Finding the Right Way to Tell the Story

I’m so delighted that so many of you responded to news of my new novel, Black and White and Read All Over, being published on May 1. It’s less than a month away, so if interested, please go to my website — williamkinsolving.com — where you can order an advance copy. It’s really the easiest and quickest way to get the book — hardcover, paperback, or Kindle.

A number of you asked a great question, one that I never thought to answer before, for myself or anyone else. I compacted the questions into: “You said in your blog that you ‘look around for a project,’ and then start research. Because you’ve written in so many different forms — novel, play, screenplay, even a musical — when do you know which one you’ll use for the current project? Right up front, or does that occur later?”

This is a great question because I’ve never asked it. It’s even better here, because with Black and White and Read All Over, it took two false starts in other forms and a real struggle to figure out who should tell the story. I mean, look: It’s a vicious trial between the unwilling leading characters, Alice Jones and Leonard Rhinelander — an infamous, shocking trial that turned customs of law upside down. That just naturally lends itself to a play (think Witness for the Prosecution or Inherit the Wind), or a movie (think A Few Good Men or 12 Angry Men). I did 10 pages of a play, 20 of a screenplay — the two false starts — trying to find the best way to tell the whole story.

A play or a movie is, on average, about 120 to 150 minutes long. What I couldn’t get with those two forms was enough space (time) to tell what came to be, for me, a greater story than the trial: the revelatory romance between Alice and Leonard — revelatory because, through them, the reader gets not only their story but the nation’s culture, its bigotry, and its corrosive economic stratification.

Once a “novel” was decided on — and research goes on all during these processes — I next had a number of flare-outs trying to find who best could tell the story. I mean, I didn’t wanna do it! That is, I didn’t want a third-person, all-seeing, editorializing, literarily striving narrator. I wanted someone deeply involved who had a strong point of view, and with emotions to be rigidly controlled during very hard times. I tried a secretly sympathetic Rhinelander lawyer for half a chapter, then for 35 pages a female journalist from a local paper who’d naturally be an appropriate teller of the tale. But neither was close enough to have believable and in-depth access to the family. I hope you’ll agree with me on whom I chose.

In the next blog, I’ll write about at what point in the research I start writing, false start or no. The process I used to write Black and White and Read All Over is little different than how I worked on the other six books I’ve published. But those “little differences” are really significant, at least to me — and I hope to you, too.

Please visit the website if you have a chance — williamkinsolving.com — to pre-order the new book and — well, why not? You can also see what my other books are about, and even get a glimpse of my acting and saloon-singing careers!

Such a deal…!