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Recently, I’ve launched into my next book project THE WICKED AND THE GOOD (loving this title!). After this most recent talk, I was inspired to use this newsletter to turn the lens on my craft, to give readers an inside look from start to finish on what it is to research and write an 85,000-word narrative history.

As the above subtitle promises, I will be offering examples from my own work, especially from this most recent project. I hope you follow along with me on this journey, all the way from the genesis of the idea, to the research, to the structuring of the book, to the writing and revision process, and through to the publication (what is that first bookstore appearance like…or that first good/bad review?!?!).

Let’s begin almost at the beginning: the book proposal. It’s an art in and of itself. One has to both sell the idea and oneself with the proposal—and do so in a concise, entertaining, pitchy way. My agent, Eric Lupfer, and I probably worked on half a dozen revisions before we got it right. Fortunately, Matt Harper, who aptly is an editor at HarperCollins, liked the proposal, and it’ll be on bookshelves and digital readers in Spring 2025. That makes me 10 out of 11 on such proposals. That one miss still stings!

Below is the opening letter for the proposal, and then the first couple of pages. As I’ll be doing throughout this journey, I’ll give a deeper dive for paid subscribers, who, in this case, will get to read the full 14-page pitch.

A caveat on proposals. They are sales documents, not finished works of literature. No doubt my view on this narrative—and the individuals who lived it—will shift as my knowledge and insight deepens. In other words, don’t hold me to it!

Hope you share with any and all of your writer friends! Away we go…

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Dear Matt,

A young undercover detective, CEO of the world’s biggest company, labor crusader, and a secret Irish crime organization—all these come together in a war at the dawn of the Gilded Age that captivated the nation and shaped the very soul of America. This is the short pitch for my new narrative history, THE WICKED AND THE GOOD.

Four years have passed since my last book FASTER published during the first outbreak of COVID. During that time, I have been searching for a story that excites me to my core. A few have intrigued me, but nothing compared to this stunning true-crime story about the infamous Molly Maguires, and I am already well on the path to cracking it.

As you know, I've written on various subjects, from skyscraper wars, to four-minute miles, to Russian mutinies, to WWII sabotage operations. Down to their core, each is a story of ordinary people set in extraordinary situations—and following how they achieve what may have seemed impossible. THE WICKED AND THE DEAD, and especially the beating heart of its narrative, James McParlan, fits perfectly within this wheelhouse.

Often during speeches, I explain how I go about choosing my subjects and what, if any, rules I follow. Two decades ago, I came up with two simple questions to answer. Here I've done the same.

1. Do I have something new to tell in this story? Immediately after these murderous events in 1870s coal country, a spate of books came out, some fantastically untrue, all sensationally told. In the 150 years since then, there have been periodic revisits, hewing to one ideologically bent or the other. The best, most recent title was a 1998 academic history called MAKING SENSE OF THE MOLLY MAGUIRES. There was even a biography published of McParlan’s long detective career, which included, in part, this tale, as well as a well-written rehash of his most significant cases in the West.

Humbly, none of these titles recount this history with much narrative momentum or cohesion. They are either sweeping compendiums of every violent act or hyper-focused on the Molly Maguires, as if they existed in a vacuum. In THE WICKED AND THE GOOD, I intend to inhabit each of the four main characters—McParlan, Gowen, Siney, and the Mollies—and how they were all pitted against each other. Under the theory that we are all heroes of our own stories, I will relate each from their own perspective, bringing all to vivid life

Already I have uncovered new research on each of these characters, and there are many archives still to plumb, including those of Gowen’s Reading Company, McParlan’s Pinkertons, and Siney’s union. All will be brought to bear in reshaping this narrative.

So, the answer to this question is an unequivocal yes.

2. Does this story have something important to say? I’ll keep this answer much more brief: YES. Of my shelf of books, few have offered such a richness of themes that were as relevant in the past as they are today. THE WICKED AND THE GOOD is a story of the age-old battle between capital vs. labor. It is a story about whether the ends justify the means. It is a story about power, immigration, law & order, and justice. As I say at the beginning of my proposal—and often throughout—this is a story about America.

Finally, this history sits very close to home. At night, from the rooftop of my Philadelphia townhouse, I can hear the whistle of trains coming down the same tracks that once brought heaps of 'black gold' into the city. I often hike about the same mountains to the north where miners once dug for coal. I know well the old coal towns of Pottsville, Shamokin, and Tamaqua. Here was once the beating heart of American industry, and if you ask the right people, you can still hear tales that have come down over the generations. This history remains alive in the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania. Better still, only a short walk in the city or a drive into the countryside, there are numerous collections of archives, some found in grand libraries, others in small local history museums, that reveal the truth of these events.

Okay. One bit of extra context. A final finally, promise: I'm a lover of true crime. From rereading Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD to binging WACO or DAHMER to rerunning films like Spike Lee’s BLACKkKLANSMAN to running while listening to SERIAL or my latest favorite, DR. DEATH. The high stakes, outsized emotions, ingenious puzzle-solving, and the "who," "what," "why," "when," and " where" of it all gets me every time. And besides my fandom, true crime works, often spectacularly well, in narrative non-fiction, especially historical stories. DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY—true crime through and through. THE SUSPICIONS OF MR. WHICHER or MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL—true crime. Most recently, THE WAGER by David Grann is less a historical naval thriller than true crime drama from multiple angles. Sound familiar?

In any respect, I’ll leave it there. I'm thrilled to dive into this history and look forward to your thoughts!

Kindly yours,

Neal

THE WICKED AND THE GOOD

by Neal Bascomb

"What is the chief end of man? – to get rich. In what way? – dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must."  –Mark Twain.

This is a quintessentially American story. Business titans. Company towns. A knight errant. Street justice. Murder. Greed. Mayhem. Corruption. Undercover agents. Class warfare. And the struggle to own your destiny.

At the heart of the narrative is 28-year-old Irish immigrant James McParlan. He was a Chicago beat cop, now a rookie undercover detective, sent in as an itinerant worker and practiced counterfeiter to infiltrate a secret society responsible for a wave of terrible crimes. He has to insinuate himself into their ranks and win their trust. Once he gains membership, he must root out their leadership, gather evidence, and stop their destruction and killings. All the while, McParlan risks exposure at every turn and a swirl of competing pressures to end the violence. The toll of deceit and danger almost breaks him, and, in the end, he narrowly escapes an assassination attempt before testifying against those who would have had him dead.

The plot conjures a modern-day spin on FBI legends and movies like Donnie Brasco and The Departed, but McParlan went undercover 150 years ago. His target was the Molly Maguires, an Irish crime organization whose members were called everything from "lawless scum" to “heroes of the people” to "diabolical terrorists." As the New York Herald editorialized, "For the Molly Maguires, murder was but child's play, arson but a pleasure, and wickedness of all kinds but the natural outpourings of vile and devilish hearts." Although their exploits have largely been forgotten, they’re still whispered about in the lands in which they unfolded, an echo into our modern times of the eternal rift between the haves and have-nots.

The story opens at the dawn of the Gilded Age. The country had torn itself apart during the Civil War, and now its people bent their prodigious energy to making a buck. The divide between rich and poor had never been wider. The Carnegies and Vanderbilts of the country built extravagant marble palaces and threw even more extravagant parties. Immigrants teemed in filthy cities, cramming into tenements and laboring day and night in factories or breaking their backs mining coal or laying railroad tracks to propel the country into this new industrial age. 

While historians have written much about reconstruction and the westward push after the Civil War, the most vital and awesome center of power in America during this period sat amidst the low mountains of Pennsylvania, equidistant between the citadels of New York City and Philadelphia. The area was the heart of anthracite coal, the "Black Gold" that fueled America's rise as a giant on the world stage. Sheared off the underbelly of the mountains and shipped by train in heaping piles, this dark hard rock with a metallic luster was made of almost pure carbon. It burned hot and nearly smokeless, providing cheap and efficient energy.

Everybody wanted and needed anthracite coal. It powered the steel forges of Pittsburgh and the textile mills of Boston. Homes, farmers, bakers, brewers, and small manufacturers all used coal. Steamboats plying the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans fed their engines with it. Black gold made possible the railroads that connected the vast expanse of the United States, north to south, Atlantic to Pacific. Soon enough, it would provide the energy to electrify cities. 

Whole industries emerged from the fountainhead of anthracite coal, so too vast fortunes. The economic boom it provided turned New York into a financial juggernaut where “Old World capital met New World ambition.” Black gold touched every part of American life, spinning a dynamic, often unrestrained flywheel of commerce. The insatiable appetite for more, ever more, of this rock swelled the greed of the titans of Pennsylvania coal and imposed unbearable demands on the miners who gave start to it all.

They lived in company-owned places called patches. They were more bustling land-locked ports than towns. They had a single purpose: retrieving anthracite coal from deep shafts and piling it into open train wagons to be hauled away for sale. Amidst northeastern Pennsylvania's long misty valleys and high blue-green hills, these patches looked like smoldering scars in an otherwise fair landscape. Single-track railroads connected one to the next. "It was not a cheering prospect," Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of a journey on such a line in The Valley of Fear, his fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel, one inspired by these events. “Through the growing gloom, there pulsed the red glow of the furnaces on the sides of the hills. Great heaps of slag and dumps of cinders loomed up on each side, with the high shafts of the collieries towering above them. Huddled groups of mean, wooden houses, the windows of which were beginning to outline themselves in light, were scattered here and there along the line, and the frequent halting places were crowded with their swarthy inhabitants.”

Rough as these outposts appeared, choked with smoke and coal dust, they were also lively and filled with taverns, inns, gaming houses, clothiers, general stores, churches of several stripes, and concert halls. Patches had a modern, if gritty edge, that few such places in America could boast at the time for a population almost entirely made up of laborers. There was some stratification among the workers – the mining superintendents and bosses lived in the patches, too, but in well-built houses a comfortable distance from the shafts and churning colliers. A white picket fence usually surrounded their half-acre of land. But of course, as for the owners, many had never set foot in the patches, esconced in their townhouses in New York or Philadelphia or as far away as London.

Nevertheless, their money and power were always present in coal country, as was the reality of the unevenness of where it fell. For the well-to-do, who lived, in a sense, on the surface of this age's industry-and-tech hubs, the clangs of the mines and sooty air were physical manifestations of passive income, compounding interest, and advantage. They could hear and see themselves getting richer. For those whose labors generated that wealth, those who worked mainly below the ground, their lives were a Dantean hell. 

Fortune on this scale – who got it and who didn't – would always be a problem. And a secret society known as the Molly Maguires would soon enough make it something that no one in the universe of black gold could ignore.

The war between the Molly Maguires and the barons of industry would cut to the quick of what America stood for and against.

Here are the plain facts…

[That should give you a good taste of the proposal. Paid subscribers can read the whole pitch. Hope you consider supporting in that way—and many thanks to those who already have!]

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Welcome to all the new subscribers. Our community broke the 6,000 mark last week, roughly a year after beginning this newsletter. It’s been a joy. Thank you for reading!

While finishing this post, the Writers Guild of America went on strike for a better slice of the pie for its members. They say timing is everything! So, we have suspended our work—and I …

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As a popular historian, there are few, if any, in my profession that I hold in higher regard than Robert Caro. The Power Broker is a masterpiece, and his Lyndon Johnson biographies are beyond compare. The shelves of his office must sag under the weight of the number of awards he has won, most notably a dual pair of Pulitzer Prizes and National…

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For years, I wanted to be a novelist. Beyond my journalism, I had never thought of writing non-fiction. I’m not exactly sure why, perhaps because fiction had always been what I read throughout school and for pleasure. Then one afternoon at the Strand Bookstore in NYC’s East Village, I came across The Great Bridge by David McCullough. Of all places, the book was located spine out on a shelf in the cavernous fiction section. And what a spine it was, at least a couple of inches thick as I remember it. On the cover was an illustration of its subject and the subtitle read: “The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge.”

By the weekend’s end, I had finished this masterpiece about the often madcap efforts to span the East River by the Roebling family. The read had everything I loved in a good novel: exquisite writing, robust characters, scenes that sprang alive, and narrative momentum. Best of all, as evidenced by the voluminous endnotes, it was all true.

Soon after, I put away my string of bad roman à clés and John Grisham readalikes. I devoured everything McCullough wrote as well as works by other masters of non-fiction. It is unsurprising then that my first published work was focused on the Chrysler Building, another NYC architectural marvel.

As many of you likely know, McCullough passed away earlier this month. For someone I had never personally met, I was struck by profound sadness. It came at the same time one of my closest childhood friends, John Clark, passed away from a massive heart attack. A champion swimmer, math whiz, teacher, and trader of rare books, he was only 51 years old. This double blow left me thinking about the haphazard, sometimes wonderful, sometimes not, influences on our paths. Besides providing true friendship and lots of laughs, John taught me the delightful joy of a little mischief. David gave me endless hours of reading enjoyment, but more importantly, he charted a trajectory for my writing.

In this spirit, here is one of the most significant lessons I learned about the workcraft of David McCullough. First, however, let me set the scene, starting with movement, a signature of how he began most of his books as bestselling author Candice Millard recently reminded me in a moving tribute of her own.

Every day, David would walk out the back of his Martha’s Vineyard house to “The Bookshop.” It was a noble name for the self-built, wood-shingled shed where he wrote his award-winning histories. “Nothing good was ever written in a large room,” he once said. There was no computer, no telephone, not even a faucet. Illuminated by a green banker’s lamp, he pecked out his books on a Royal typewriter, surrounded by reams of his research. On the wall over his desk was the motto “Look at Your Fish.”

One might argue that this simple phrase was the secret to his success, and he explained its significance to a Paris Review interviewer in the fall of 1999:

“Look at your fish.” It’s the test that Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard naturalist, gave every new student. He would take an odorous old fish out of a jar, set it in a tin pan in front of the student, and say, Look at your fish. Then Agassiz would leave. When he came back, he would ask the student what he’d seen. Not very much, they would most often say, and Agassiz would say it again: Look at your fish.

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A little personal memory before I launch into my first CreatorCraft Q&A. Future interviews will feature artists as well as industry insiders, speaking to how they go about their work, whether it’s in the field of books, art, film, theater, music, dance, or another creative pursuit.

It was the summer of 1998. I was living in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, inhabiting the cliché of a twenty-something ex-pat writing the great American novel. Called Chasing Blue, it was as bad as the title sounds. My daily routine consisted of walking from one café to the next to scrawl a few hundred words. I was living with two French natives in an expansive (but still inexpensive) apartment. With two decks and an elevator that opened up into the living room, it was a place made for parties. One roommate smoked incessantly, never by an open window. In fact, I believe she closed them before lighting up. The other was about as cool as they rolled, ran an upstart magazine, and somehow became a life-long friend. To add to my social circle, I had a French girlfriend, who was an artist, translator, and nicer to me than I deserved.

Life seemed perfect, even though it didn’t seem to have much future in it.

Then I got a call from Michael Carlisle, a literary agent at William Morris in New York. We had known each other in my previous life as a book editor. He explained how he was leaving the big talent agency to start his own shop. He wanted me to work for him, both as a junior literary agent and in-house editor for his stable of authors. The opportunity sounded exciting; I liked and respected Michael, and since I was running short on savings and even shorter in my confidence as a writer, I took him up on the offer. Weeks later, I was in London for a photo shoot with the New York Times. It was my first time in the ‘Gray Lady’, and the two of us were posed on some gritty fire stairs outside a London hotel. (excuse the fact that I look like a man-child and Michael is pretty glum)

For the next year, I worked as a literary agent. We had a tony office on the Upper East Side, right off Madison Avenue. There were catered parties, sumptuous lunches, author meet-and-greets, and lots of reading. For a time, I loved the process of recruiting writers, proposing book ideas, shaping proposals, and pitching to publishers. But truth told I wanted to be one of those writers, not the one selling their books, and my interest in the job waned. I thought about quitting but didn’t have the guts to give up a job with decent pay, fun perks, and an all-access pass to the publishing world. Nonetheless, I invested most of my time in side projects and my writing. Wisely and graciously (although it didn’t feel that way at the moment), Michael fired me almost to the day of my first anniversary.

It was the best thing that could have happened to me, and I still look fondly back on that brief life as a literary agent. In the spirit of those days, I’ve interviewed Kate McKean, who works at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency in New York, to offer a glimpse of her own WorkCraft.

As background on Kate, she earned her master’s degree in fiction writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and began her publishing career at the University Press of Florida. She represents New York Times bestselling authors in a wide variety of genres including Alix E. Harrow's The Once and Future Witches and Trung Le Nguyen's award-winning The Magic Fish. As if this was not enough to keep her busy, Kate is an adjunct professor at New York University, writes her own books, and publishes a weekly newsletter called AGENTS & BOOKS (which is tremendous).

Kate and I first met when she was an assistant at the literary agency where I was formerly represented. No matter how smart or connected one might be, it’s a right of passage to start at the bottom in the publishing industry: answering phone calls, making lunch dates for the boss, reading ‘slush’ (unsolicited manuscripts), dealing with rights issues, sending author payments, and fielding the all kinds of crazy that surrounds this world. Kate managed all this with elan, and it’s no surprise she’s now at the top of the game.

Tell us about a writer you ‘discovered’ and fostered into a bestseller? What does that process/craft look like?

My favorite example of this is NYT bestselling author Madeleine Roux. A billion years ago, it seems, (but more like 13 or thereabouts) my brother sent me a link to a blogger site that he was reading for fun. It was a fictional blog written from the perspective of someone who was trying to survive the zombie apocalypse by hiding out in a bookstore. People were participating in the world of the blog in the comments, saying things like "Seattle is safe! Get here!" or "Don't come to Ohio! We're overrun!" and I thought, either this author is seeding the comments herself, which is genius, or people are playing along because the world she's built is just so good. Either way, it was the sign of a great writer, and the blog posts themselves backed that up too. But the author hadn't included any contact info! I didn't want to spoil the fun, so I posted a comment that was like "Allison, I have to talk to you here's my email." (Allison was the character's name.) And Maddie reached out to me like ummm, hello? and I said Oh hi, I'm a literary agent and I think you're great. And the rest is history. We're on book 14 or 15 I think now? I've lost count.

That story doesn't, of course, get to your question on the process/craft of fostering someone into a best seller, because I don't think you can actually do that. I don't think there is anything I can do on my end to make anyone a best seller. The publisher can sometimes do that if they throw enough money at the marketing of something, but that doesn't guarantee it, and they can't do that to every book. The bestseller list is fickle and all I can do to help my writers get on to it is help them hone their ideas into the best versions they can be while staying true to the author's vision, and hope for the best. Maddie and I have always worked well together in an editorial way, which is usually me saying hey what about this? or I don't know about this part. and Maddie saying Ohhhhh right. How about this fix? Or this? Or THIS!? and coming up with something spectacular. Editorial notes are not a prescription that will fix a story and lead to guaranteed success. They're just reactions of one reader to one writer's work. If a writer's only goal is to hit the list, well, I would probably help them find other goals to work toward as well, so they don't end up disappointed forever.

What inspired you to become an agent versus an editor or other role in publishing? How do you distinguish yourself among other agents?

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It was 2005. Emilio Perez, the son of Cuban immigrants, was nursing an early-morning hangover in his paint-speckled loft in Bushwick, an industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. The phone clanged. Micaela, a curator who would become his life partner, was on the other end of the line. She was in Verona, Italy, preparing for the opening of a new gallery.

“You’re in the show,” she said. “Another artist dropped out. You have to make a 60-foot-long piece. You have a week.”

Emilio muttered, “Oh, okay,” before she hung up the phone. Then he set to work.

At the time, Emilio was a 33-year-old artist. He was already represented by galleries in Miami and Houston. He was neither scrapping by, nor reaching the aerie heights of the art world. In sum, his big break had yet to come. An eager talent. He was that. Confident too. “I was incredibly cocky, thinking that I was the best artist on the planet. I just had the attitude.” He also followed a unique process in the creation of his paintings that gave his works a vibrant, three-dimensional character.

On wood panels, usually very large ones, he would first use oil-based paint, covering it completely with dark atmospheric colors. Then he painted over this background with several layers of white latex paint, essentially leaving himself with a blank canvas. On top of this, he made a loose energetic painting that served as a kind of roadmap for what came next.  With an x-acto knife, he cut and peeled away these layers of paint in swirls and patterns to reveal the moody base layer. He loved “the expressive quality of the material, the looseness, the accidents that happen, and the immediacy of the mark.” Everything was done “with a kind of intuition, of being in the moment, in the flow. Ultimately, I was pulling an image out of chaos.”

The last-minute show in Verona was a “huge success.” Emilio sold the site-specific painting he had created and a “bunch of other paintings” that he brought over with him. The momentum continued. On Emilio’s return to New York, a director from the Galerie Lelong asked to come to see his other work. The gallery represented some of the world’s most successful contemporary artists. A studio visit from them was akin to a New York Yankees scout coming out to see a young pitcher throw. If they wanted to sign you, welcome to the major leagues.

In December that year, the director climbed the three, dilapidated flights of stairs in Emilio’s Bushwick building to reach the loft. He walked around, stopping at one painting, then another. Emilio told his story, what he intended with his dream-like work.

“What galleries are you interested in?” the director asked.

Emilio stumbled out a response. Galerie Lelong was not exactly on his radar.

“Well, what about us?”

“Yeah,” Emilio said. “That’d be good.”

With Lelong’s representation, Emilio began selling paintings almost as quickly as he could produce them. They were sold to wealthy collectors and museums alike. Private commissions poured in, as did the money, press, and accolades. “This is it. I had arrived,” Emilio thought. “It only goes up from here. All I need to do now is make paintings, everything else will be gravy….”

I was always very creative from an early age. I was very curious, taking things apart, putting them back together, exploring. When I was younger, we would always take trips to the Chesapeake Bay, and my mom collected these giant clam shells, take them home, and paint birds upon them. She always had these oil paints around. I can still smell them when I think about it.”

His parents, Jose and Maria, fled Cuba during the 1961 revolution. Jose was a lawyer. Maria studied economics. They lost everything to come to America. They moved to Jackson Heights, NY where Emilio was born, the third and youngest child. “My dad comes from the old generation. He’s definitely patriarchal. He is very domineering, and we were always at odds.”

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I don’t know how to sew. Nor does my wife. By fate, we were handed a daughter (let’s call her Martha) who loves to knit and sew. Yes, she is an old lady masquerading as a young teenager. After Santa delivered a brand-new sewing machine through the chimney, the metaphor “threading the needle” never rang so true. I wanted to toss the whole contraption into the fire by day’s end. Months later, Martha is into quilt-making, something my mother and grandmother did before her. Remembering them, watching my own daughter lately, I was struck by how much the assembly and structuring of my narrative non-fiction books resembles their craft.

The Collection

Growing up, I spent a fair amount of time in fabric stores, following my mother down aisles spilled over with bolts of fabric. For hours, she would hunt for the right patterns and colors for her newest quilt. The beginning of any project was one of collection. For me, it is the same, whether I am investigating the history of the first individual to break the four-minute mile (The Perfect Mile) or the spies on skis who sabotaged the Nazi atomic bomb program (The Winter Fortress).

The library is my starting point. I read every book on my new subject. I copy their bibliographies, then read the books, newspaper/magazine articles, and other materials these authors sourced. Steadily, over scores of books, I slowly become an expert on the subject (Russia 1905, for instance, for Red Mutiny) and in the process, assemble a huge inventory of material. Eventually, I reach a point, months later often, where I essentially know what others know or have interpreted—and these secondary sources provide an excellent base from which I can advance into primary research.

A sidenote on libraries first. Like a good, independent fabric store, I love open stack libraries, usually found in universities. Search engines and databases are wonderful tools, but they lack the opportunity to stumble upon something one might not even have realized they needed. In researching the Art Deco period at Columbia University’s superb architecture library, I recall coming across some bound volumes of an out-of-print magazine called Pencil Points. Curious, I began thumbing through the pages from 1928-29 and discovered a rare profile of one of the lead individuals in my story.

From the open stacks of the library shelves, I move to institutional and personal archives. There's nothing like first-hand material: letters, diaries, secret documents, unpublished memoirs, and scrapbooks can unveil a story and go to the heart of the individuals who experienced such great events. Again, I don't reinvent the wheel if it is not a must. I'll first investigate papers referenced in other books, but then use those to dive deeper, looking for treasure. I'm searching for facts, color, stories, and details that have never been found--and sometimes hidden on purpose.

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This research is very much detective work. One reads of a bit player, call him Helder in a history of a great escape of WWI pilots from a prison camp. You look up this individual in the British archive—and elsewhere. Nothing. You Google the name, find a single reference in the source notes of a long out-of-print book in an archive in Canada. You track this down, but it’s a couple of letters to a woman in Ontario, call her Sue Jacobs. You hope they are married, but no. This is when the obsessive crazy takes over (very necessary). You run a genealogical search for Sue. A grandson turns up. You can’t find any contact information except a Facebook account. You write. He offers to talk on the phone. In the conversation, you discover his grandmother donated her diaries and letters from WWI to a local library. You go to the library. Two big folders come to you. Inside, dozens of letters from Helder, describing prison life, describing the key role he played in helping the pilots escape. Gold.

As any good historian or journalist knows, these stories are real but few and far between. While following the trail of Nazi war criminals in Argentina (for Hunting Eichmann), I was led into a warehouse with paper bursting out of thousands of moldy boxes stacked to the rafters. There was no index, simply "good luck". From this, and other research, I discovered the passport Adolf Eichmann used to escape Europe at the end of WWII. In Russia, I had to maneuver a labyrinth of bureaucrats and political roadblocks to enter naval archives in St. Petersburg that had not seen an American in ages. My travels for primary source material have taken me from small towns to big cities, from Lawrence, Kansas and Rjukan, Norway to Berlin, London, Buenos Aires, Washington DC, Melbourne, and Odessa.

Some of my best finds have come from families who have stored historical treasure in trunks or bound volumes that have rarely, if ever, been published. For The Winter Fortress, my history of the Norwegian patriots who sabotaged the German atomic research program, I benefited from one of the finest personal archival collections I have ever seen. One of the heroes of this story was Leif Tronstad, a brilliant scientist. He spied on the Germans after their occupation of Norway, and when exposed, he escaped to London to lead the missions against the heavy water plant at Vemork that supplied the critical ingredient to the Nazi's efforts. Tronstad had rarely been written about in these histories, yet from the diaries and secret documents his son assembled in many volumes of black binders, the truth of Leif’s essential role in these events—and their impact on him personally--was very clear. Further, his son provided personal letters written between Leif and his family during the war that revealed so much of his interior life.

Archival documents can only be bested by personal interviews. In my history of the skyscraper wars in New York in the 1920s (Higher), I was not able to interview any of the central figures or key witnesses as they were long since deceased, and to be frank, my lead characters lacked depth because of it. With my next The Perfect Mile, I enjoyed long one-on-one interviews with the three runners battling to break the record. I remember interviewing the American Wes Santee while he was driving through a graveyard. Crying, he told me of his troubled youth, of the circumstances he endured from an abusive father that fueled his drive to be the world's best miler. I'll never forget the Mossad agent who spoke of his dangerous overseas activities as if he was recounting a trip to the dry cleaner. These moments reveal a person and make it possible for them to spring to life on the page.

And sometimes, these interview/research expeditions are just plain fun, too, like learning to cross-country ski and live in snowbound cabins in the Norwegian wild, retracing the steps of the saboteurs themselves. There was nothing like being in the scene of the story (even wearing one of the saboteur’s gear, including his long underwear) to understand what they endured in advance of the mission: a winter where legend spoke of it growing so cold, so fast that flames froze in fires.

There comes a point when the collecting is done. As for when there’s no fast rule. One could arguably search a lifetime for tidbits on a single story, same as a quiltmaker could continue to hunt and collect fabric with that perfect pattern or color. For me, I stop when I’ve crossed off every primary and secondary source on my wish list (which grows throughout the assembly process) and feel in my gut that I have multiples more material than I could ever include in a book. For me, this is typically a two-year process.

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The Sorting & Structuring

At the moment I write this essay, the kitchen table in my house is a pile of fabric, some cut into squares, some still in rolls, others fragments. There are patterns of floral, chevrons, zigzags, and flywheels. There’s ivory green, black and white, periwinkle blues, and pink. Lots of pinks. Most of the fabric is cotton, but there’s some linen there, and something called Voile. I do not know what this is but it feels like silk. My daughter Martha could sit at this table for hours, sorting and envisioning how her quilt would look, but she’s a kid and so she sometimes haphazardly begins. My grandmother was much more rigorously organized in her efforts. Before she ever brought fabric to the sewing machine, she knew every piece of material she would use, what shape they would be cut, and how they would be put together. The beautiful and intricately symmetrical quilts she made reflect this attention to detail and process.

Once I’ve gathered my mountains of research for a book, I follow a similar process. My method may not call to mind Kerouac or Hemingway, of mad-eyed geniuses toiling in Parisian garrets, but it works for me. Every book is broken down into pages of interest and brief summaries of what they contain (for instance: Battle for Norway, p.88 – attack in Trondheim where Leif Tronstad lived). Same for every interview, diary, and private letter. By the end, I have a monster file, thousands of summary lines in Excel of what I’ve uncovered in my research—and where it exists on my computer, bookshelves, or file cabinets. Glamorous, it is not. Supremely useful, yes

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Then I repeatedly read over this file until these summaries swim and coalesce into rough order in my head. I take notes on timelines, key subjects that need their own mini-histories, and essential characters that need fleshing out. Afterward, I put it away…and go away. Far from my desk. Far from my house, if the family allows. A beach. A mountain. A hideaway in the woods—anything to unwind, free me from the swirls of research. When I return, I sit down, notebook in hand, old school, and hatch out the structure of my book with no computer in sight.

John McPhee, the New Yorker writer and master of structure, speaks of how he breaks down many of his stories into an ABC/D format. I won’t dare explain but read him. He is a genius. Mine is a more simplistic and no doubt inspired by an amalgam of grade school English instruction, screenplay theory, Aristotle’s Poetics, and a lifetime of reading both bad manuscripts and great novels and histories.

I start with what is the book’s beginning, middle, and end (let’s call it B/M/E—McPhee watch out). Then I break down the “Beginning” into its own B/M/E, including what characters and backstory need to be introduced as well as what is the driving momentum of the narrative that leads into the core of the story. This “Middle” is divided with the same B/M/E, focused primarily on what forces the characters affect and are affected by, how the characters develop (change) to match these challenges, and what is the leap they need to take that moves them toward the “Ending”. Again, in this third stage, B/M/E, with a heavy bent toward action and narrative drive to a rousing conclusion. Since I write fact, not fiction, this structure needs to adhere to the truth and a certain chronology, but with the right interplay between various lead individuals in a history, the construct usually works.

Once I have these breakdowns, I structure them into chapters—and even sections within chapters (for instance: Saboteurs sneak into the German guard plant at night, climbing a cliffside. This could be Chapter 14, section 2—or 14.2). Stay with me here. Almost done. Then, once I’ve hashed this out, I sit on it again, and make some revisions, then I’m ready to finish the sorting. Every line of my Excel file gets a number for where this research would best fit into the book. If it’s an oral history interview with one of my saboteurs of almost slipping during the climb of the cliff, the line receives a 14.2. Over weeks, I assign all my research to a spot in the book. There are even subheadings for characters and subject matter, but I believe I’ve offered enough of a window into my crazy.

When finished with this phase and the time comes to write (and boy, am I ready to write at that point), then I look at my chapter breakdown, prompt my Excel file to spit out all the references I need to read before launching into Chapter 1, section 1, and off I go.

Part inspiration, part preparation, I am a writer as a quiltmaker. Perhaps one day, I’ll even learn to sew too. To learn more about my books, here’s my author website www.nealbascomb.com