Kristin: I’m drawn to ask you about your process because I’m trying to get in my mind how something [like this book evolves]. You said you outlined, but you also work on things for years, and then you said that this book sort of began as a story about a contemporary tribe in Italy. So this book then, over time, blossomed into all of these other areas - one of the things about writing that I love is the magic that happens not on the page, but the magic that happens in your discovery period. When your friend says, “Here take a class on gemology,” or you just happen to be in Scotland and stumble upon this story that finds its way into what you’re doing - it fits thematically but blows the doors off. So you’re like plucking these bits of magic and so my question is, how does this work for you? Do you outline the original story and change it? Or do you wait until you’ve got the whole story and then begin?
Adriana: Well, full disclosure, I had gone down a rabbit hole about Orson Welles, who makes no appearance in this novel now, but could have. I cut about three hundred pages from this novel, which was the Winston Churchill storyline. I found a story about Winston Churchill in 1955 early on in my research process- and was struck by his desperation late in life- to get back into the game. I found it sad, after all he did, after all he had done - he was voted out by the very countrymen whose lives and families he had saved as a result of his leadership during World War II- they seemed to have forgotten the debt to him 12 years or so on. Well, I found a story that’s pretty well chronicled but I wanted to dramatize it, which was centered around Winston Churchill and his love of Italy. He lloved Italy and he loved Italians, which is why what happened to the Italian Scots so horrific, because he knew us, he knew us, right? But what happened was, he would go to Italy to paint. At first I thought what was so interesting there was he chose the particular towns that related to this tragedy - also he did a lot in Tuscany. But here was the story: Orson Welles in 1955… was in Italy trying to make money to make a movie, as we all do when we make movies… Orson Welles, by some weird coincidence, was staying at the same hotel as Winston Churchill and his wife… And all this juicy stuff [about how Winston Churchill helped Welles get financing to make his movie] was in my book, but it wasn’t what it was about [so I cut it out].
Kristin: So do you edit a lot? I still wanna know - like how do you do this? Do you write draft after draft? Do you write longhand? Do you write in order?
Adriana: I do handwriting, but I don’t do handwriting like you do. I type - because I’m a typist… But I keep notebooks. If I could turn the camera, and I can’t, you would see - almost as tall as I am - a stack of notebooks. I’m constantly writing down notes. And so that’s how my novels take shape… and then if I have a conversation with you, I’m doodling while I’m talking to you on the phone or whatever, I write down what you say, and then later I revisit it. But I rewrite sentences sometimes hundreds of times. I mean, [the first line of The Good Left Undone] “the mountain was a tabernacle with one door” took, I don’t know, hundreds of tries. I know it was hundreds…
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