J. Kasper Kramer is an author and English professor in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She has a master’s degree in creative writing and once upon a time lived in Japan, where she taught at an international school. When she’s not curled up with a book, Kramer loves researching lost fairy tales, playing video games, and fostering kittens.

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

I think this changes with each book for me. Right now, I’m working on a ghost story set in 1910, and it was actually the location that I found first—a quarantine island in New York City. I often incorporate folklore and fairytales into my novels, so sometimes the first piece of the story comes from there, such as a book I’m revising right now that’s grounded in Polish changeling lore. 

With The Story That Cannot Be Told, I found the era first, while listening to stories from my Romanian friends. I knew the book needed to be set right before the Romanian Revolution. From there, I discovered Ileana and her family, then the journey she’d have to go on. It’s funny, because I actually knew the title right away, but I didn’t know the titular “story” itself till pretty late in the first draft.

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

I often say that I need to “think” about a book for a good year before getting serious about it. I might do some casual research or chat out the ideas with my husband, but I very rarely take any notes or write anything down during this phase. I don’t want anything concrete that I might get attached to while I’m letting the story find its shape.

After that, I’ll start seriously researching—reading books, conducting interviews, collecting photos, and scouring the internet. How long this stage takes depends on how much I already know about the era and location. Once I start drafting, I always continue to research, though. And if I hit a question I don’t have the answer to, I pretty much have to stop writing till I figure it out.

What is your favorite thing about research?

I absolutely adore it when my research takes a book in a direction I hadn’t planned. For instance, while I was working on the first draft of Story, I found myself struggling to find propulsive conflict in the third act. Then, while researching something entirely unrelated, I came across “systemization”—where Ceausescu, the Romanian Communist leader, was destroying villages and sending villagers to go work in the cities. Suddenly, I had a major new conflict for my book.

What’s your least favorite thing about research?

I hate it when I forget if I researched something or not. Sometimes, I’ll be reading through a draft and go, “Wait. Is that right?” And then suddenly I’m down the rabbit hole, trying to skim through my sources to double check a date or recipe or other (often insignificant) piece of information that I already confirmed a long time ago.

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?

At the end of the day, the story I’m telling—about the characters I’ve created—is what matters most. That’s what will keep a reader engaged and result in the most meaningful emotional impact. Often, historical events might steer the plot of my novels, and historical locations, of course, help build setting. When I’m really lucky, all those things line up thematically with the motivations and choices of my characters. When they don’t, it gets complicated. With Story, for instance, there was a lot of confusion in the history books about what exactly happened during the Romanian Revolution in Bucharest. It wasn’t even clear who was fighting whom by the end. Ultimately, I just addressed that confusion up front, which fortunately worked well in a book about the nature of storytelling.

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.