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Behind the Chapter: Who Is Mrs. C. J. Seeley?
One of my favorite parts of writing Countess of Cons was taking the fragments I found in old newspapers, court records, and city directories and figuring out how they fit together into Catherine’s story. Sometimes a single newspaper article gave me the bones of a scene. And sometimes another article came along and complicated everything.…
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Behind the Chapter: How a 125-Year-Old Newspaper Wrote This Scene
Sometimes the hardest part of writing narrative nonfiction is imagining scenes that were never recorded. Sometimes the scenes are already waiting for you in a 125-year-old newspaper. When I wrote Nothing Really Bad Will Happen, I often had to reconstruct scenes from fragments. I knew where my ancestors lived and what they looked like, but…
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Behind the Chapter: Building a Courtroom Scene from the Historical Record
One of the questions I’m asked most often is: “How do you know what really happened?” Take this 1892 courtroom scene from Countess of Cons. Justice Kersten regarded the woman brought before him—the set of her shoulders too proud for pity, the hands too restless for innocence. Whatever she’d done, she didn’t look like someone…
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The Manuscript Is Finished. The Book Isn’t.
People often imagine writing a book ends when the author types The End. I wish. This week I completed the final revision of Countess of Cons, my upcoming historical narrative about one of the Gilded Age’s most fascinating con artists. It’s a milestone worth celebrating—but it’s far from the last step. A finished manuscript is…
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Becoming a Detective: The Research Behind “Countess of Cons”
People often ask how I know what Catherine Seeley was thinking. The truth is, I don’t. That’s one of the greatest challenges—and greatest responsibilities—of writing narrative nonfiction. I can’t invent conversations or emotions simply because they make a better story. Everything has to grow from evidence. Sometimes that evidence comes from a court transcript. Sometimes…
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