From outward appearances, writing books is not a swashbuckling career choice.
Writers of fiction and nonfiction gems share one thing — a lot of alone time. They type into computers or draft words on yellow legal pads. They rub eyes after hours of editing. They occasionally nod off as they sink into dusty records in obscure archives or get lost in spreadsheets. For fun, they may make site visits to get the feel of places that later appear in books.
If, however, you could peek inside the heads of people writing books, you would find a lot of excitement as they paint scenes with words, craft the measured pace of interesting tales, develop characters and work ideas from interesting abstracts into dramatic stories.
With more than 80 of the world’s top writers in the Holy City from Nov. 7 to Nov. 16 for the packed, world-class Charleston Literary Festival, let’s peek inside the minds of three writers who will speak so you can learn what they go through in building their award-winning books.
Fields-Black: Getting into the pluff mud
Edda Fields-Black, a Miami-born historian with Lowcountry roots, spends a lot of time in archives to get the information she needs to tell moving stories of often nameless African Americans who left few, if any, written records.
In 2025, her research-based diligence led to a Pulitzer Prize in History for COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom during the Civil War.
She and her staff at Carnegie Mellon University spend a lot of time vacuuming information from archival records, collections, stories, antebellum transactions and pension files into databases. It helps them keep up with oodles of facts and an array of information so it can be crafted into compelling narratives.
“When I’m in the archives, I cast a very wide net and try to get all of the puzzle pieces,” she said. “Then as my research questions evolve, I usually have the pieces I need to put the puzzle together and form a single repository and can move on to the next.”
In COMBEE, Fields-Black used more than 175 U.S. Civil War pension files and other documents to reconstruct the stories of enslaved South Carolinians who freed themselves on June 2, 1863, in the Combahee River Raid. At that time just five months after the Emancipation Proclamation, abolitionist Harriet Tubman led a group of 150 Black Union soldiers as Union ships rescued more than 750 enslaved Africans. Many later joined the Union Army.
Fields-Black, who got to know the Lowcountry as a child visiting the family of her paternal grandmother in Green Pond, said the occasionally frustrating times she spends transcribing and looking at archival documents are not the only way she gets information. Insights also come from visiting sites, such as Combahee River marshes.
At one point during a research visit, she wrote about people running through the rice fields to get to the boats. The next morning before sunrise, she found herself going through pluff mud in bare feet to feel what it was like. She then encountered a baby alligator, which caused her to run.
“I figured the mother alligator couldn’t be too far behind. So I unsuccessfully tried to run but discovered the pluff mud was too quicksand-like and the vegetation simultaneously slippery and prickly.”
So she walked — and revised the previous day’s passage, which made for a better book.
- IF YOU WANT TO GO: Fields-Black will talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight at 2 p.m. Nov. 12 at the Dock Street Theatre. Tickets are $30.
Pavone: Outline and plan
Novelist Chris Pavone was working as a young copy editor in New York when legendary South Carolina writer Pat Conroy taught him something that has helped through the years.
Back in 1995, Pavone was working with Conroy on revisions for his novel Beach Music.
“He knew I wanted advice, but he turned every conversation back toward me — my job, my family, my social life,” Pavone recalled. “It was very frustrating until our final day together when he advised me: ‘Listen to other people’s stories,’ he said. ‘Listen carefully.’ ”
Pavone, whose new book is The Doorman, said he then realized Conroy had been working in a different way — listening to Pavone’s stories — during the revision process. Conroy knew, Pavone concluded, that “writing fiction isn’t something you do only when you’re typing. It’s something you’re doing all the time.”
A Cornell graduate whose first novel, The Expats, received broad praise, Pavone said he plans his books carefully using an outline.
“I write meticulously, according to plan — the plot, the twists, the themes, the tensions,” he told the Charleston City Paper. “When I get to the end of a first draft, I set the thing aside for a bit.
“Then I read it through again, focusing on one question: What more can happen? Then I dive back in there, and I make more happen.”
In a June substack post about beginning a new book, Pavone related how the most important initial part of the book-writing process is to draft a one-page summary. He said he refers to it constantly to make sure he’s on track.
“Until I can describe a book, I don’t actually have a book, no matter how much I believe I do,” he wrote.
He might know pieces of it — the setting, characters, themes, some stories and maybe the ending. But until he writes a description — something that can take a long time to complete — it’s not a bonafide book project for him.
“It’s this exercise of describing a book that forces me to focus on all the necessary elements, how they fit together and what makes this a novel and not just a setting, not just a character, not just a predicament.”
Another benefit of the one-pager: It’s about the same length as the description of the book on the inside flap.
- IF YOU WANT TO GO: Pavone will talk with Professor Anne Blessing at 6 p.m., Nov. 12, at the Dock Street Theatre. Tickets are $30.
Sobel: Stringing together lots of term papers
Unlike writers who rely on interviews for source material, nonfiction author Dava Sobel will tell you she spends a lot of time with the “long dead.”
It’s in the reading of old stuff that she discovers nuggets that tug at her.
“The choice of topic happens usually unexpectedly,” said the 78-year-old writer who now lives in Charlotte to be nearer to family. “I’m reading, looking for one thing, and I learn something else that really surprises me and delights me, and I really want to know more about that. That is usually how it starts.”
And that’s what happened with Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2000 that took five years to research, write and rewrite.
In the early 1990s, Sobel discovered that Galileo, a scientist who was accused and tried for heresy by the Catholic church, had two daughters who were nuns. And that piqued her interest. And then she learned that one of them left 124 letters to her father — and that they were still available.
“When I found out that he had two daughters who were nuns, it was counter to everything I knew about him,” she said. “I’m not Catholic myself, but I wondered what would it have been like for her being in a convent when her father was being tried by the Inquisition for heresy. It was such a rich vein.”
To understand the story, Sobel said she had to learn a lot about the Catholic church and how convents work.
But to really get inside the story, Sobel had to brush up on three years of college Italian. She said she was fortunate to have a tutor who had a lot of old Italian dictionaries, which helped her to translate the letters.
“To have original material to work with is a thrill,” she said. “So that’s what I like to do.”
She’s found similar thrills with Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (1995) and The Elements of Marie Curie (2024).
Writing these works about scientific topics is like, she said, crafting a series of college term papers.
“I have a good time,” she said.
- IF YOU WANT TO GO: Sobel will speak with author Angela Saini at noon Nov. 11 at the Dock Street Theater. Tickets are $30.
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