The Story I Wanted to Tell

In the spring  of 1978, I found the story I wanted to tell while flipping through a Time magazine from 1944. I read an article about a group of German Navy prisoners of war who had tunneled out of a P.O.W. Camp near Phoenix, AZ. I was intrigued. “This would make a great novel,” I thought. And it has. But getting there took decades.

I had first to teach myself how to write a novel. “How hard can that be?” Harder than I ever could have imagined. Writing An Honorable German has been a humbling experience at times. I had no idea how many years and how much sweat went into writing a good novel. I also had to know German history so well I could write from the point of view of a German. That took reading a few hundred books.

I wrote the first drafts of An Honorable German in the early 1980s. Yet it didn’t match my vision. My writing style is very fast paced. But finding that writer’s voice within me took a lot of time and a lot of writing. My mentor, Al Rose, an author and historian of jazz, told me,“writers write and that’s what you need to do; just write, it doesn’t matter what.” And so I did.

I poured my heart and soul into An Honorable German for years. It was good. But it wasn’t great. I knew I had the talent. I knew I could do better. But emotionally, I just couldn’t write anymore so I stopped. 

Years later a friend read the manuscript and took it a Deborah Grosvenor, a literary agent in Washington, DC. She had discovered Tom Clancy, so she had a stellar reputation. She agreed to represent me. I knew this my chance and took it. I quit my job to devote all of my energy to rewriting and polishing my novel.

When I started working with my editor, Mitch Hoffman, he taught me this invaluable lesson: to move the story forward, each scene has to tell us something we don’t know.  This forced me to cut scenes I loved and had labored over. I found this the most difficult part of the editing process.

The two years I spent writing and re-writing and editing An Honorable German were a rollercoaster of emotions--exciting, depressing, euphoric, stressful, fun, sometimes miserable, often tense. But when I was on a roll and writing so fast my laptop was smoking--those moments of sheer creativity--when I was re-creating a world from long ago--those times made it all worth it. Often I would read over what I had written and say to myself, “I did that.” It still surprises me nor can I explain how it happens.