Interview with Tamara Allen, author of “The Only Gold” and “Whistling in the Dark”

Tamara Allen recently released the wonderful The Only Gold, following on from the massive critical acclaim for her  novel, Whistling in the Dark. She graciously agreed to answer a few questions from yours truly about Gold and her writing process. In Whistling in the Dark, you chose a rather lively, morally relaxed milieu for your story. The Only Gold is set in a very respectable bank. What attracted you to such an apparently dry setting?

A buttoned-down man is a creature of wonderful potential as a character in a novel (and in real life.) And there’s no one, to my mind, more buttoned-down than a 19th century banker. Add what was, in Jonah’s world, a risky sexuality, and he became an irresistible prospect. Any man who tries to keep his life and his emotions in neat order and under wraps at all times needs to be unraveled and set free from his own restraints. I wanted to take the ultimate respectable member of a society weighed down with strict rules of conduct and introduce him to someone who could get under his skin, who could prod, annoy, and challenge him, push him in touch with his tamped down emotions and bring him back to his own humanity. Reid, with his own wide-ranging life experiences, was just the man for the job.

The Great Blizzard of 1888 plays a big part of the story. Which came first – the plot or reading about the blizzard?

For me, historical incidents lead to story ideas. Downtime came about because I was alone in the house one night and browsing an extensive Jack the Ripper site just to spook myself. While researching the year 1888 for Downtime, I first learned of the Great Blizzard and I made a mental note to read more about it after I finished Downtime. Any setting where you can trap people together under seriously adverse conditions has fabulous story potential.

Where did you do your research for Gold? What were your main sources? Were you able to find many images to build up your mental picture of 1880’s Manhattan?

I leaned on a lot of sources that I first came across while researching for Whistling in the Dark. My three favorite sources for historical New York are the New York Public Library digital archives, which has a wealth of old photographs that are just haunting in their beauty and their powerful sense of a long ago time period; the New York Times article archive, which gave me details as small as the weather on a certain day or the price of an apartment in certain New York neighborhoods; and Google Books, with which you can turn up the most obscure details you will find no place else.

With Google Books, I found two books written by 19th century bankers, which were about as perfect a resource as I could have hoped to find—and utterly adorable, to boot. They were so earnestly written and so full of advice to potential young bankers on the need to be a man of good character and flawless reputation. These fellows took so much pride in their work and so much care to keep the public’s trust, I developed quite a respect for them and their ideals. I wanted those qualities to come across in the story, just to do right by these authors.

I also found, through Abebooks, four books on the blizzard, one of which was packed with photographs that weren’t online. I was surrounded by wonderful resources.

The plot turns on the way veterans from the Civil War were treated. Was much attention paid to this, and how widespread were the injustices regarding pensions and so on?

This was another historical tidbit I came across inadvertently while researching President Cleveland for Downtime. I knew nothing about Civil War pensions beforehand and it was interesting to discover what some men had to go through to receive the pension they deserved. The administration looked more understandingly upon the more obvious physical disabilities. If you were suffering nervous or mental disorders, you were more likely to be denied (also race, class, and military ranking appeared to play a part in how quickly and how much you received.)

Of course, there were fraudulent applications, but a number of men with what sounded (at least to me) like legitimate claims struggled for years to receive compensation and never got a cent. In a great many instances, they would be hard pressed to prove that an illness or disability necessarily arose from their service. They had to come up with documentation and witnesses, which they could not always do, especially years after the war had ended.

The whole system of how to recompense veterans went through an incredible number of changes from the time of the war up through the end of the century. You get the impression it was something of a learning process for this country, but one that unfortunately left a lot of men (and their wives and children) in desperate situations.

From your research, what was life for gay people, men in particular, like in late nineteenth century America? Although it was illegal, clearly this wouldn’t have stopped people forming relationships – do you think many were cohabiting as bachelors and flying under the radar?

As you’d expect, it was always a situation requiring vigilance and discretion. What fascinates me is wondering what readers of the period made of a New York Times article like this, a tragic story with some curious details:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9D01E7D81038E533A25753C1A9659C94699FD7CF

This particular article might spur speculation, but two men sharing a place and even a bed was taken as unremarkable in so many instances that I imagine flying under the radar was not as difficult as we might first think. There were apartments being built at the time exclusively for the “rapidly growing class of unmarried men”—despite Times articles with their tongue-in-cheek despair of rousing bachelors to “a realizing sense of their God-forsaken and forlorn condition.”

About your writing process:

How do you find your plots? Do you gain inspiration from something you’re reading or researching? Or do you have an idea and then do the research to find out how feasible it is?

My ideas, so far, have been primarily born out of research; the exception being my initial conception of Whistling, which came out of my grandmother’s stories of her father, who played piano on the radio in the ’20s. Still, I had no idea when to set the story nor how to tell it until I researched radio and how it was involved in WWI. That is the fun of research; you never know when you’ll stumble across an intriguing bit of history with the potential to blossom into a juicy new plot. It’s a thrill when it does—and then comes the pleasure of chasing down more information as the plot takes shape in your mind.

Are you an outliner or a pantser?

Pantser, to my detriment; and the reviews of my work bear that out. Readers react far more favorably to my characters and their relationships than they do to the plots of my books. And, invariably, I agree with the readers. I know my plots have their iffy moments and my ability to pace needs work. I don’t have a logical mind, so tracking a storyline properly is always the hardest part for me. I’m too wrapped up in wondering just how Sutton feels when Jack pushes him away, or musing over just how well Reid understands what drives Jonah’s resistance, to worry adequately over whether a certain plot point is making as much sense as it should.

This is something I’m trying to correct by pushing myself toward being more of an outliner. Or, if not an outliner, at least a more careful scene-by-scene plotter.

Do you write linearly?

I’m telling myself the story as I write it. I can’t write scenes out of sequence because I don’t know where the characters will be emotionally in Scene B if I haven’t written Scene A. I have an idea of where they’ll be, but it feels wrong to try to write it down before I get there along with the characters. I can’t really set scenes out of sequence, either, and seldom use flashbacks. Writing linearly in every aspect feels most natural to me. I don’t know if this helps or hurts my writing, but I can’t seem to do it any other way.

Do you write and write, then go back and edit, or polish as you go?

Both. If the story is coming along slowly, I polish as I go—and sometimes that pulls me in deeper and the story will start pouring out. When that happens, I let it pour and wait till my next read-through to clean it up.

Your next novel to come from Dreamspinner is Downtime – care to tell us a bit about it and how you came to write it?

Downtime was the first novel I completed and sold. It began, as I mentioned, with my fascination with the Ripper murders and evolved as I thought about how much a chance to investigate would fascinate a modern day detective. I also love opposites-attract stories, so Morgan and Ezra developed from there, and researching Victorian London was a blast. I initially considered making a character of J.K. Stephen, who was suspected of being the Ripper; but after researching his sad life, I couldn’t do it, so my Ripper is a mix of different real-life suspects with a lot of fiction thrown in.

The story grew literally as well as figuratively. The first draft was 190,000 words and had three more characters. I cut quite a bit and it’s still a long story, but a lot of readers like it the best of my books, and I have to admit I’m rather pleased it has moved a few readers to tears. That is quite a compliment and one I cherish.

Are you contemplating a sequel to Gold?

I have, at one time or another, thought about sequels for all my stories. I always think about the characters when I finish a book and imagine where their lives go, even if I don’t plan to write more about them. I think Sutton and Jack’s story is told; I don’t know what else I’d do with them, unless I followed them into the market crash and Depression to see how they coped. I’ve briefly thought about Jonah and Reid having an adventure in California, but nothing solid has evolved from that.

Downtime is really the only one I seriously considered having sequel potential. Right after Torquere first published it several years ago, I had in mind a story where either Ezra or Morgan would be shot and maybe left comatose while investigating a case, and the other would think the only way to save his life would be to send him into the future; so the two of them would go to present-day NYC, with all the subsequent adventure of a case to solve and Ezra’s adjustment to the modern world.

I don’t know if I will ever write a sequel, though, because I’m fondest of first-time stories, where they meet and fall in love. Only if I run out of other ideas, I might fall back on sequel writing.

What are you working on now?

After a long stretch of indecision, I began a story that’s set in 1893 America (starting off in New York, then crossing the country to Colorado.) I’ve resisted writing it because it shares a thread of history and a profession with a fanfic I wrote ten years ago (that really was an AU of a fandom, which probably five people read.) The characters and plot are different, but I think it’s a story that will have to be self-published with full disclosure, if I finish it.

I’ve also started a story that has an m/f relationship of equal weight with an m/m. Readers may be difficult to find for that one, and I may decide partway through that I don’t like writing m/f and abandon or change it, but for the moment it wants to be written, so I’m giving it a go. It’s set in the present and the past, but don’t ask me what the plot’s about, because right now it’s a mess and I couldn’t explain it coherently if I tried.

I’m also pondering a pure contemporary, because there are so many readers, it seems, who shy away from historicals. I thought I might lure them in with a setting they find more comfortable and maybe they’ll give my historicals a try later on. Seriously, I’ve wondered if I could pull off a contemporary, because I don’t think my voice is suited for it. So we’ll see how that goes.

Thank you, Ann, for giving me the opportunity to talk about my books. It wasn’t easy but it wasn’t quite as nerve-wracking as I expected. You’re very generous to give me the space on your blog. And can I just say a thank you to the readers who’ve bought my work and supported cancer research through their purchases. You’re all wonderful.

Thank you, Mara, for taking the time to answer my questions, and for writing such terrific books