Everything Girl

When it comes to the concepts of “naughty” and “nice,” nothing epitomizes the eternal struggle between them quite like a chessboard, and no one writes novels that make chess seem like an adventure better than Katherine Neville. Twenty years ago, she published The Eight a novel that defies description, but has elements of swashbuckling action, intellectual mystery, true romance, and even some magical realism. In October, the sequel was finally released, and Ms. Neville took some time to answer questions about both books, as well as her writing process. She’s currently on tour promoting the new book, The Fire, but she’s also here in our pages, with these words:

Please tell our readers a bit about yourself: I know both from the bio at your website, KatherineNeville.com, and from the fly-leaf on the original copy of The Eight, as well as from various interviews, that you’ve worked at IBM, Bank of America, and with OPEC. How much of you is in Cat Velis, and how is she different from you?
It’s hard to realize, but when you write fiction, you yourself–the author–actually are all of the characters. In my case, even including Napoleon’s grandmother, Lord Byron, and the evil Marat. To make a character come alive, you have to be able to empathize, to put yourself in his shoes and speak from his point of view. It’s like what an actor does but even more so–because you have to imagine what he’d say, as well as say it for him.

As for the characters in The Eight, I’m often asked if I am “really” Cat Velis. Even though she does narrate events in first person, I personally feel that the character who is most like me in The Eight is Ladislaus Nim. He does the things I would do–for instance, I’d try to solve the formula and help humanity, not bury it or destroy it. As for my professional career–though it was a long time ago, I know that I never really thought like an executive. I was more of a high-level computer geek (they called us “technocrats” in those days)–and even today, I still get along really well with people who are up to their elbows in the nitty-gritty of science and technology. In fact–I even live with one! (Dr Karl Pribram, the noted brain scientist.)

A reader noted that the women in The Eight, especially Cat and Lily, were subject to some pretty rampant sexism, and wondered if that was an accurate portrayal of the time and place in which the novel was set? Also, have you been on the receiving end of sexism, in your own career, both before and since becoming a novelist?
Wow! So that’s what they call it now? “Rampant sexism?” In the 1960s and 70s they just called it Business as Usual. Back then, no one had even heard of a “glass ceiling.”

But any young girl who needs a refresher course today should run right out and get grandmaster Susan Polgar’s autobiography, Breaking Through: How the Polgar Sisters changed the Game of Chess. As the first woman in history to receive the male grandmaster title, Susan won her first competition at age four and she and her two younger sisters went on to take the chess world by storm for something like twenty years. She sent me this biography just after I’d finished my new book. I was flabbergasted how close it came to the backstory I’d invented for Lily Rad in The Eight, and also now for Cat and Solarin’s chess-whiz daughter, Xie, in The Fire - that the anti-female chess world that I’d imagined was that much - and then some.

It’s been said that your work “paved the way” for books like The DaVinci Code, and you yourself have been described as a female Umberto Eco. What are your thoughts on such comparisons? Have you read Eco’s work, or Dan Brown’s?
Oh yes–I have to read everyone’s work - mainly to be sure I’m not doing something they’re doing at exactly the same time that I was about to do it. It’s endlessly astonishing to me how often I’ve written something, where I wasn’t really sure whether it was believable enough to use in a novel - and then gone to the movie theatre and seen that Stephen Spielberg had just done exactly the same scene, right up there on the big screen where you just have to believe it.

The same thing with Umberto Eco: his training as a semiotician made him interested in the same things that an emerita computer wizard like me is naturally drawn to. For instance, I’d already written the first half of The Eight when The Name of the Rose came out, and the monastery he described sounded almost word-for-word like my first chapter opening. I actually had to go back and change Montglane Abbey so people wouldn’t think I was copying him!

I can’t say how many times I’ve had to slash and burn material like that, because somebody else got attracted to it simultaneously. But luckily I’m also an information junkie. I’ll never run out of obscure and little-known facts. And having to delve for them - as I had to do repeatedly while writing The Fire - has stretched the boundaries of what I’m writing. So while there are newer writers who are partial to writing this type of puzzle/quest/swashbuckling adventure novel - like Dan Brown, whom you mentioned, or my colleagues Steve Berry, Javier Sierra, David Hewson - I’m really glad that they are! We now have a whole field of the books that I had missed for so long, and that I love to read.

One of the things I liked about The Eight when I read it twenty years ago, was that even though chess was an important theme and there was an actual game one could follow through the novel, knowing how to play chess was not crucial to enjoying the book. Are your chess skills good, or did you have help with the details? Is the new book, The Fire similarly constructed?
I love chess. Like Borges, Nabokov - and so many of my favorite writers of yore - I love the cosmic aspects of “the Game” and the interplay of long-range strategies and short-term tactics. I’ve always regretted that I learned to play chess too late ever to be any good at it.

As for assistance, when I wrote The Eight I had input from a friend who was a female chess competitor, and several International Masters who helped me find the game - from a score of those in international competition - upon which the plot of that very complex book could be based. But now, twenty years later, I’ve met grandmasters in other countries, I’ve been interviewed by chess magazines and asked to write chess stories - and I not only got help from a lot of chess wizards (I thank them all under Acknowledgments in my book) but also from a child chess champion, Alisa Melekhina, who helped me for the several years that I struggled to get inside the mind of my main character in The Fire: Alexandra Solarin.

The men in your novels are all very vibrant characters – Alexander Solarin and Ladislaus Nim, of course, but also Zoltan Tor. Are these men drawn from life, or are they completely fictional? Do you have a favorite among them?
I based all the male protagonists on friends of mine–men I knew really well as “best friends,” or had even dated. When I knew I was about to finish a complete novel, I asked and got permission from all of them to use them in “composite characters.” Obviously it worked really well: women readers love these guys because they are natural-born egalitarians toward women. While men love the fact that the heroines find an intelligent man sexy. Just like real life - right?

My favorite “vibrant character” is definitely the key male protagonist in The Fire, Vartan Azov. I think it’s because Vartan surprised me by yanking the plot out of my hands. He did something three chapters earlier than any of us had been expecting. I phoned my editor Mark Tavani, and I said, “Guess what - Vartan has just taken matters into his own hands.” Mark said, “I love it when characters do that. It makes our job so much easier.”

For readers, twenty years is a long time to wait for a sequel. Had you always planned to revisit the characters from The Eight? What made this year the right time for publication, or was the timing controlled by forces outside yourself?
The timing was controlled by forces outside myself.

I should explain: I have never felt that I was writing my own books - I felt they were writing themselves. I do all the ground work, but if books are not dropping off the library shelves open to the right page, providing the exact fodder I need to advance the plot, it doesn’t matter how much character, material and plot I’ve already accumulated, I know that the book isn’t ready for me to write it.

The most interesting thing to me about The Fire - more than any of the other books I’ve started or finished writing - is that when I first conceived of the book (1992) or when I actually began writing it (1998) the stellar events that were later going to prove absolutely pivotal to the plot and the characters hadn’t happened yet. Each time I would start working on the book something bizarre would happen that would tell me I had to stop - to step back - to pay attention to the larger picture. It wasn’t until I was halfway through writing the book that I realized why:

When The Fire finally got itself under way, the modern part takes place in the single week of 2003 of Cat Velis’s birthday - the original heroine of The Eight. That week also happens to be the week we entered Baghdad. In The Eight, we had learned that the Montglane Service, the chess set that once belonged to Charlemagne, had been created in the eighth century - in the then-brand-new city of Baghdad.

Tell us a bit more about The Fire. Will we be seeing our old favorite characters again? Will we get a “where are they now” kind of thing for those who aren’t active in the story?
Yes, the main characters in The Fire are the children of the earlier characters in The Eight. They don’t have a clue what was going on in the previous book, and some of the earlier characters show up to summarize the backstory for them.

The most important thing in The Fire is that we now see the earlier events from different points of view, depending on who is recounting each story. For instance, Lily Rad has a different perspective on the day that she first met Alexander Solarin at a chess match, along with her pal Cat Velis (his future wife.) And Ladislaus Nim shares intimate details about his own life with his young niece, Alexandra, that he might never have shared with her mother Cat in a thousand years. And Charlot, who was a child prophet in the historic part of the previous book, is now a grown man with a very different take on his two parents: the nun Mireille and the statesman, Talleyrand.

Your work always seems so well-researched. Can you share your process for compiling all the necessary information? Do you begin with a real historical event and move forward, or … what?
I always say “Life is research.” I shouldn’t admit it, but I never compile information. I also confess that I’m a Google virgin, and while librarians help me all the time, I spend more time speaking at library benefits than I do in browsing library call numbers on the web. To do research, I just go places. If you have lived in as many places as I have had to, for my work - and of course, if you are curious about who and what’s around you - then information just sort of sticks to you like chewing gum and it’s hard to get rid of until you scrape it off or write it down.

When it comes to historic events–I’ve been smack in the middle of them, quite by accident, so many times. For instance, I was working in North Africa when the OPEC embargo took place; I was in working in the nuclear field when 3-Mile Island happened, and living in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down. But if later, you’re going to write about it, just being present and accounted for isn’t enough. You have to be curious about how it happened and how it affects the people it happened to. For me to do that (given the stated limitations of my research capabilities) I need to see, touch and smell the actual source documents or materials, taste the food, ski the mountain.

I once heard that the Eskimo have forty words for “snow.” If I had ever spent a week among the Eskimo, I would not only have come back with lists of the forty words–but if I could have managed it, I would have tried to see and taste and feel the differences among the forty kinds of snow.

Take us through a typical day in the life of Katherine Neville?
I get up early in the morning - about sunrise - take a shower, have a healthy drink with fruit and juice - and after that, it’s anybody’s guess. Life just keeps on happening.

Many of our readers are also aspiring writers; what advice would you offer to them?
The advice I always give to young people who want to write, is: Get a job and get a Eurail Pass. That is to say: get out into the world and see things. And experience things. And do things.

As for the rest of us–just one word: write. Maybe they can prevent you from being a published author, but no one can ever stop you from being a writer. You don’t have to come up with “an idea” for a book. All you have to do is write. And not surprisingly - just as with any craft - the more you do it, and the more you study experts who have done it before you, the better you get.

What are you working on now, and what should we expect to see from you in the future?
I was reading my old clippings in preparation for updating my web site for publication of The Fire. And I discovered - in an interview I did with Publishers Weekly, more than twenty years ago - that I was already talking about the book I’m now writing - about painters in the 1600s. But now I’ve already got my industrial-grade easel and paints and brushes out of the cupboard. I think that book is ready to go!

Katherine Neville’s most recent book, The Fire was released on October 16th, 2008, by Random House. You can read our review here. To learn more about Katherine Neville and her books, visit her website at KatherineNeville.com

Melissa A. Bartell likes strong coffee, red wine, and dark chocolate. She earns her living writing web-copy for an Internet marketing firm, dabbles fiction on the side. She lives near Dallas, TX with her husband, two dogs, and more computers than anyone really needs. She is the Managing Editor here at All Things Girl. Find out more about her on our About Page, or check out her blog at MissMeliss.com.

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