Secrets of the Tower
I started writing Secrets of the Tower over seven years ago. I had the idea ‘cooking’ away in my head for a couple of years before that. The story was inspired by a difficult time in my own life – when my husband had a stroke while making a film in Pisa about the Leaning Tower. We had two young children at the time and I had to leave them with my mother and rush over to Italy to take care of him.
As the weeks progressed, and he began to slowly improve, I fell in love with Pisa and its mixture of medieval and Renaissance architecture - the spectacular buildings that form the Campo dei Miracoli, the Piazza dei Cavalieri, and the beautiful Arno river that starts its journey high up in the Appennine mountains and snakes its way through the Tuscan countryside, through Pisa and out into the Ligurian sea.
As the daughter of two architects I have always had an interest in buildings. I was inculcated from an early age to understand the difference between Baroque and Rococo church architecture. Dragged (almost literally) around Europe with my sister, our parents took us to visit beautiful churches and cathedrals from Beauvais to Ulm. Much of Europe was explored and whilst, at the time, we whined and moaned, it did us a great service and my memory banks are full of beautiful and inspirational buildings.
So it was natural for me to take architecture as a ‘theme’ for my own novel Secrets of the Tower. Not only are Pisa’s Leaning Tower, Cathedral and Baptistery amongst the most impressive buildings of their kind in Italy, but it is extraordinary to consider that these vast monuments to God were built by men with limited technology. Man’s ability to create and construct such buildings is truly inspirational.
So.. what are the best ways to make use of a private passion such as architecture when writing a novel.
First off... know your subject. I don’t pretend to be an expert on architecture, but as you have seen, I have been exposed to it all my life and am fascinated by it.
Love your subject... knowledge doesn’t necessarily equal passion. But if you are going to spend years (possibly!) of your life writing about something you need to love it enough to enjoy the research. Plus – if you don’t love something you will find it hard to convey that passion to others.
Use it as the backdrop to your story. In Secrets of the Tower, the architecture forms a sort of backbone to the whole story. Without the theme of building, this could be any love story, but the architecture is woven into every part of the book.
Ensure that at least one character in the novel is knowledgeable about it. In my story, Berta and Gerardo – the stars of the novel – are both experts and so the reader absorbs and learns about the buildings on the Campo dei Miracoli through their eyes.
Make it central to the development of the story. In Secrets of the Tower that is certainly the case. This is a story that examines the very beginnings of the iconic Leaning Tower of Pisa – so without that building there would literally be no story...
If, as in the case of Secrets, your subject is a building – ensure that the building is of genuine interest to as many people as possible. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the most recognised building in the world. So I hope the story will have a similar worldwide appeal.
Don’t allow your passion for a subject to dominate the novel. It should be inspirational and interesting, but you should not expect your readers to be studying for a PhD in the history of architecture!
Detail is key... sometimes it’s the tiny details that you’ve discovered in your research that give colour and texture to a novel.
Try to find a passion that has universal appeal. Everyone lives in a building of some kind. Everyone goes to school in a building, or shops in them. We all understand at a fundamental level what architecture is about, but we don’t perhaps stop and think too often, how important it is in our everyday lives.
Many of us enjoy reading a novel that teaches us something about a subject we knew little about. I know I do. I hope that I’ve managed to achieve that in Secrets of the Tower. I’d like my readers to go away from this novel having enjoyed the story, but having learned a little about how magnificent public buildings were created a thousand years ago...