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"Maxwell Street at that time was an open-air bazaar of second-hand electronics, knockoff designer shoes, food stalls, junk, and trinkets to rival any great market in the Third World, and the vendors and shoppers came from every corner of it. It was a carnival of simple commerce, people haggling over single pairs of socks in eleven languages."

That's Tony D'Souza describing an immigrant corner of Chicago in his new novel, The Konkans. During his writing career, D'Souza has traveled the world as a freelance reporter (writing for everybody from The Esquire to Outside magazine), taught creative writing, and served in the Peace Corps.

In his new novel, we follow the lives of a family of Konkans--an Indian ethnic group that converted to Catholicism centuries ago. Like that market, D'Souza's imaginary family contains a multitude conflicting, beautiful details.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:

The Konkans rests on a tremendous body of research into two centuries' worth of history. This was a new level of historical depth for you. How did you research this book, both historically and setting-wise? Which novels did you read for inspiration about how to write a book set against such a dramatic history?

God, I read everything, about the Goan Inquisition, about Vasco da Gama, Francis Xavier, about the ships of those days, the food, the commerce, people's understanding of the world, of the ethnic groups of India, of their religious beliefs and cultural practices. Continue reading...

 

I read thousands and thousands of pages. And all of that reading gets distilled down to a line here and there, a specific object at some juncture of the story, an anecdote someone tells to someone else.

The point is that you have to do all that reading to collect the rare gems that you will then spend in your writing. And so there are not tons of diamonds in the rough, so you have to crush a lot of rock to get a little gold.

That's what research feels like to me. It's just preparation. It's not always the most engaging of work, but it must be done. You have to read everything and even then you will still miss out on a ton.

I researched the story for a number of years before I began working on the book; even towards the final stages of the editing process I was still looking up things and checking on things. And even now with the book done and bound I've found a couple of mistakes that won't be noticed by 99% of the people who read the book and it will not have an affect on their understanding or enjoyment of the story, and still I cringe when I think about those mistakes.

One is where a character is described as being a Malayalam. It should say that he was Malayali. In another place I use the word Piaster instead if Paisa. Almost no one will notice. But I notice it and that's enough.

So if you are thinking of writing a historical novel or a novel with strong historical elements to it, be passionate about your subject because you are going to spend a lot more time immersed in it than you'd guess. It's kind of like picking a wife.

But at the same time I think that it's very important to be creative with that history in the way that say Michael Ondaatje was in The English Patient and like in Corelli's Mandolin, or even Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, McCarthy in Blood Meridian, and Faulkner again and again, but most notably in Absalom! Absalom!

It's fiction. You can bend the rules. Because history itself is very open to debate and fluid. In the end we can only really come to know ourselves in any true way.