Children’s author Kate Hannigan writes fiction and nonfiction from her home in Chicago. Her middle-grade history-mystery The Detective’s Assistant received the Golden Kite Award from SCBWI for best middle-grade novel and was a California Young Reader Medal nominee. Her nonfiction picture book biography A Lady Has the Floor: Belva Lockwood Speaks Out for Women’s Rights (Boyds Mills) received a Society of Midland Authors honor and earned four starred reviews. Kate has a nonfiction graphic novel about the Chicago Fire coming out in June 2020 with First Second’s History Comics series, and five more picture book biographies about fascinating people from history. Visit her online at KateHannigan.com.

What typically comes first for you: a character? An era? A story idea? How do you proceed from there?

I typically start with an interesting person. For my new historical fantasy, Cape: Book 1 in The League of Secret Heroes (Simon & Schuster/Aladdin), I was thinking about Wonder Woman! I asked myself whether she was the only female superhero of early comic books or whether there were others. I couldn’t really name too many — beyond our mighty Amazonian, I had to pause when trying to come up with anyone else! 

I’m happy to report that there were lots of women wearing capes back in the day! So I read as much as I could about them, and they inspired the superhero “mentors” who help guide my young superheroines in Cape.

What I learned when poking around in the history of Wonder Woman was that she made her debut in December 1941, which was the same time as Pearl Harbor’s bombing and the United States’ entry in World War II. So immediately we have these two great threads: women comic book heroes and WWII. The war brought out tremendous action across as aspects of society. But what I found fascinating was learning about some unsung women who were doing remarkable, even heroic things during the war.

How do you conduct your research? 

I am a library junkie, so I’m dashing in and out of our local branch on a weekly basis. I get stack and stacks of books to learn about historical moments and figures. I also try to read letters to get a sense of the language used at the time, what people ate, what music they listened to, what their apartments might have looked like. I rely heavily on books to help me imagine what the era might have been like.

I also like documentaries. If left alone with the TV remote, I’ll burrow into the sofa and get lost in black and white footage. Even through the long Chicago winter, as I exercised indoors, I trudged along on my elliptical machine watching WW II battle documentaries!

But my favorite form of research is talking to people. I think it stems from when I was a little kid and sat at the dinner table listening to my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins sharing stories and laughing late into the night. So when I researched aspects of Cape and the other two books in this series — Mask and Boots, publishing in 2020 and 2021 — I talked to people. I got on a plane and went to meet real people who either had been involved in WWII or who were close to people who had. 

Of anything I’ve done related to this project, what I cherish most is having been able to interview a former WASP pilot. Jane Doyle loved to fly, and when WWII broke out, she answered the call for women fliers to gather at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. Jane was 97 when I met her at a reunion for WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots) in May 2018. She passed away in early 2019. While there are some survivors of WWII still living, we’re losing many. It’s important that we hear as many of their stories as we can, before it’s too late and we lose that physical connection to storyteller and listener.

How long do you typically research before beginning to draft?

I could get lost in research all day. In fact, some days I really DO get lost for the entire day and into the night. For history nerds, there is ridiculous fun to be found in digging through old newspapers, black and white photos, tracking down menus and recipes for old-fashioned meals, examining the hats or shoes of a bygone era.

I spend about a year or more just immersing myself in an era. With a previous historical fiction novel, The Detective’s Assistant (Little, Brown, 2015), I needed to nail down Civil War history, know a good bit about Abraham Lincoln, and understand the role the Pinkertons played in Chicago history. I was writing about America’s first woman detective, Kate Warne, so I read Allan Pinkerton’s accounts of the cases that involved her. It was so much fun, and if I could, I’d still be researching that book, or perhaps a sequel or two! 

With Cape, again I spent a year or so trying to learn all I could about WWII history and the women of the era who broke barriers as computer programmers, code-crackers, spies, and pilots. And on top of that, I needed to learn all I could about superhero history, like powers, costumes, and backstories. For that, I read some of the books by Trina Robbins, easily the foremost authority on women superheroes. And when she came through Chicago for a lecture, she generously met me for coffee to talk about women superheroes and their history. It was an incredibly exciting experience!

What is your favorite thing about research?

The short answer: knowing stuff. Frankly, it feels bad when someone asks you something, and you don’t know the answer, right? I’ve had that happen all too many times in my life! So I love research because I build layers of knowledge and, over time, feel like I start to know a few things. I’ll never, ever know enough! But at least I’ll walk through life able to make connections from past to present, which hopefully has bearing on the future.

Research is like a Zumba class for your brain. You’re working that muscle, processing facts, making sense of dates and eras and societies and individuals, pushing yourself to find more. So it feels good to do it, and you’re all the better for it. Once you’re done, you want to get back at it again and devour more. And it doesn’t hurt that every now and then, my parents will call me after an episode of Jeopardy and ask me if I’d gotten a certain question right!

What’s your least favorite thing about research?

My least-favorite thing about research is having to leave things out. I might have to cut entire sections of a chapter full of fascinating details because I have too much material, or perhaps because what I find interesting might bore the socks off a classroom of kids! Some things that I can’t put into a book for one reason or another I will share with students on school visits or at book events.

What’s your favorite thing about writing historical fiction?

I love writing historical fiction because I love thinking about how the past impacts us. I’ve always been fascinated by the connection between generations and what might carry on from one family member down the line to another. I want kids to take a little time and think about that, too. I am keenly aware that one of my grandmothers was an immigrant who cleaned houses and worked as a nanny. She had dreams for her kids and, I imagine, her grandkids. That impacts how I treat others. I want kids to think about their place on the continuum — about who fought for the rights we enjoy, who sacrificed for our benefit, who was present at significant touchpoints in history. Maybe by reading historical fiction they’ll think about how they themselves fit in and how they will make their own mark on history, too. 

Kip Wilson is the author of White Rose, a YA novel-in-verse about anti-Nazi political activist Sophie Scholl. White Rose won the 2017 PEN New England Susan P. Bloom Children’s Book Discovery Award and is a 2019 Winter/Spring Indies Introduce title. Kip holds a Ph.D. in German Literature, is the poetry editor at YARN (Young Adult Review Network), and wrote her doctoral dissertation about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She’s lived in Germany, Austria, and Spain, and currently calls Boston home.

What typically comes first for you: a character? An era? A story idea? How do you proceed from there?

With White Rose and another new project I’m working on now, I started with a real historical figure in a specific time and place. My short story, Car 393, was sparked by an article I read about an event a hundred years in the past. But the process can be different when the characters aren’t based on real historical figures. I’ve written other historical fiction projects that began with a setting and only once I figured out how I wanted to tell the story did I decide who the characters were and what they wanted. 

How do you conduct your research? 

Nowadays, I definitely start online with my specific time, place, and historical figure. By starting online, I absolutely mean googling key names and phrases. This often leads to Wikipedia, which is a fine starting place—but like any serious researcher, I obviously never end there. 

Google and Wikipedia thankfully lead to images, videos, and book titles. When I find a particularly relevant source, I order it right away. Where possible, I order a source first from the library to see how much useful information it contains regarding my project. But because my subjects have mostly been in German and thus unavailable in libraries and bookstores here in the States, I do sometimes end up purchasing a book or video sight unseen. Once I start reviewing a source that has the kind of information I’m looking for, I often skip ahead to the notes and references in the back matter to order more sources before I’ve finished so they’ll arrive when I’m ready for them. 

Google and Wikipedia also often lead to museums, organizations, or historical sites that can provide more information. Some such institutions offer collections of images or other documents online. They generally also include a means to contact the administration, which has led me to people who can answer specific questions or advise me where to turn. 

Finally, I’ve also been lucky enough to be able to visit museums, archives, and important settings both in the States and abroad, and highly recommend investing in this if at all possible.

You do have a specific system for collecting data? 

I am constantly refining my system, but I do like to purchase sources I’ll refer to again and again, and I place color-coded sticky notes in appropriate places to be able to more easily find specific bits of information again. With online resources, I download important pages when possible, saving them to a “research” folder for a particular project. I do also bookmark pages, but URLs sometimes change, so having the information at hand has been helpful. 

When it comes to actually using the research for a project, I’ve tried various methods to keep track of my sources. Stealing a method from nonfiction, I once drafted a (fiction) manuscript with footnotes to track the research. I’ve actually seen footnotes in one published novel-in-verse (Your Own, Sylvia by Stephanie Hemphill) and it worked really well there, but those notes were non-intrusive, whereas my notes were meant for my eyes only. 

What I finally did for White Rose was to create a spreadsheet that listed each poem and its source(s). The spreadsheet method was especially useful for me because I could include additional information (dates of letters, people in the poem, page number in source, etc.) that I personally needed in additional columns without bogging anyone else down with it. 

What kinds of sources do you use? The more specifics here, the better!

I use whatever I can get my hands on, and I try to get my hands on everything. There’s obviously no substitute for letters and diary entries by the protagonists themselves to understand their emotions, relationships, and situations. My sources for White Rose included a collection of letters and diary entries by Sophie and her brother Hans, as well as letters from a more recently published collection between Sophie and her boyfriend Fritz. In the Scholl archive at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, I was able to view Sophie’s own handwritten text and drawings on microfilm. I remember one letter in particular that included a pressed flower, which showed up on the microfilm beside the text. So lovely, and such a reminder of how much Sophie loved nature. 

I also studied the White Rose leaflets with their calls to resistance, interrogation transcripts, testimonials, interviews, and letters from those who had known Sophie, and I read all the biographies and books about the group that I could find. Because the White Rose has been so well researched in Germany and because the survivors and family members who remain are growing older, I didn’t reach out to individuals myself for interviews, but instead used existing material. Again, because so many people have already conducted and documented interviews, most questions I still had were ones that unfortunately only Sophie or Hans could answer.

Other wonderful sources to study for historical fiction about a particular era are books, films, and music that came out during that particular time that the protagonists might have read, seen, or heard. For instance, I read The Confessions of Saint Augustine after learning how the book influenced Sophie, re-read some of my favorite poems by Rainer Maria Rilke with her in mind after learning how much she loved his work, and listened to the Trout Quintet by Schubert, because Sophie mentions listening to it in one of her last letters.

I also studied the broader context of the Nazi regime’s rise to power, the laws its leaders developed, and its criminal justice system. Again, I read a lot of books about the subject, but I also watched countless films and documentaries, found an abundance of documentation online, and visited museums here in the States, including the Holocaust Museum and the International Museum of WWII. 

At what point do you feel comfortable beginning to draft? How does your research continue once you begin writing?

I begin drafting as soon as I have enough basic information to be able to create a scene. I don’t need to know everything about the characters or the plot to be able to place myself in a single moment, but I personally like to get the story flowing to know what questions I have and what I still need to research. When I’m first drafting initial scenes, I often include best guesses about dates, places, and character relationships that I’ll later have to verify, but that works for me. 

That having been said, my research never stops. When I was reviewing the second pass pages for White Rose, I was still frantically triple-checking last items and making last wording changes based on additional information. An example I looked up at the end was the word Blitzkrieg, which literally means “lightning war,” and is the type of all-out attack the Germans launched on Poland in 1939. My dad (a WWII history buff) was reading my ARC, and mentioned that he thought the term wasn’t initially used by the Germans, and it turns out he’s correct! It was first used in an English magazine in 1939. I ended up keeping the word in, because the Scholls listened to foreign broadcasts and because Germans did end up using the term as well, but I was definitely glad to learn the details of when and how it came into being.

What’s one of the most interesting things you’ve learned while researching?

I included a scene near the end of White Rose that takes place after Sophie’s been condemned and is allowed to see her parents. Her mother offers her homemade cookies, and Sophie takes them with enthusiasm. This did happen. However, I learned in a published interview with Sophie’s sister Liesel that the family found the uneaten cookies in Sophie’s coat pocket when given her personal effects after the execution. My heart! What a brave face she put on for her parents. This is a small detail, but learning this affected me profoundly and gave such insight into Sophie as a person. 

Because life isn’t always clear cut, the motives behind our actions don’t always make sense. But stories need to follow a logical path. What sorts of decisions have you had to make about “muddy” historical figures or events in order for your book to work?

One disputed event I included in White Rose was a moment in which the prison guards brought Sophie, Hans, and their friend Christoph together for a last cigarette. Or did they? Sophie’s eldest sister Inge described this moment in the first book about the group, The White Rose, published in 1955, and a multitude of subsequent sources quote it as well. However, I noticed that a more recent and extremely thorough source didn’t include it, so I asked about it, the author responded that it’s more probable that it didn’t happen (although not confirmable either way). I did end up including it, because it’s still possible it happened, and because it’s such an emotional, positive moment if it did indeed happen.

In the end, Sophie Scholl’s determination, defiance, and courage combined to create an inspirational heroine, but she was also a very real person, and I tried to bring those smaller, human moments to life as well. Like her, we all possess the power within ourselves to speak out and make a difference—a power we must exercise when silence would mean complicity.