Ask the Author: Katrin van Dam
Answered Questions (4)
Katrin van Dam
For me, motion is the answer. I write on the move, which is to say that I dictate into my phone while I'm walking, and then try to decode it later at my computer. There are some rules, though. It has to be in a place that's familiar, and it has to be solitary -- if anyone else is with me, that part of my brain doesn't come out to play. But if I'm stuck, and I go take a walk in Riverside Park, I usually find that the blockage clears.
Katrin van Dam
The protagonist of Come November has a younger brother named Daniel whom I really love. As I was finishing the first book, I found myself thinking about him a lot, and wondering what would happen next in his life. So the second book picks up with Daniel about seven years later, when he's a teenager.
By the way, just the fact that I'm putting this in writing is a pretty bold move for me, since I am only just getting back to working on this book after almost two years of politically-induced apathy. Wish me luck -- I'm gonna need it!
By the way, just the fact that I'm putting this in writing is a pretty bold move for me, since I am only just getting back to working on this book after almost two years of politically-induced apathy. Wish me luck -- I'm gonna need it!
Katrin van Dam
There were a couple of different articles that I read right around the same time that occupied a lot of brain space for me. This was back in 2011. In May of that year, a radio preacher named Harold Camping and his followers were preparing for the Rapture – they believed the world was going to end. And there was this amazing article in the New York Times about families where the parents were followers of Camping's, and the children were either unconvinced or opposed to the whole thing, but didn't have the power to stop their parents from giving away their life savings. I couldn't stop thinking about those families, and what was going to happen to them when the world failed to end.
And then someone told me about this Jared Diamond article about Easter Island that was also super intriguing to me (I should mention that the article is quite controversial, and has many detractors. But I wasn’t aware of that at the time, and I was fascinated by the story he was telling). So there were these two big ideas that I couldn't stop thinking about. And then it occurred to me that you could combine those two ideas into one story somehow. That was really when I decided to try to write something.
Originally, Rooney's mother belonged to more of a traditional religious cult. I did some research on that, and wrote about 20 pages, I think. But it became clear that I was not remotely qualified to write about a religious cult. It would have taken me years just to get the vernacular right. It was just so different from my own experience. So I realized I was going to have a much easier time writing this book if I invented the cult from scratch, so I could make up the rules myself. I had always known I wanted there to be an environmentalist theme to the book. That was the most important thing to me. So why not an environmentalist cult? That's how the Next World Society began.
And then someone told me about this Jared Diamond article about Easter Island that was also super intriguing to me (I should mention that the article is quite controversial, and has many detractors. But I wasn’t aware of that at the time, and I was fascinated by the story he was telling). So there were these two big ideas that I couldn't stop thinking about. And then it occurred to me that you could combine those two ideas into one story somehow. That was really when I decided to try to write something.
Originally, Rooney's mother belonged to more of a traditional religious cult. I did some research on that, and wrote about 20 pages, I think. But it became clear that I was not remotely qualified to write about a religious cult. It would have taken me years just to get the vernacular right. It was just so different from my own experience. So I realized I was going to have a much easier time writing this book if I invented the cult from scratch, so I could make up the rules myself. I had always known I wanted there to be an environmentalist theme to the book. That was the most important thing to me. So why not an environmentalist cult? That's how the Next World Society began.
Katrin van Dam
Getting to create, and then inhabit, a world is surprisingly enjoyable. When I was really deep into working on Come November, there were times when I felt as though the fictional place and characters that I had created were almost as real to me as my own world and the people in it. They started to kind of invade my thoughts, to the point where sometimes I had to remind myself that this was all something I had just made up. That was pretty cool. And then, after working for about three years without ever showing a word to another living soul, to have other people read my manuscript and start talking about my characters as though they were real people ("I don't believe she would do this," was a comment that came up a fair amount in the early editing of the book)… It was funny and amazing to me. There was something so touching about the idea that people were buying into this world so much that they wanted to defend these characters, like they knew them.
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