Flashback: The Year It All Began

Over the next few months, I’ll be reviving some of my most substantial, evergreen newsletters as blog posts so that anyone can read them. And so it begins!

The year was 1994. Schindler’s List won the Best Picture Oscar. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon. (Remember the days when it sold only books and you got a free bookmark with every order? I do!) I turned fourteen and entered my Freshman year of high school.

I also started writing a historical saga about a family on the Oregon Trail who became separated from the rest of their wagon train. In the past, I’d written novellas in journals with pretty covers, but I could already predict that the new story would be epic in scale. I knew I’d need more pages than a slim journal, so I decided on a Mead notebook: fat, lined, and spiral—boring but utilitarian.

I didn’t yet have a computer. I did have a Brother word processor with a narrow green screen, essentially a typewriter that let you save your work on floppy disks. I liked to write my first drafts longhand so that I’d be forced to go over every word as I inputted the second draft into the word processor.

Little did I know just how many drafts I’d write of my historical epic… I’ve lost count, and it depends on the scene in question. I’ve easily rewritten some parts twenty times, and they would take up the next three decades of my life.

I used a bunch of pretty journals after all but to hold my research notes. So many research notes, on everything from the Haitian Revolution to celibacy to Egyptian Revival architecture to Charleston gardens to slavery to horseback riding to blood transfusions to corsets to Cheyenne Indians. For a selected bibliography, check out this page.

Back in 1994, I thought I was writing a single, albeit doorstopper-sized, novel. In its final form, the Lazare Family Saga is four fat books and more than half a million meticulously researched, finely polished words.

Many, many times over the years, I doubted I would ever finish this project. I couldn’t figure out where the story began—or where it ended. If I did A, could I also do B, or were those choices mutually exclusive? My characters wouldn’t stop talking; scene after scene came to me, but how would I ever stitch them together? I was terrified that even if I managed to start well and the middle was strong, the saga would end with a whimper.

After nearly three decades, when I typed the final words (this time on an iMac), I knew I’d pulled it off. I reached my mountaintop with a little help from my writing friends: my critique partners, beta readers, and editor, who gave me fantastic feedback and kept me from getting lost along the way. Those final words exist because of my editor in particular, who suggested closing with René’s point-of-view. When she read the new Epilogue, she said: “You absolutely nailed this. Way to tie it all together. This ending is nothing short of spectacular.”

Exactly what an author wants to hear.