The Art of Crafting a Novel: In Conversation with Ann Hood
In Ann Hood’s latest novel, The Stolen Child, the protagonist, Nick Burns has been tormented by a choice he made as a young soldier during World War I, when a French artist he had grown close to suddenly vanished, leaving him with her artwork—and her infant. In 1974, facing a terminal illness, Nick recruits Jenny, a restless college dropout hungry for excitement, to help uncover the truth. Their search takes them from art galleries in Paris to quiet towns, ultimately leading to an unexpected destination: the Museum of Tears, the creation of a reclusive Italian artisan. As they pursue the fate of the missing child and artist, the idealistic Jenny and the gruff, world-weary Nick are forced to confront old wounds, broken promises, and the pasts they’ve tried to forget.
Hood sat down with Camilla Marchese Gonzalez to share the writing process, the inspiration behind her latest novel.
What sparked the idea to write this book?
One day, I found an Instagram account by a National Geographic photographer who photographed trenches in France where they had discovered art by the soldiers who had been stationed there. It really piqued my interest, so I wrote to that photographer and asked him if I could visit the site. Unfortunately, the answer was no, because the trenches are so fragile people can’t really go down to them without special permission. When you tell a fiction writer that they can’t see something they see it in their imagination. This gave me the idea of creating the character of a young soldier. When we think about the war we think about battles, ferocity and the tensions. But a lot of it is about waiting around, waiting for a battle to start, waiting for the Germans to approach, in this case. People were actually bored, which seems strange. I wanted to create a character who was an artistic soul and was in this war. So that was one part of what inspired the novel.
The other inspiration came when I visited Paris and went to the Musee des Orsay. I love this museum, I’ve been there many times. It struck me how there were very few, if any, female artists represented. Not long after I had that thought, I went into one of the galleries and was struck by this painting of a white cow, covered with mud. To my surprise, it was painted by a female artist and I became obsessed with her art. I wanted to create a character who was an artist and write about the challenges for women artists in France at that time.
Then the third aspect, which actually was the first thing that got me started was that one day, I was sad and crying and I wonder how many times I’ve cried in my life. Millions? Billions? Then I thought that I wish I had saved them all, and wrote down why I cried. That sparked the idea for the Museum of Tears which is a thread throughout the book.
Those three ideas formed around the same time, and I figured out a way to make them part of the same story.
A lot of the novel explores different themes of grief. How did you play around with the concepts in the novel, and how did they shape the writing process?
Unfortunately, that is the theme that I explore the most, based on a lifetime of personal losses, including the loss of my brother, my only sibling, when I was 25, and he was 30. My father died when he was in his 60s, but that was too young. And then I lost my 5-year-old daughter a couple years after my father died. My first novel, Somewhere Off The Coast Of Maine, came out five years after my brother died. I don’t want to keep telling the same story over and over, so I always try to look at grief from different directions. In The Stolen Child, for example, there’s the love story, the loss of love, that’s a different kind of grief when a love is unrequited. I wanted to explore all the ways in which we confront this, experience this, and also, our redemption—how we march through it.
What was your writing process in organizing the different timelines and POV that the novel explores?
I always think that writers are not just writers, they’re like architects and mechanics mechanics—they’re fixing all the things that are wrong. A book is like a building, it’s a structure. Each book has a different structure, and so before I begin, I try to think of how I will build my story. In one of my novels, The Red Thread, I built it imitating the amount of time it takes to adopt a child. I had a nine-month to a year timeline, and each section was the part of the process parents go through. The interview, the orientation, the waiting—that was decided beforehand, because writing is to solve how all the pieces fit together. I can follow a pattern and knit one thing, but If I want to make the sleeves shorter, or the sweater longer, or the pattern bigger, I have to change the architecture of the sweater, so I see a book that way. Ultimately, I actually go to the stationery store on 6th Avenue, very close to the New School, and I buy poster boards, markers, and post-it notes. I spend a bit of time creating a storyline, not an outline. Because of the type of person I am, if there was an outline, I’d have to follow it exactly. I wouldn’t feel free to change it around. I like different angles when looking at a story. For example with Enzo’s timeline, I actually have the Museum of Tears be introduced every 30 to 35 pages. I wanted to see how long we can go without touching base with that, to keep it in the reader’s mind. I just asked myself all these questions that shaped the structure as I wrote.
Before creating the structure, did you know that you wanted to tell the story with these three main characters? Was it mapped since the beginning, or did that come later for you?
That’s a really great question.I first came up with the idea of the Museum of Tears. I sat down and wrote what is now the first chapter of the book. I thought that was gonna be my story. I wrote maybe one or two other Museum of Tears chapters when I realized there wasn’t enough conflict in it, that it just wasn’t a novel. It was just a guy going around collecting tears, which is interesting, but it does not make a novel. I wondered what I could do with it, I didn’t actually put it aside, but I had those other things kind of bubbling around in my head, and thought about the timeline I wanted to use, with time jumps from World War II to the 1970s. I got very excited, because I realized that although the Museum of Tears couldn’t be its own book it had potential for developing character and relationships.
Was there a specific aspect that surprised or excited you the most when writing?
For me, a lot of the excitement comes from revision. For many drafts, I killed Nick without learning about the stolen child and what had happened when he left that baby. My editor said “the reader’s gonna be so mad at you. This guy’s life has been hell. He’s taken his last weeks to go back to find out… And you just are not letting him have peace.” Initially, I resisted changing it, but I think that’s the magic of revision, that I could rewrite it and still get the effect I wanted. Having him live to know what happened–that was a really exciting turn for me.
What was revision like specifically in the novel , when did you know that it was ready?
It’s never ready to be published, it’s more like this story had taken to a point that you were content with it being out in the world. I can write a draft of a novel in 6 months to a year, but it takes me 2 to 5 years to revise that. Because this is my fourteenth novel, I pretty much do it the same way each time. There might be some specificity for whatever the story is. Basically what I do is write up to page 75–whatever is a natural chapter break. I send it to my agent to read and she sends back notes. My husband is also a writer and he also reads it and gives me notes.
But I don’t really show it to anybody else. Once I revise according to the notes on those opening pages,I just write to the end. When I think I finished, I print out the manuscript and I take it to revise a different place to where I wrote it. I do all my revisions in handwriting. I put it away for 1 to 3 months, because if I start to revise right away, I’m still too delighted with myself. [laughs] If I wait, I can read it with more objectivity.
For example, I’m revising a novel now. I haven’t touched it since March, and I just started revisions. I make sure to revise everything which includes small things like, oh, I repeated words, or the language is a little sloppy, or I used a cliche, or changing punctuation, etc, to rethinking scenes or writing new scenes that I do on the back of the pages. It’s a really thorough revision, not just, like, a copy editing.Then I take those pages, and this is where I am on my new novel. I do the revision process multiple times. For me, I just do it untilI I can’t even find a comma to take out.That’s why revision takes so long.
Would you give us a sneak peak to your next project?
It’s untitled right now because everybody unanimously hated the title I had [laughs]. I really had fun writing it. It is quite serious in places, but it’s a time travel romance. The woman who’s time-traveling is doing it to save her daughter, following the themes that I’ve written about. I’m having fun—writing the first draft, or even the first couple drafts is really a glorious time for a writer, because you’re so free.There’s no one commenting, no one standing over your shoulder. You’re just free to make mistakes, to change as you write. It’s one of the best feelings in the world.
This interview series is produced by Camilla Marchese Gonzalez.