I’m delighted to welcome Nick Taylor back to 1st Books. Nick did the 4th post ever here back when his first novel, The Disagreement, was published in May of 2008. It went on to win the Michael Shaara Prize for Civil War Fiction. Now he’s back with a new novel, Father Junípero’s Confessor. Nick has also received a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, among other honors. And he’ll have a thriller coming under a pseudonym next year as well. – Meg
Currently Nick serves as Associate Professor of English and Director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University.
In 2014, Doubleday will publish his first thriller, The Setup Man, under the pseudonym T.T. Monday.
It’s no secret that female readers make up most of the market for fiction, as much as 80% according to some surveys. Every fiction writer knows this, so I should not have been surprised when the publisher of my first novel, The Disagreement, declined a proposal for my next project, a novel about the Spanish Franciscan monks who settled California in the 1770s.
That’s monks, mind you, not nuns. In fact the first draft of my new book had a total of zero female characters. This was going to be a big problem. I remember my agent asking me, “Is there any way the friars could have brought along some women?”
As a writer of historical fiction, I feel obligated to respect what actually happened in the times and places where I set my stories. In the case of Spanish California, the historical record states very clearly that the friars did not bring any European women. But there were plenty of women among the California natives.
“Great idea!” my agent said. “A forbidden romance!”
Um, no. I was planning to attribute plenty of misdeeds to my zealous friars, but sleeping with native women was not one of them. All my research suggested that these men took their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience very seriously. At least among the first wave of missionaries, I was sure there had been no hanky-panky.
“You know, Nick,” my agent said, “almost all fiction readers are women, so without any female characters, I won’t be able to sell this book–”
“I’ll think of something,” I said.
I tell students that writing fiction can be a fun hobby, but being a professional writer isn’t about writing–it’s about revision. Case in point: banging your head against a wall trying to shoehorn Spanish women onto missionary voyage that clearly had none.
Then it occurred to me that the women didn’t necessarily need to be physically present on the voyage. What if they existed in my characters’ dreams or memories? That was too abstract. But what about letters? What if the women and the friars were correspondents? A character could exist only in letters, right? Bram Stoker’s Dracula consisted only of letters (and journals, and other written artifacts), and no one would deny that Mina Harker was a legitimate character.
So I tried it out, giving my protagonist a female cousin, Encarnación Mora, whom we meet in Mallorca before he sets sail for America. They correspond frequently, and through their letters we watch them grow closer than they were before he left. Eventually the protagonist questions his vocation and considers (much too late, for by this point he is on the other side of the globe) that he might have stayed in Spain and married her. It isn’t a happy love story, but it is a type of love story, and most importantly, I didn’t have to alter history.
And even if the correspondents’ story doesn’t end well, mine does: the novel, Father Junípero’s Confessor, is just out. – Nick
