The Historical Novel and Old Newspapers

Until I do a book tour I won't know if it's true that the question readers most commonly ask a novelist is "Where do you get your ideas?"

In the case of LIFTERS, the answer is from the Seattle newspapers from the period 1905 to 1909.
History is seductive.  The further you get into the details, the further the details get into you.  You crouch over the microfiche reader and pursue the events that interest you as they unfold from one issue to the next.  But you also become aware of assumptions that the newswriters don't know they were revealing.  A blend of admiration and racial contempt for the Japanese, for instance.  A belief that insanity can strike anyone at any time, sometimes the result of a shocking event, sometimes not the result of any obvious cause.  Insanity explains otherwise inexplicable behavior.  A vague fear, in the background but never too far away, that hypnotism can induce anyone to do things they don't want to do.

I would become so engrossed in the University of Washington newspaper files I would lose all sense of time, and would end the session because of eyestrain or the first hints of migraine.  It was all fascinating, the shipping news, the theater events, the local crimes.  Dr. Benjamin Franklin Roller rose out of the sports pages as a figure larger than life and I had no choice but to make him a major character in the novel.  The challenge
is that this kind of research has a kind of centrifugal force and can lead to a multitude of story lines.  I could have found myself like George R. R. Martin, with too many story lines ever to bring back to the leash of a narrative line.  In LIFTERS I set a lot of things in motion, but (I believe) they all fit together at the end.