Rebecca Stott, author of The Coral Thief (Nov 23-Dec 4)

Please welcome Rebecca Stott, author of The Coral Thief . Rebecca will be chatting on LibraryThing until December 4th.

Hi there - I'm writing from the University library in Cambridge where people are packing up for the day now - it's 6.30 pm here and the librarians will soon start to ask us politely to leave. It is wild and wet and windy in Cambridge outside so no one is in a rush. Happy to answer any questions or just to chat.

Rebecca

Hi Rebacca,

I recently read and enjoyed The Coral Thief. (In fact, I wrote the review on the front of your American Amazon.com page.) I haven't had a chance to read Ghostwalk yet. Probably the biggest thing that attracts me to your work is the scientific settings of your novels. Can you talk about what attracts you to that subject matter, and how you choose these intriguing and pivotal times you write about?

I really didn't know anything about post-Napoleonic Paris, and it was a FASCINATING time and place! Are there other such periods you'd like to explore in the future?

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts. :-)

Susan

If you've not already read the series THE OCEAN WORLD OF JACQUES COUSTEAU (24 volumes) or the single compendium volume consisting of 446 oages, I strongly sugest you take a look at it.

Best
Steve

I haven't read the Coral Thief yet, but plan to since I enjoyed Ghostwalk so much. I enjoyed learning more about Isaac Newton, as well as the way you tied the past and the present together. And I was intrigued and surprised by the way the ghost story and the modern murders came together at the end of the book.

Hi Rebecca,

Could you please say something about your influences and likes in literature?

Thanks,
Paul

I loved "Darwin and the Barnacle". It offered great insight into a period of Darwin's life that is commonly overlooked by science historians. As your books shows, this was an important period of Darwin's life, during which he developed and refined his evolutionary views, gathered evidence bearing on the great questions, and established a professional network of colleagues who supported his evolutionary views once they were published. And of course your book also gives insight into his personal life with his family.

Can you describe how and why you came to write a book of this kind? Further, do you have intentions to write more works in the history of science?

thanks

Hello,
I really enjoyed "The Coral Thief" even more than I expected to.
I really enjoy historical mysteries.
I was wondering how long it takes to write a book like that, I know there must be tons of research that is behind it.
I look forward to reading more of your books, there is nothing I like more than discovering an author that I enjoy.

Thank you.

thank you for that review. It's really smart. There are certain periods of history that really interest me - usually moments when everything is in flux. Then again sometimes stories just start up around objects. I'm not sure why science interests me so much. Perhaps because I want to know how certain ideas came into being in particular times and places. IN Ghostwalk the story started for me after I;d read a biography of Newton and the story of him puzzling out certain questions about light whilst he was walking through the same streets I walk through in Cambridge fascinated me. Actually it was more of an obsession. I think I wrote Ghostwalk in part because I wanted to see Cambridge through Newton's eyes.

thanks for that. Really glad you liked the book. The Coral Thief took me around two years to write. There was a good deal of editing and re-editing to do and I cut quite a lot of material out. The key thing for historical novelists is to make sure that the 'research' doesn't stand out as research. They have to 'sink' it. Which usually means a lot of 'waste' but then in a way there is no waste because everything you find out (about lighting, streets, maps, horses, carriages, clothes) feeds into the story in some way. I spent a lot of time in the rare books room of the library where I work with my head in various early nineteenth-century guidebooks. It was fascinating. I began to dread people asking how my book was going because I'd be so enthusiastic about some aspect of Paris (a marionette theatre I'd discovered for instance or the history of gas lighting) that I'd have to watch myself and make sure I didn't go on about it in a wide-eyed way. So much of what I do by way of research is absolutely fascinating. The difficult bit is keeping on top of it and forging all of that disparate material into a strong narrative.

that sounds amazng - I will order it up tomorrow. Thanks. I have alot of books on the sea on my shelves but I haven't seen this.

I read poetry often. My current favourite poet is a Scottish poet called Don Patterson. His new collection Rain (Faber) is amazing. I like the strange incredibly haunting and inventive German writer W.S. Sebald who wrote Rings of Saturn and the Emigrants. I read contemporary novels but most of my reading time is taken up with following some kind of historical thread or investigation for my writing. I am currently trying to work out what it was like for Aristotle to do zoological work on Lesbos in 350BC! I love George Eliot and Wilkie Collins and Henry James too.

How about you?

Great question. Back in 2001 I was working on a bigger book on the nineteenth century and the sea and I went to see some publishers and one very clever publisher saw an account of Darwin's obsessive barnacle work tucked away in a corner of one of my sample chapters and he said 'has anyone written about that?. Once I'd talked about the Darwin-barnacle story a bit he said: 'that's the book you should write... Then you can hang all the other historical material on the Darwin-barnacle encounter.' I laughed. I remember that. I just didn't think there was enough material there. I told him. I said 'there are no dramas in that story... Darwin hardly moved from his house. He was sick all the time. Nothing happened.' But of course in the end what I found was enormous drama in those 8 years. It was a kind of intellectual adventrue story. And that's what Darwin was discovering in the barnacle too - that what looks ordinary and commonplace stops being commonplace if you look close enough, if you look through a kind of microscope. I learnt a good deal in writing that book. I learned to look close.

I'm currently writing another book on the history of science - this time non-fiction - about the history of the evolutionists before Darwin. The book starts with Aristotle on Lesbos (although he wasn't really an evolutionist, he was the first biologist and he began the line of questioning that lead to the first evolutionary speculations). I am really enjoying it. I shall be going to Lesbos in February - trying to put Aristotle into that landscape as I tried to put Newton properly into Cambridge and Darwin into Down House. The spaces in which scientists worked are interesting to me.

tying the past and present together in Ghostwalk was incredibly tricky. I had to go back into the book again and again. In the end it was like working on a house of cards: each time I changed something or changed the order of events, I was afraid the whole house would fall. So the last few months I was working holding my breath all the time. The Coral Thief doesn't jump between past and present so it is easier to read I think but I missed the intricacy of the double time frame. It was easier to write too.

I wonder sometimes if the people who really liked Ghostwalk will like The Coral Thief as well. They are both dense books but The Coral Thief moves forward in time in a less complicated way.

Out of curiosity, have you read The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson? As soon as Newton made his first appearance in Ghostwalk, I found myself thinking of Stephenson's portrayal of him.

I'm also curious as to how your training as a PhD student influenced your writing, especially after reading your above response on writing historical fiction. Do your research skills come from being a graduate student, and if not, how did you learn to conduct such detailed research? I'm working on a PhD in Russian history, and I often find myself wishing I could use all my research training to write fiction instead of continuing to hammer away at my dissertation.

Your current non-fiction work sounds fascinating - I'll look forward to reading it.

When reading Ghostwalk I found that the thing that interested me the most was the historical aspect - my knowledge of Cambridge's past is restricted to the odd snippet picked up here and there - mostly overhearing tour guides (something I'm not sure one can trust all the time in Cambridge, if certain punting tours are anything to go by!) I was wondering if you have any references that you found particularly useful/interesting/well written while writing the book?