, she would like to be able to read one of my books, straight all the way through, which he has not been able to do since reading Time and Chance, which was my novel before Moloka’i. I would, I would like her to have that ability, but I value her judgment too much to pass it up.
Ariel: Is her pen more sweet or sharp?
Alan: More sweet, I would say. She couches things and suggestions. I almost always agree with, her notes. On a range of “oh my God, how did I miss that” to “Oh yeah, I think that improves it,” maybe one out of 20 things I'll just look at and go, “Eh, it's just a matter of personal taste, I think I prefer it this way.” But she's really been invaluable. Not just in upfront editing, but in the copy editing phase. And I believe you usually ask a question about what part of editing you hate the most. I would have to say copy editing.
Ariel: Oh my heart!
Alan: I'm sorry. Are you yourself a copy editor?
Ariel: I am a copy editor.
Alan: OK, well, I have to quickly say that I have had a lot of good copy editors, but every once in a while... I mean I think the copy editor that I got on Honolulu, they decided to take it upon themselves to rewrite my prose, which I thought was going a little far over the line. And I had to spend a lot of time going back and putting it back to where I wanted it, as the author of the frickin book. So that was unusual.
All the other copy editors have been great, and have pointed things out that I missed. And the only thing that that gets tiresome about it is when you start going through—and I’m sure you're aware of this—you can go through multiple layers of copy editing before you get to the end of the process. On Daughter of Moloka’I, I think I was trading Track Change manuscripts back and forth with the copy editor about five or six times. More copy edited manuscripts than I'd ever been shown in my life, and I was flattered that they were doing this, and that I should be involved in it.
But even after all of that, there were things that slipped through. I had two Japanese speaking readers read this book to make sure that the Japanese and it was correct. Despite this, one word was misspelled not once, not twice, but probably about 46 times, which is what leads me to believe in the AutoCorrect editor. It was the Japanese word for White people. And I think the word was actually hakujin. And somehow, one of the times, I must have entered inverted letters. It must have come up on spellcheck and I must have hit the wrong key. The next thing was, it was all that. And we didn't find out about this until after it had gone to press.
Ariel: Oh no!
Alan: We didn't notice this, mind you! This was my friend Rose Masters, who was very, very helpful in researching the book, and I sent her the, the reading group guide that was going to be appearing simultaneous with the book, and she said, “Oh, this looks great but do you know that the word hakujin is misspelled here?” And oh my heart just sank.
The good news, they were able to change it immediately in the ebooks. The bad news is it was too late for the hardcover, you know we got, got a direct in the paperback. In retrospect, I'm kind of surprised I didn't get more letters about it than I did. I was relieved it wasn't a bigger embarrassment than it was so, so there are always so many hazards in the copy editing, but I don't mean to impugn the entire.
Ariel: Wow. Yeah, and that's one that's so tricky. A copy editor who is not familiar with Japanese, oof, it would be so hard.
Alan: It's bad enough, you know, they've had to get used to my Hawaiian stuff. It was my publisher actually who suggested for the for the title of Moloka’i that we use the ‘okina, the little upside-down apostrophe between the A and the I. But having done that I had to make sure, and I would have done this anyway, that was that all of the Hawaiian written in the book was properly spelled, had the proper orthography. And I did get a letter once from somebody who said, “I'm so grateful to you. Reading this book was the first time that I ever saw the words in my language and in a novel that were spelled correctly, you know, had proper orthography.” And I think that went a long way toward explaining why the people of Hawaii sort of have embraced my book and my writings in general. I've had respect for the language, I've had respect for the people and their culture and their history. But it started with that, you know, it really started with wanting to get the small details right and going all the way up to the into the big details.
Ariel: So, you beat me to the first question that I ask every author I talked to. How about, what's the most common bit of feedback you receive on your writing?
Alan: How is it—and this sounds immodest when I say it, but it is but people ask me—how is it that you write women so well?
Ariel: Aha!
Alan: And I don't really have an answer for that. I sort of say “I write people.” I find that particularly with these kinds of books where I'm starting with a character, a character almost from birth, certainly from childhood to adulthood. You start deciding, you know, okay, what time period does my character grow up in, and what culture are they growing up in, what are the factors that shape him or her as a character? And once you do that, you're getting into what makes us human. It's not something where I sit before the typewriter ... the computer. The compute! And say to myself, “Alright, now I will write as a woman.” You just hear the voices in your head. Once you've decided what the tone of each character is, pretty much try to stay consistent with that. There are certain commonalities. You know, we all have dreams, we all have hopes of what we want to do.
My editor was and is a woman. My agent is a woman, and my wife is a woman. So I figure if I get anything wrong...
Ariel: Somebody has opinions.
Alan: Yeah, I just get slapped upside the head and that's it. So, I actually Hope was very good about that, because—and it really didn't have anything to do with the fact that I was male so much. We, my wife and I don't have kids. At one point, I was describing Ruth’s birth in Moloka’I and Rachel's pregnancy. Hope said to me, “Alan, I think here on page such and such, you may have gotten two of the stages of pregnancy backwards.” And I think I yield to your authority in the matter.” Having two daughters of her own.
Ariel: I love seeing that comment, I see it every now and then, “I yield to your authority.” Oh, I didn't even know I had authority, but thank you!
Alan: You do! You do.
Ariel: So do you have any last words of advice?
Alan: You know, I can't quite imagine what advice I could give aspiring novelists in today's market, which, as my agent keeps telling me, is just the worst market she's seen in years and years, but I mean she's been telling me that for about, you know 15, 20 years now, so honestly I can't, I'm no judge of that, and I'm afraid I have to pass on that.
Ariel: All right. Well, the last portion of our program is my favorite anyhow, and it's a Hot and Wholesome Gossip Corner. Are there any other writers or creators doing something you're excited about? Any shoutouts you want to give or people you want to lift up?
Alan: Yeah, there are a couple of names that come to mind. A writer friend of mine is named Sarah Bird. She's a wonderful writer. She lives in Texas. She's written some novels from the Texas background and others with other backgrounds. Her most recent book was a remarkable book called Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen, which was about a young slave girl during the Civil War, Cathay Williams—this is a real person that it was based on—who decides to run away and pose as a man and join the Union army. And as they say this is a true story. Sarah was very faithful to the woman's life. She researched it as thoroughly as any of my books, and it's a wonderful novel. She has a new book coming out next year called The Last Dance at the Starlight Pier. But she's a wonderful writer and I really recommend, especially Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen. We were at a book festival once and I said, “You really doubled down on that daughter thing, didn’t you?”
Ariel: Is the daughter of a daughter of a queen, a grand princess?
Alan: Yes, yes, technically. Her grandmother was a queen in Africa. So this was a poetic way of saying, yes, she was the granddaughter.
And the other writer that I'd like to give a little shout out to is another friend of mine named Carter Scholz. Carter and I have known each other since we’ve been... 16 years old. Carter is truly the most gifted prose writer that I have ever known. His prose is angelic. There are times when I find myself struggling with how to describe something in one of my books, and I think to myself, “How would Carter say this ?” and I know I couldn't get it as good as Carter did, but I at least I aspired to that.
Among other books, he's written a wonderful short story collection called The Amount to Carry, which are run the gamut of alternate history to straight contemporary fiction, straight historical fiction, but they're all just beautifully, beautifully written. He also did a collection, in collaboration with the writer Jonathan Lethem, called Kafka Americana, which are all stories that are told either in the vein of Kafka or about Kafka. So Sarah and Carter are two that I really admire a great deal.
Ariel: Wow, such high praise! Well, if you want to check out Alan's work, you can follow him on Facebook, or go to his website, AlanBrennert.com. My book club enjoyed reading and discussing Daughter of Moloka’i, so I can heartily recommend picking up a copy. Thank you again for talking with me, Alan.
Alan: Thank you for having me. Good talking to you.
Ariel: If you loved this episode of Edit Your Darlings, why not share it with a friend? Remember to rate and review on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast fix. For show notes go to edityourdarlings. com, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @editpodcast, or I'm @arielcopyedits. Until next week, cheers!