Eventually I realized that the only thing that guarantees failure is never trying. If you aren’t willing to take risks and sometimes write badly, you’ll never discover what you can do. The miracle of fiction isn’t producing an adequate chapter that fits into your plot. It’s pulling out something from inside you that you didn’t know existed. The trick is to keep reaching for that, morning after morning.
Looking back, I wish I hadn’t doubted myself so often. A writer, especially a beginner, should be humble and always trying to learn. But it’s awful to stand on the brink of giving up. If you’re brave enough to write a book, be proud of yourself and keep going.
Like Tristan, you dropped everything to go on a European adventure, quitting your job and moving to Berlin. What motivated you to move to that city? How did you prepare for the transatlantic move?
I lived in Europe on and off after college, but eventually I wound up working at a law firm in New York. It was a good job and I loved living near my friends. But I felt unsatisfied. I wanted more to my life than an office job, and I felt I had something to give, but I didn’t know where to put it.
I started working on the book. I’d tried writing fiction before, but after I developed this story it became more serious. I wrote nights and on weekends. Gradually I realized the book was the one thing I was doing that I really cared about.
A few years before this, I’d stopped in Berlin for a few days, and I’d been fascinated by it ever after. It was unlike anywhere I’d been in Europe — a vast capital full of unpredictable spaces. When you went out in Berlin, you never knew where the night would take you. I thought it would be the perfect place to write a book.
So I saved as much money as I could and quit my job. I left for Berlin with a plot outline, a few rough scenes and three suitcases full of research books. Even once I was on the plane I couldn’t believe I was really doing it.
In The Steady Running of the Hour the action alternates from World War I to present day. Why did you chose to structure the novel with alternating chapters? Was it difficult to change time frames while you were writing? Or did you write each time frame all at once?
I alternated the chapters because I wanted both stories to progress at the same time, and I didn’t want the past to feel too “historical.”And I wanted them both in the present tense, to have the same immediacy. A big question in the book is whether Tristan’s life — or anything in our contemporary lives — can measure up to this epic notion of history, the Great War or the Battle of the Somme. But people don’t think about history while it’s happening. It’s personal mythologies that matter, the stories that Ashley tells himself about Imogen for seven years, or the way that Tristan feels about Ashley and Imogen.
I didn’t write the book in chronological order. I just wrote scenes when I felt ready. The Everest and war chapters were written last, because I wanted to research as much as possible before writing. I felt so much pressure to get the historical chapters right that it was a relief to write Tristan’s chapters, because I could relax a bit and rely more on firsthand experience.
Anton DiSclafani called The Steady Running of the Hour “an astonishingly vast, meticulously plotted, and beautifully told novel.” There are so many twists and turns throughout Tristan’s quest: can you tell us how you were able to plot them out so precisely? Did you know how Tristan’s search would end when you began writing?
When I started the book I plotted it carefully. I probably made ten outlines in ten different notebooks. I felt everything had to unfold in a very particular way. But of course I made mistakes, or characters or events changed and I had to replot things.
As the writing went on, I realized that knowing what happens is just the beginning. Next you have to figure out how things will happen, where they will occur among the alternating story lines, which characters will know about them and how they will find out. The infinite permutations are enough to give you a headache. Eventually you have to just follow your instinct.
I always had an image of where Tristan’s search would end. I’d gone hitchhiking in Iceland and I remembered a particular fjord, where I got dropped off and no more cars came. I lay down on a black sand beach and instantly fell asleep, as if I was meant to have some kind of vision. It felt like the end point of the long trip I’d taken across Europe, a destination I’d arrived at without knowing I’d been traveling toward a destination. I knew I wanted Tristan to end there. But what it actually meant for him to reach that fjord — the meaning of that developed as his story grew.
When talking about his research Tristan says, “All I need is one good piece of evidence, and I keep getting sidetracked. It’s hard because… every time I got sidetracked I found the best stuff.” How did you conduct your research for the novel? Do Tristan’s research methods mirror your own?
At the beginning I read very broadly. I got to Berlin with thick surveys of the Great War and Everest and Edwardian Britain. But eventually I realized that specific knowledge was far more useful than historical overviews. I didn’t need to know everything about Franz Ferdinand or British Imperial policy toward Tibet. What I really needed was to know what it felt like to be there. So I became obsessed with figuring out what the streetlights looked like in London in the summer of 1916, or what kind of dishes you could get in a good hotel, or what the mud felt like in the Somme that November.
A lot of that research was similar to Tristan’s. But he never worries about the thing that I found the hardest, which is getting inside a culture. It’s one thing to be correct with superficial details. But to be true to an entire vanished civilization — the way different people talked or acted, what they cared about, what they shared and what they kept to themselves — it’s nearly hopeless. The closest you can get is reading what these people left behind, their letters or diaries or memoirs. So I read as much as I could, until I felt neck deep in their world. No amount of research ever felt sufficient. But at some point I just had to close my eyes and imagine.
As Tristan researches more about Ashley and Imogen, he is often surprised. Did anything surprise you when you were conducting your own research for the book? If so, what?
I was surprised nearly every day. And if I wasn’t surprised, I’d feel like I wasn’t learning enough. It’s the surprising things that shift your view of a period, or give you details that later become important. I’d be trying to figure out how long it took to send a letter from the Somme to London, and I would read something unexpected about codes in soldiers’ letters. Often I barely noticed these things when I first read them, but they stayed inside me and came out later.
The best surprise was writing something from my imagination, then finding it mirrored an archive later, in a document I’d never seen before. It was usually trivial things — I’d imagine Imogen knitting an afghan, or Ashley writing a telegram about Poste Restante letters, or Eleanor ordering certain pigments from Paris. Then I’d read a letter mentioning knitting an afghan all night or Prussian blue pigments or Poste Restante letters. It felt like a small miracle every time it happened. I hadn’t done anything special, of course. I’d simply seen a detail elsewhere and it had entered my picture of the period, so I had put it in the novel. But it felt good to be vindicated.