The Power of Storytelling: Jill Jonnes Interview

Post written by Christa Avampato. You can follow Christa on Twitter.

Some of my favorite recent reads are by author Jill Jonnes.

In the past few months I’ve read Eiffel’s Tower: And the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count and South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. Her books were recommended to me by one of my regular blog readers and contributors at Christa in New York: Curating a Creative Life.

I love Jill’s writing because she takes us along for a ride with her through time to meet incredibly complex characters grappling with extraordinary circumstances. From page one, readers are immersed in another world far from their own. I had the great privilege to interview Jill recently about her work and the art of writing.

Christa – The research that goes into your writing is an enormous task! With projects like Eiffel’s Tower and South Bronx Rising, how do you not get overwhelmed by the subject matter and the amount of research that topics like these require?

Jill – Organize, organize, organize. I photocopy absolutely anything I think might be useful and have individual files for every person and every subject I expect to write about. Chronology is key in history and storytelling.

For Eiffel’s Tower, the Paris Herald and Le Figaro de la Tour were very important and I xeroxed every article or issue about days, events, or people of interest and then put them in chronological order into loose leaf notebooks. Same for the mass of other 1880s newspaper and magazine articles now available through searchable databases.

Christa - How did you get started as a writer? How do you stay motivated to perfect your storytelling abilities?

Jill – I was a newspaper writer for about six years. Since I began writing books in 1981, I just get up most Mondays through Friday and sit down in front of my computer and work. Or if I have research to do, I go to the library, the archives, or go see people. I am always writing about subjects and people I find enthralling and so while I definitely have those days when I wonder why in the world anyone would want to read any of this stuff, most days I get caught up in the material and how fascinating it is and that just sweeps me along.

Christa - What’s your own personal work style and where do you do most of your writing?

Jill – I usually start work around 9 a.m., break for lunch, do some errands or go exercise, and then work until sometime in the afternoon or evening. When my daughter was still in school, I was always glad to stop working and go off to soccer games or pick her up–made for a good break or end to the day.

Some days I cook dinner, others not, but when my husband comes home, I stop work, or may have ended before then anyway. Long ago I read of some writer who always stopped his writing in the middle of a sentence or section he thought was going well so he could pick right up the next day. I find that works well for me and try to do that. I also LOVE to rewrite and so often will start my writing day reworking the previous day’s efforts.

I have a separate study, painted red with all the books and files I need, and I do all my writing there. Some books are harder than others. Eiffel’s Tower was really just fun in every way–the characters were great and there was enough information about them and it’s not too hard to make Belle Epoque Paris interesting.

While I have had many, many readers who loved Conquering Gotham and I found it an incredible story, it was VERY hard work mastering the tunnel materials and figuring out how to make it a gripping tale. I look back on the book as hard, hard, hard, and yet readers found it a page-turner.

Christa – Your books are part of such a fascinating genre – they tread along a very fine line between history, personal accounts, and engaging narrative. By the time I’m done with your books, I feel as if I know the characters. How do you strike that balance between getting the history right and adding just the right amount of personality and emotion to make the story engaging without fictionalizing it?

Jill – Everything in my books has to be factual and from a reliable source. Fortunately, the late 19th century was the golden age of print coverage. Before radio or TV, journalists and writers wrote with all seven senses–and so you can learn what things smelled like, sounded like, etc. in a way that would not be true from print sources today. And of course, people wrote letters! I have no formula at all–I just tell the story in the most compelling way I can. But I very much believe that to understand the past it helps to have a feeling for what people’s lives were like, and the politics that shaped the times.

When I’m done, I try to be ruthless about editing.  Sometimes you will have a particular fact you just love because unearthing it was difficult and of course you want that in the book. But in the end, you have to be willing to toss it out because it doesn’t really enrich the history and just slows down the narrative.

Christa – What conversations do you hope your writing will generate? What main themes would you like readers to take with them when they finish reading your books?

Jill – With my first two books, which really are informed by public policy, I hoped people would use them to think about urban problems and illegal drugs. But my last three books–which I view as a trilogy of Gilded Age epic engineering endeavors–are really just wonderful stories about very amazing technological feats. And the Paris book has the added advantage of all those wonderful characters in the fair besides Eiffel.

You can find Jill online at http://www.jjonnes.com/.

Tagged as: Book Reviews, Christa Avampato, Interviews, Jill Jonnes, Writing