[00:00:00] Jane: Welcome to Historical Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction novels. I’m your host, Jane Healey, and in today’s episode, we welcome best selling author Beatriz Williams to discuss her latest novel, Husbands and Lovers, which Booklist calls a captivating novel of love and love lost with well drawn characters and sweeping drama.
Thank you so much for doing this, Beatriz.
[00:00:26] Beatriz: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:28] Jane: Yeah, thanks for coming on. I apologize to Beatriz for the baseball cap. I pulled my back this morning. So I’ve been moving very gingerly around the house.
[00:00:38] Beatriz: Or nothing. I have a friend with back issues. So be careful is all I can say.
[00:00:42] Jane: I’ve just been like, so that’s why I’m a little Yes, not looking fancy, but let me jump in with a bio and then I have a ton of questions. So Beatriz Williams is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of 19 novels, including four, actually five, in collaboration with Karen White and Lauren Willig a graduate of Stanford University with an MBA in finance from Columbia.
Williams lives near the Connecticut Shore with her husband and four children. Welcome again. Thank
[00:01:14] Beatriz: you. It’s a pleasure. Thank you all for turning up. We’re actually here on the Connecticut shore. It’s a bit of a heat wave. I was close to a baseball cap myself. That
[00:01:24] Jane: kind of day. So talk about this super unique premise.
I’ve read the author’s notes, of course, cause I love author’s notes at the end. And it was so interesting how you came up with this dual narrative story with lots of different threads.
[00:01:40] Beatriz: Yes. It’s that’s what I do, and I can try to tell a simple story and I can also try to summarize my books in a sentence or two and it always ends badly.
So I’ll try to do yeah lots of different as usual lots of different ideas and threads went into this one is it’s heart it’s a story of a single mom, whose son needs a kidney transplant he even just a. Death cat mushroom at summer camp. So she’s a single mom. She’s got two things. She has to investigate her own family tree and discover potential kidney donors that are now unknown to her.
And but she also has to go and reconnect with the man who is the father of her child, a man she hasn’t seen since the summer the child was conceived, and he is now, to make matters more complicated one of the world’s most It’s a story about a woman named Monk Adams, one of the most famous and beloved singer songwriters and also maybe one of my favorite and probably most charismatic characters I have ever created, Monk Adams.
So that’s the story in a nutshell, but again, it brought together a lot of things. The actual, the historical side of it was where I started. That was my starting place. I just reading the story about this woman. Who had her DNA. Results done and turned out her mother was adopted from an Irish orphanage and the father of the child was conceived out of wedlock.
The father of the child had been a hotel manager in some sort of country on the rim of the British Empire. So that was where I started. And then I ended up bringing this contemporary story into it. , as usual, lots of ideas and threads.
[00:03:20] Jane: And regarding the historical aspect, post war Egypt is such an interesting place.
It’s not one you read about often. Talk about your research for that and a little more about that. That timeline in the story.
[00:03:34] Beatriz: Yeah. So I, with the kind of that premise in mind, this woman who’s in an unhappy marriage with a sort of a much older man has an affair with the manager of a hotel, again, and one of these countries, my, my should preface this by saying that my father is British.
He was born in Calcutta in 1946. So these types of stories, that kind of British expat story is interesting to me, Especially in this period of time when, the British colonial empire is crumbling. It’s like a crisis of national confidence that kind of leeches into people’s own confidence and feelings about themselves as people.
As British citizens. So that’s always been of interest to me. And I thought how about Egypt? Because of course, in 1956, we have the Suez crisis, which is one of those events that is basically like the death knell of the British empire. As we know, that’s the moment where it’s like, they can’t do this anymore.
This is over. And so I thought, okay, that would be a good. Moment and then I’m and the other thing is it tied in. I’ve done a couple of Cold War books at this point. Our woman in Moscow and the beach at summerly. So I was very well tuned into the Cold War and the geopolitics. Very fascinated by this sort of post war reality of geopolitics.
And the Suez crisis happened to coincide or not. I shouldn’t say happened to coincide. It was very much a result of of two things colliding, which was the the Suez crisis reaching its peak in November of 1956. And at the exact same time, the Hungarian revolution is about to succeed and then is brutally put down by the Soviets.
At the same days in November, this is, these are two happenings. So I thought this is interesting. So I ended up with a Hungarian main character. Hannah is from Hungary. She has been through the war. And lots of trauma, lots of bad things happen. And so she marries this senior British diplomat at the close of the war to escape.
And then I’m doing my research on Egypt and and I’m thinking if we’re going to have a hotel, it’s got to be Shepherds of Cairo. That is the iconic hotel. But it turns out, as I’m doing my research, that in January of 1952, Shepherds Hotel actually burns to the ground in a series of fires that sweep across downtown Cairo.
During a single night and start the sparks of the Egyptian revolution. So that, okay, then maybe now we’re going to be in 1951, 52 and everything going on there, doing my research and I turn to memoirs, I do all that sort of top level research Cairo, Egypt, background, 1956, 1952, Egyptian Revolution, rise of Arab nationalism, all these things so I start, going down to like the person level, the human level, which to me is the most interesting thing.
I. I am much more interested in how the human experience during periods of historical change than, say, the lives of great people who are moving events. I want to know what it’s like for a human being. So I turned to memoir, and I’m looking for memoirs that are in post war Egypt. And it turns out they are almost all written by Jewish people.
Who are kicked out of Egypt in that post war period, and what strikes me as I’m reading their stories is how similar it is to the process by which Germany made life impossible for Jews in the 1930s. So you strip away legal rights, you strip away property rights. They can’t.
Hold money in bank accounts, and these are people who consider themselves Egyptian. Their families have lived there for centuries, they’ve come from Syria, they’ve come from, Spain, they’re kicked out of Spain in the Inquisition, so they come to Egypt, and their families are very Egyptian, and they feel very much part of Egyptian life, and all of a sudden, they’re told, no, you’re not Egyptian, get out, we don’t want you anymore.
So that was what led me to my story and Hannah meeting this hotel manager Lucien Beck who is part Swiss, part Egyptian and it turns out is not just managing a hotel.
[00:07:51] Jane: We won’t, no spoilers there. No spoilers, yes. But so much to work with the history. And I love historical fiction where I learn, I didn’t know that much about that history.
So that was really fun too. Yes.
[00:08:03] Beatriz: It was a
[00:08:04] Jane: journey for me as well. And
[00:08:05] Beatriz: that’s what I love it when. You come in without a lot of preconceptions because you don’t know a lot about the period. You know the basics, but not, the specifics. And then the research leads you to your story. And I love that process.
discovering the history and then discovering your characters.
[00:08:24] Jane: Yes, absolutely. And it’s not a spoiler. You already mentioned that the one of the jumping off point of the novel where the son eats a death cap mushroom at summer camp. And I have to tell you as a mom, that was a really hard thing to read about.
And you said it was inspired by a story that you read or a story you had heard about.
[00:08:43] Beatriz: I and I’ll preface this part by saying that I am not a huge mushroom fan, I’ve never, I don’t mind the flavor of mushrooms I was just, I just drizzled a little truffle oil on, I made some, oven french fries.
I love truffle oil. Yeah, I love a little truffle oil, or even a mushroom puree, but not I can’t like, Eat a mushroom. I just it’s just a that I just the tech. I don’t know tech something in me revolts against Eating an actual mushroom. And I realize this is a weakness.
Mushrooms are very trendy. They’re like, the wild mushrooms are, is in everything now. I feel very, like a very unsophisticated palette. But there it is. So I’m always looking, as we all are, for stories that affirm our own core beliefs when we’re going through the internet. We don’t want Click on the stories that like, don’t affirm our core beliefs or challenge our core beliefs because that is like no fun.
So I find this story and it was actually about the guy who wrote the horse whisperer. So you may have heard this story or forgotten that you had read it, but he, this was an obituary. He died a couple of years ago and he did not die of the mushroom poisoning, but it had happened a couple of decades earlier.
He was out foraging for wild mushrooms in, I think, Scotland, and ingested a death cap mushroom and survived, obviously, but went into kidney failure. So he needed a new kidney. And it was eventually his own daughter who donated the kidney that he needed to, resume normal life without dialysis.
So I found that intriguing. Obviously felt bad. You know how it is when you’re a writer. It’s there’s half of you that is like sympathizing and empathy and all this sort of thing. And then the other half is that would make a really good story though. And then just the, the evil genius part of your brain takes over where, you take.
that seed of a story and then turn it, into your own story, which is single mom. And, again, as a mom that just that visceral, when you, when the call comes in and that it’s like the school nurse on the other end, and you’re like, it could be that I forgot to fill that a form, or it could be, disaster on the playground.
And so I just I, was going bad. My kids are a bit older now, but still that visceral like panic. And that’s why the nurse always answers the call by saying, so everything’s okay. Let’s just establish a baseline here and then we can move on. And, but what if it’s not okay? Your child is literally being airlifted to the hospital right this very second and you’re a single mom and you’re not in contact with the father.
I tried to pack all of that into that very, it’s the very first chapter. These are not spoilers here, that very first chapter and also established a little bit of question mark in the reader’s mind. Why is she not in contact with the man who’s the father of this child?
[00:11:36] Jane: Yes. And that, we won’t reveal that spoiler either, but I loved I read Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, and that’s about like an SNL writer.
I,
[00:11:47] Beatriz: I love Curtis Sittenfeld, and I literally, as soon as I, I hadn’t read anything, I always just read her books, without even knowing what to read. They’re about, so I had literally just sent my manuscript in and I’m like, I’m going to reward myself by reading the new Curtis Sittenfeld. And I’m reading this going, wait a minute, again, you have this kind of waspy guy who turns out to be a, and I’m like, I guess I’m just vibing on the same
[00:12:09] Jane: I know, which.
I like the love story where it’s like a normal woman, like going about her life. And then there’s this. uber famous guy who’s from her past and comes back. So Monk, the main characters are named Mallory and Monk. And talk about how you came up with them, how you developed them as characters, because it was a great, it was a great storyline.
[00:12:32] Beatriz: So it’s funny, because I obviously knew from the get go that this guy was going to go on and become, yeah, because I needed some barrier between them. Because, I knew that, I knew the bare bones here that you have this woman who has a child with a guy and then they split up and she doesn’t see him for many years.
So what are some of the barriers between them that are going to keep them, from being together? And I thought obviously fame, celebrity, that’s a big one. But the interesting thing was, and this is partly because I’m not exactly as my kids will be the first to tell you, I’m never okra on like current popular music.
Like At all. I grew up again, British father and a very a cultural vulture type mom. And it was, my dad was a civil engineer. I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. My dad’s like a civil engineer. My mom’s, homemaker. We went to these things in our childhood.
Closed from this year’s catalog, we did Shakespeare during the summer was our summer vacation every year and then opera in the winter. I had like season tickets to the opera at age seven. So that’s that’s my imprint teens. I don’t really other than like a brief period as a teenager of listening to top 40.
I don’t really have a. very good grounding other than what, I overhear my kids listening to. So I didn’t have a clear, to me, it wasn’t that Monk was a singer songwriter or the music that he was singing. I wasn’t, I certainly was not picturing any particular singer songwriter having this fantasy about him at all.
The starting point was Monk as a person. Like the first thing, the first scene in which Monk appears is Is when they’re both being dropped off at boarding school. They’ve both been home for the weekend. They’re being dropped off. It’s October. And Mallory comes from this working class Catholic background.
Her grandparents scraped together the money to send her here. Monk comes from This summer aristocracy on Winthrop Island, which is the island I first created in my book The Summer Wives in the 1950s and The Beach at Summerlee and also in the 1950s and it’s loosely based on Fishers Island, which is a real place off the coast of Connecticut in Long Island Sound.
And I thought it’d be interesting to see, to check in on these families and see how the kids and grandkids are doing here in, the present day. So Monk is actually the grandson of a character in The Summer Wives, and he’s very much of that, again, that the summer families that, you know, that, that aristocracy on the island.
So they definitely come from different backgrounds. But Monk just walks into the scene and he is so himself and I think the important thing to me in creating him is that he’s just, he’s a good person. He’s a kind person. They’re both good, kind people. And that’s both his greatest strength and in some ways his weakness but he’s a really good person and he’s so kind and such a great, he’s obviously popular and privileged and talented and handsome and all those things, and so I create him as a kid, as a 14 year old, and then visit him again in 2008 when he’s about to go into his senior year of college, which is when he and Mallory have this wonderful romance on Winthrop Island. She goes there to be a nanny for his his father and stepmother.
They have two twin kids. There he is in 2008, and again, he’s just this great guy, college guy, very charismatic, he’s the guy that walks into the room and, just everyone’s drawn to him. And he, but he wants to be a musician. And he’s incredibly talented, but a lot of pressure on his family, the expectations of being the son of one of these families.
So he’s struggling with that. And it’s really not until, I did not meet. I was a singer songwriter until all of these things had happened because that’s how I write my story. So I wrote Hannah’s story and then I wrote, 2008 and then 2022 when they, they meet again. So I knew him so well as a person that to me, it wasn’t even that interesting that he was a singer, a songwriter, or that he had succeeded at it.
Rather that fame thing wasn’t that interesting to me. And in fact, we don’t really see him in that persona very much. It’s just him as a person and that to me, what was so was, what was so magnetic about him is just who he is as a person. And just, the fact that he is this incredibly talented musician is like icing on the cake and almost it’s almost a problem because it gets in the way of these two finding a way to, to, to get along in, in 2022.
[00:17:16] Jane: Yeah, it’s funny. You just answered my question, too, about the lineage and Winthrop Island. And and so it’s based on Fisher Island, right? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s really cool that you pulled it into this story. Like that. What a fun thing. And what a fun thing for your like longtime readers, I’m sure too.
[00:17:34] Beatriz: And I want to assure people that, you don’t have to read, either the Summer Wives or the Beach at Summerlee. It’s just fun to know where Monk comes from and his backstory and his grandfather’s and and it just, it. It gives you a little extra layer of knowing who he is and where he comes from.
But but yeah, I love doing that. And it’s partly because, I write these characters and they’re so real to me that it’s very hard to let them go. And if you’ve read my books for a while, you know that what I then end up doing is I bring a main character in to a new story as like a secondary character.
Or I take a secondary character from One book and they become the main character in another book. We’re always in that world, that universe, because to me it’s so real. And I love checking in on my characters 10 years after the story, 10 years before the story, how are their kids, how their grandkids doing?
How has and it’s partly because this is the way, this is the reason why I tell these multiple narrative stories is because I can’t look at a story in isolation, something that happens in somebody’s life without reflecting on how did we get here? What was, what happened 10 years ago that made this person the way they are?
What happened to a mother or a grandmother or an aunt that shaped who this person is and the life that they’re leading? So my, that’s just how my brain just works. I can’t seem to tell a story another way.
[00:19:02] Jane: Very cool, though. And is there, I don’t know if it’s too early for this book just came out in June.
Have you had any movie interest? Because I want to know who you picture as Monk and Mallory and Hannah and Lucia and do you have any ideas for actually, it’s funny people,
[00:19:17] Beatriz: you get these casting questions and I definitely do not have any kind of mood board in my house where I’m like, Oh, Ryan Reynolds, on my mood board, I it’s actually very hard for me.
to picture my characters physically, if that makes sense. Other than just a general sense of their physicality is this somebody who has a, is a tall and lanky kind of person? Is this a muscular person? Is this somebody who has, what, Of those interesting faces versus a classically handsome face versus, and so it, I have to really struggle to be like, okay, this person has brown hair and green eyes, and the hair is straight or curly or whatever.
And I’m always getting like my copy editor is always wait, I thought this person had hazel eyes, in like chapter two. And I’m like, I’m sorry, I can’t keep it in my head because it’s not it’s who that character is. And I think it’s partly that just the way I write, like I can’t. The reason I can’t outline a plot in advance is because once I’m inside that character, I really write from the inside of a character I can’t, and if I have a plot in place.
And then I start inhabiting that character, I just, I end up having to toss a lot of the plot out because it turns out this character isn’t going to do that. This character isn’t like that. So I, I definitely, as I’m writing, I’m literally writing from the inside of a character.
It’s like a sort of a, an acting kind of a thing, where I, I, it’s all about voice and it’s about who that person is. So the last thing I think about is what they look like. And we don’t even really get a good idea of what Mallory looks like. This was pointed out to me in an interview, actually earlier today, she’s we don’t really know what Monk looks like, or what Mallory looks like, until there’s like a final chapter that’s from Monk’s point of view.
And then we’re like, oh, wow, mallory, it’s not like she’s not one of those people who’s oh, I’m not pretty, she’s definitely someone she’s very comfortable in herself. But when we see her through Monk’s eyes, we just get this sense of her inner beauty and what an amazing person she is and why he loves her so much.
And that’s like the first moment where you’re like, oh, now I see what she looks like, cause the rest of the time we’re inside Mallory’s skin. We just have Mallory’s. Sense of who she is. We have, I love that. That’s, I think there’s so much of my books, I love that space in between persona, which is the image that we project to the world, to the other characters in the story, to, the image that we think versus, person, which is who we are on the inside, that true self.
. And that’s why I love writing love stories. because there’s no better way to explore that. The essence of love is somebody who sees through your persona to who you are on the inside. So if exploring that gap, that, that liminal space is what’s interesting to me as an author, love stories to me are just a great way to, to show that, showing instead of telling, to show that and explore that gap.
[00:22:25] Jane: No. And you actually just started to get into, I always write, I always ask a few writing related questions before I take questions from the audience. So I want to get into those. So talk more, you talked about process. I always ask, are you a plotter versus a pantser? And it sounds like you are definitely not a plotter.
Is that right? I’m not a
[00:22:45] Beatriz: plotter, but I’m not altogether a pantser either. I definitely know. Okay. What this story is about when I start. And it’s probably because I do a lot of cogitating before I sit down to write. I really love writing in a bright, big, creative flow. I don’t like to be like, okay, open up my word document and who are my characters, I definitely spend a lot of time, even as I’m writing one book, in the back of my head I’m thinking about the characters for the next book and the ideas for the next book and I’m like, okay, Developing that in my head so that when I sit down, I, I do have an idea who my care, my main characters are going to be, where they are in history, where they are in their lives.
What is the big thing that they want? What is the conflict here? What is what is that gap between persona and person with this character? And and the plot to me always has to serve that. So while I have an idea of where I want the plot to go and who, what, I know my end goal how I get there, other than knowing a few what are my inflection points?
What’s my arc? And what are the key points on that arc? Other than that, I have to leave it up to the characters. I have to let the characters lead me lead me through that. Otherwise, I can’t write. I get stuck. I can’t access that flow, that creative flow that, to me, is where my best writing takes place.
[00:24:08] Jane: So interesting. I love hearing about process from writers. Everyone. Yeah, it’s so fascinating. So another question I always ask is how do you strike a balance between fact and fiction in your storytelling? And do you have any rules that you adhere to overall?
[00:24:27] Beatriz: So my general rule is if a fact is knowable it needs to be true.
And if it’s not, if I have to massage it a little bit I will let the reader know in the notes, generally speaking, if it’s knowable if it is a knowable historical fact. And. And I have, am able to establish it to the best of my knowledge and I do, it’s not like I never make mistakes, there’s some stuff you don’t know you don’t know as we all know, and that’s what really trips you up.
That being said, I do. I am most interested in the human story, not in the historical story, even though I consider myself a history native. History is where I feel most comfortable, but what I’m most interested in is that human experience within that historical context. Because, forget, if you go back to all this stuff that I was indoctrinated with as a child, it’s all it’s not historical fiction.
It’s not because when it’s written other than say the history plays or there’s a few history operas out there It’s written to be contemporary it’s you know, the it’s written 200 years ago 300 years ago 400 years ago 100 years ago but they’re right
[00:25:46] Jane: you froze Beatriz
Hello?
[00:26:00] Beatriz: Characters. Oh, there we go.
[00:26:01] Jane: Interact
[00:26:02] Beatriz: with historical figures.
[00:26:03] Jane: You just froze for a little bit. Did you? Oh, sorry. Or at least for me. Sorry, I do
[00:26:07] Beatriz: have four kids in the house. They are supposed to understand that they’re not supposed to go on the internet right now. We sometimes have slip ups. The internet being a very tempting I
[00:26:16] Jane: know.
Tempting targets. Okay. A little bit of a freeze again. One sec.
[00:26:25] Beatriz: Oh, shoot. I don’t know where I froze stuff up there, but back you said Fictional characters.
[00:26:38] Jane: Oh, there you are. You’re back. Okay.
[00:26:41] Beatriz: Okay. Yes. All right, let’s cross our fingers here. Yeah, so my interest always lies in in a historic, I’m sorry, in fictional, in
a,
[00:27:00] Jane: oh shoot,
[00:27:02] Beatriz: not necessarily a story of some historical figure. And I care, I’ll be, I’m sorry, it’s going to be a. Fictional character.
[00:27:16] Jane: I’m, we’re still losing you. You’re cutting in and out. I’m sorry. That’s the story I wanted
[00:27:19] Beatriz: to tell. I wanted to tell the human story. And I don’t want to have. Okay.
[00:27:37] Jane: Okay, I think she’s gonna cut out and try to come back in. People have been saying in the chat what are you reading? Tell me what you’re reading. I am currently reading, I just finished Beatriz’s book, but I’m currently reading All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker, which I highly recommend.
She’s coming back. We’ll try this again. Hello.
Audio.
Beatriz, your audio is off.
Okay.
[00:28:19] Beatriz: Okay. There it is. Yeah. I was just saying, I just sent a text message to the entire family group text no one should be on the internet for any reason, at all, on pain of death. So I hope that worked.
[00:28:33] Jane: No, I do too.
[00:28:35] Beatriz: I cannot control what is going on in my own house. I
[00:28:38] Jane: totally understand that. No, no worries.
It happens all the time, go ahead.
[00:28:42] Beatriz: No, I was just saying that, my characters, I always try to have fictional characters rather than as my viewpoint characters rather than any historical figure because my interest lies in in the human experience. And I don’t want to have to be beholden to somebody’s biography to tell my story.
In the case for, that’s why for Fisher’s Island, I fictionalized that into Winthrop Island. Because I wanted to be able to tell the story that I wanted to tell. Without having to worry about someone from Fisher’s Island saying, There’s no cliff there, what are you talking about? And again, when I wrote that.
Say a hundred summers I was inspired by a real location, but I fictionalized it because again, I wanted to be able to tell the story the way I wanted to tell it without having to worry about this person was in another country or this person married someone else or biographical details that to me were not the story that I wanted to tell, but the historical facts that are in the book are as real as I can make them.
Verify them because, to me that’s, I don’t ever want to mislead somebody that, you know, that, the facts are different from the way they are. But that’s why you go to, that’s why you turn to fiction. You turn to fiction not to learn the language, but to go to that country and be that person.
[00:30:09] Jane: Exactly. I have a couple more questions in the audience. If you have any questions, please put them in the chat or the Q and a, and I’ll field them for Beatriz. I know we, we have. writers in the audience and I always like to ask, you’ve been at this for a long time, you’ve been very successful, what’s the best advice you can give about writing and about getting published?
Both of the, I know those are very different things but I’d love to hear what you have to say.
[00:30:33] Beatriz: I think to get published, honestly, just write the best book you can, and to write the best book you can, I have, I spent my whole life learning how to write books starting from just reading as a kid, writing stories, reading from a wide, really a wide range of books.
I think one trap that we can get into in historical fiction is that someone writes a book that’s really successful, people read that book, oh my gosh, this is the kind of book I want to write, they then write a book that’s a bit of a derivative of that book, and then someone writes a derivative of that derivative, and pretty soon we’ve lost that book.
The essence of where we were in the first place. And so I try to read from a bunch of different genres. And in fact, for my pleasure reading, I tend not to read historical fiction. I tend to read either books that were written in periods that I’m interested in books written about those periods or.
Detective fiction, thrillers, literary fiction anything that is a good story that is told well I think that’s where you want to be, in, in your reading pile. And then just, I think, writing. You just have to write. And you have to know that, you’re never going to be, how can I put this?
I’m never going to be good enough for my own standards. Whatever I put out there, it’s, I’m never going to feel like that is the absolute best I could ever possibly do. I always want to learn to tell a story better to write a better story to, understand my characters better to, Switch things up, write a different kind of story.
I never feel like I’m really there yet, and I think that’s a good mentality to have, because you’re always being really conscious and mindful as you’re writing. I feel like Every word needs to count. Every word needs to have purpose in there. And, if possible, serve more than one purpose.
I love, one of the things I love about writing about New England, and I’m a West Coaster myself. I grew up near Seattle College in California, and I came to New York after college, very reluctantly. I didn’t want to come to New York. That was just the only job offer I had. And then I met the man who became my husband and he’s from a New England family.
So I’m learning. Yeah. And what I, what’s so interesting to me is there’s just all this subtext.
And that is interesting as a human being moving about this world, but it’s also interesting from a writing standpoint particularly as we’re talking about, as I did about persona versus person, because That’s really the essence of showing instead of telling, isn’t it?
And so when a character says one thing, do they mean it? What are they really trying to say? And so you have to trust the reader a lot with that. You have to trust that the reader is not necessarily going to take everything at face value. He’s going to think about those words.
He’s going to think about, is there maybe a disconnect between the way the person is acting and what they’re saying? All these things. Every time I write a book, I try to have every sentence have double or triple duty in terms of conveying the meaning of the story or moving the story along.
[00:33:45] Jane: Very good advice. Yes, excellent. Ike Levick, who is, I believe asking this question from Australia she wants to know which craft books you rely on if there are any craft books that you can recommend. Yes, Sydney, Australia, she says. I haven’t read craft books in a long
[00:34:01] Beatriz: time. Back good old, E.
B. White, and Oh,
[00:34:04] Jane: Strunk and White, Elements
[00:34:06] Beatriz: of Staff. Yeah, that’s
[00:34:07] Jane: a
[00:34:07] Beatriz: good one. Yeah, I feel like, the problem is, I think with craft books, is that, and, maybe I’ll go back to this, is that and not that there are not some very good craft books out there, I’m not at all, definitely, if that is something that works for you, By all means do it.
I think we all need to find ways to analyze text and figure out what’s going on there and how to transform that into, into our own writing. But I, like I’m on Twitter, like a week or so ago and I’m scrolling through and now Twitter is it’s very so algorithmic. So you’re getting stuff from people you don’t follow, but that, Are you know, or link to what you’re interested in.
And the soprano and I follow some opera people, no surprise soprano was saying, and she would just had a look quick, video that I wish I could do these quick little videos, but I’m hopeless at it. But she was saying, look, I don’t know if you need to know that. She’s talking to singers. But she said, I don’t know if you need, maybe this is whether you need to hear this or not right now, but just remember if you’re headed to, and I’m paraphrasing, the rehearsal room or the performance space, just remember that your voice is enough.
Nice. Don’t try to do to mimic someone else’s voice. that you can bring. Your voice is enough. It brings the colors and the shading. And this is, as I, the one thing that I can bring from my own experience to Monk is that I understand singing because of just spending so much time following opera.
And they talk a lot about singing and where a piece sits in your voice and so on. And so she and this idea of colors, the colors that your voice brings to the performance and, and your voice is enough. What you have your instrument is enough to paint those colors and to bring those characters alive.
So just remember that you’re enough to work on your own voice, your voice. You’re the only one who can bring your voice to this project. performance or to this interpretation of the piece. And I was literally like, Oh my God, I did need to hear that, because the first thing I do after I finished writing, a new manuscript is I start reading and sometimes I’ll read something that’s really good.
I’m like, Oh my God, I need to bring more humor into my, I’m not snarky enough. I’m not this, I’m not that. So every so often, to hear that, to remind that yes. And that person does that great. That is their voice. They’re amazing at it. You have your voice. You have your own stories that only you can tell.
And only you can tell it that way. So I think that the most important thing you can do is to develop your voice. And not, obviously you want to read other writers and hear other voices. But understand, your own voice. And the stories that you tell really well, and how to tell them well with your voice, and the colors that you bring to those sentences, and I just That is, I think, to me, the most important advice.
I was so glad I just stumbled on this little video. I was like, that’s it, that’s exactly it, and I just replied to her, I’m like I’m a novelist and I needed to hear that right now. It applies to, I think, anyone trying to create characters, to create some kind of art.
[00:37:21] Jane: Yes, that’s excellent advice.
I love that. Irene Axelrod asks, Will there be a sequel to this book? And and this also ties in with one of my questions is what you what are you working on now? What’s next?
[00:37:34] Beatriz: Yes. So I, like I said, I just turned in my most recent book. And yes, So this is interesting. So I had a different, it was going to be Winthrop Island, but it was going to be back in the fifties.
I was going to pick up a character that interested me from the beach at Summerlee, who was a side character in that book. And that was going to be my next book. And in November, I was already writing. I was like, like not that far into it, but. I had, four or five more months to write it.
I was several chapters in and I was really going strong and my it was November. My editor sends me an email and says so now that we have the galleys printed and it’s gone around the office, we want you to come in. We’re all so excited. We all love this book so much. We want you to come in for a big marketing meeting.
And I’m like, oh, great. So I go into the city and it’s this great meeting. People came into the office, which was amazing, as to have publishing people actually come into the office. They came in, and they were all so excited, and all these plans, and I’m, like, literally on cloud nine.
I’m walking to the elevator with my editor that’s never happened to me before. This is so amazing. You’re so excited. And I said, and I just want you to know, I’m well on my way to that next book. It’s going really well, and I will definitely have it in by deadline. And I, she’s so here’s the thing, she’s we love this one so much that we were hoping you would do some more contemporary stuff, like maybe Winthrop Island Contemporary because we think, it’s going to open up new readers for you.
And I was like that’s not the book I was writing. But, as it so happens, I loved these characters so much that, and we were speaking before we started it was like a couple of months before I could even think about another book after I wrote this book.
[00:39:16] Jane: The
[00:39:17] Beatriz: writing hangover from writing Husbands and Lovers was so intense.
I was just writing You know, epilogues in my head with these characters and as soon as I was like, over the kind of shock slash, slash dislocation of oh no, I have to toss out the book I’m writing I was like actually, I would love to return to these characters lives. So the next, the problem was I needed to find a historical tie in, because to me that’s essential, is what’s the past?
What’s happened where the characters are at this moment? So I’m snooping around and, Fisher’s Island history, and I come across the story of this steamship wreck in 1846, and the survivors are washed ashore on what was then, very sparsely inhabited territory. And that’s where my story, I was like, okay, this is where I’m going to anchor my story.
And so we have that and then we have contemporary Fisher’s Island, a couple of characters from Husbands and Lovers do come into this one. Monk has a cameo, Mallory has a cameo, some secondary characters will be there, but also A couple of characters who are related to characters in my earlier Winth of Ireland novels as well.
Descended from people in The Summer Wives and The Beach at Summerleigh. So it all comes together. There’s a murder mystery. There’s missing art. There’s all kinds of threads going on in there. And also really cool, and this sort of surprised me because I didn’t go in expecting this, but a really cool mother daughter relationship.
That develops, that again, I love it when this happens where you put these characters on the page and you start writing them, all of a sudden, boom, there’s just this like combustion of, of. Two people and a thing. So I love, I was really, interestingly on this one, it was the historical part of it that I struggled with a bit, trying to bring my, play some fictional characters in this very specific historical setting where actual stuff happened.
And then develop that into an interesting story that, Kept to the facts, but made space for my fictional characters. But once that was done, wow. I, the interestingly, the contemporary side of the Winthrop Island really really, I found a good beat. I’m very excited about it.
[00:41:34] Jane: Excellent. Jackie asks when, what’s the name of that book?
[00:41:38] Beatriz: It does not have a name. I turned it in right before I went on tour for Husbands and Lovers. And I was like, I am out of words. I cannot, like my words are, I, my, my battery is zero. We will see titled. to be determined.
[00:41:53] Jane: Excellent, excellent. What is the best way for readers to keep in touch with you and do you ever zoom with book clubs, things like that, since we’re getting, we’ve taken up a lot of your time,
[00:42:03] Beatriz: yeah no I I love zooming with book clubs just send me the best thing is I’m on my main social media is Instagram I do Facebook not as much, and I’ve been having a weird thing right now where I can’t seem to cross post multiple help messages yet.
I haven’t gone unanswered, but I used to be able to just cross post, so I’d post on Instagram and it’d instantly post on my author page, and now it all it wants to post is on my Facebook personal page, which I don’t even use anymore. I can’t get it to go to my So I have to literally repost the whole thing from scratch.
So I’m mostly on Instagram, but I do check my Facebook messages from time to time. I do have a on my website BeatrizWilliams. com. There is a form an email form. So if you want to email me something, I will get that as well. I try to be prompt with my responses, but sometimes I go on little hiatuses sometimes family related, sometimes work related, so I apologize if I don’t get back to you right away.
I’ve gotten actually so many lovely people have just been responding in the most magical way to this book, which makes me so happy because I just loved these characters so much, loved this book so much, so I’ve been very busy, I’ve been trying very hard to keep up with all that, so thank you if you have sent a message if you’ve loved this book and sent me a message.
Thank you so much. I really, I think when you love a book and characters as much as I did and do with this book, it’s really wonderful to have readers come back to you with the same love. So thank you all. And I do read the messages and I will try to get back as soon as
[00:43:43] Jane: I can. Yes. Thank you for your time.
I know you’ve been so busy. I love the book. Everyone read Husbands and Lovers. Good luck with the rest of your tour and your new projects. And and yeah, everyone, I’ll see you next time. Thank you so much for coming to Historical Happy Hour. Have a great night. Thank you so much for having me, everyone.
And and I hope you enjoy the book. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of your summer. Thank you. Bye bye.
