Melanie Dobson (https://melaniedobson.com/) who has been writing historical/contemporary novels for 25 years, published for 20 years, and is on the Sherwood library board. If you missed her talk, you missed a lively tour of history, research, and literary inspiration.

Melanie says she writes to support her research habit. But, of course, the question is how do you start, and how do you stop that research.

See https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2018/05/22/the-national-archives-larger-than-life-statues/ if you want to find the “Study the Past” statue that so inspired Melanie. Her studies of the past have included trips to France (to the chateau where family friends grew up, helping allied airmen escape occupied France in WWII), England (to see the spy files first hand!), Netherlands (where she saw a Dutch edition of her translated book), and more.

Where do her ideas come from?

1. WWII stories sell at the moment, so her publisher has her under contract to write some. But she doesn’t have a story, characters or place in mind at the start.
2. Someone told her there are “caves” near Maastricht – a photo looks somewhat like a tunnel entrance. She was interested.
3. Doing some research introduced her to the labyrinth of mines where people would hide in secret rooms during German bombing. It was enough to get started. It was an idea.

Turning idea into book takes 5 steps:

1. The SPARK: What are the caves? What happened there? While researching, she stumbled on the story of a man (aged 107!) who had been the principal of a school, across the road from the theater that was used to gather Jews for deportation Next door was a nursery and day care. And the three leading characters, from these three places, worked together to release and transport Jewish children to safety.
   1. Useful tools at this stage include online maps, google earth, emails, articles…
   1. She was able to connect to the gentleman’s daughter and “talk” to people close to him.
   1. The spark is becoming a story.
2. The RESEARCH: Start by invading the library. Useful tools now include:
   1. The reference library – Washington County is great!
   1. The reference librarian – they can (and want to help you) find things that you would struggle to find on your own.
   1. Librarians in the towns you’re going to visit. Contact them before you travel and ask your questions. They have the resources and the connections you need, including connections to locals.
   1. The Library of Congress.
3. EXPLORE museums, landmarks, the countryside.
   1. Make notes
   1. Make connections with locals and experts – maybe even an expert mortician if your character is going to dig up the dead!
   1. Ask for email addresses so you can get in touch later.
4. INTERVIEW your experts. Even if you start off shy, you’ll soon discover experts love to share what they know. Just be sure you do due diligence first so they’re sharing serious stuff rather than trivialities you really should have found out on your own.
   1. She learned how to open a 400-year-old casket! But she had to promise not to try to do it herself.
   1. Sometimes an expert won’t want to talk because other people have written books and “got it wrong.” Convince them that you intend to get it right. Then get it right! Don’t let them down.
5. VISIT locations. This was harder in Covid but there are virtual reality tours, and tours where a real person walks you around (virtually) answering questions as you go.
   1. From a real visit, you’ll get a sense for the sights, sounds, smells and other sensory details
   1. You’ll learn where children would have played in this location
   1. The people you meet will influence your writing and your characters
   1. You’ll learn about unexpected details that make your book more authentic:
      1. The stamp that influential Jews had to stop them being deported.
      1. Where they were sent when time ran out and they were going to be deported
      1. With a few crazy coincidences, you might meet the grown-up children, now living in Oregon, who were hidden with strangers through the war because their parents were Jews!

How do you stop researching and start writing?

1. Melanie is a full-time writer. She spends a month, full-time, on research then puts the research aside and starts writing. She’ll continue with extra research as needed, taking opportunities as they arise. And she’ll work to her own (and her publisher’s) deadline so she knows when she has to stop.

What are some of Melanie’s WWII books?

• Memories of Glass was released in Dutch in the Netherlands at the same as its English US release! It’s now published in many languages, including German.
• Melanie’s latest book, The Winter Rose, came out in January. Her travel research was all done online due to Covid, though she would have loved to visit the South of France
• The Curator’s Daughter is set in the art tunnels at Nuremberg, with a Nazi archeologist as protagonist.
• Hidden among the Stars is set in the Alps, with a (real) castle by a lake, where things dumped by escaping Nazi officers still appear from time to time.

What was she writing before WWII books?

• She started with history books – her passion – but in 1999 no one was buying historical fiction except from famous authors. The first book she sold was a contemporary novel.
• She started out writing about the 1800s, went back to Biblical times, moved on to the Revolutionary War…
• She’s writing WWII novels now because one sold well and a publisher signed her on to write more.
• People read historical fiction when the present world gets too stressful.
• Time-Slip fiction is fiction where a contemporary character is affected by events of history, leading to parallel timelines side by side.
• Her Love Finds You In… books are set in the US.
  • The Stranger and the Society are set in the Amana community in Iowa
  • See https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078MD34K9 for the Legacy of Love series (originally Love finds you in… and others – see below for republishing after getting rights back)

How many publishers has she had?

• Eight!
• Publishers come and go. One of her publishers was sold (with her books) to another company which didn’t push her books, so she asked to “get her rights back.” Sometimes that’s really difficult, and sometimes you have to check what your contract says. They gave her the rights back and she rereleased the books.
• Her publishers provide the covers
• She has an agent who will deal with questions about contracts, covers, marketing…
• She has a box full of rejection slips from her first 7 years of writing, including a rejection from her current publisher for a book they have now published, and one from her present agent!

Useful Links from Melanie’s talk:
https://books.google.com/ngrams for Google engrams (see Melanie’s talk) to see how and when words were used, and

1. https://onelook.com/ a great way to find words (with thanks to Melanie again)
2. https://www.merriam-webster.com/ will give you the first time a word was used