The Biography of a Novel—Part 3

Welcome back to my exploration of the biography of the novel I’m publishing in the next few weeks. In two earlier postings, I explained that the genesis of the book was my daily walk in a cemetery. There, I began to speak aloud one day. The words seemed to answer the question: “Who is he for you?”

Recognizing that the person being described was Jesus of Nazareth, I reread the four Christian Gospels. There I discovered twenty-seven people whose lives interested me. Asking each the cemetery question, I wrote twenty-seven monologues as answers. Friends who read these monologues encouraged me to publish them as a devotional book.

However, the crisis of faith I was then experiencing did not seem conducive to following through on that suggestion. Moreover, I’d always wanted to write a novel, and I found myself intrigued by what some of these characters had said about Jesus and about their own lives. I didn’t know exactly what to make of all the words that had come.

Then the lightbulb came on.

Someone was asking the question: “Who is he for you?”

That someone could also be a character who could hold the book together.

Given the times—the first-century of the Common Era in Palestine—only a man would be culturally able to travel around the country meeting people and asking that question. So I needed a man who had the time and leisure to do so. Thus, he couldn’t be tied down to a job. Also, he would need the money/means to travel and stay at inns and buy food and papyrus or parchment for writing. He would need to know how to write Hebrew or Aramaic—the languages of the people in Palestine. Given all this, I thought he’d need to have some wealth.

Ta-Dah! The character of Jonathan, a wealthy Judaean aristocrat, emerged and began a dialogue with the characters, asking them to describe their experience of Jesus. In this way, the monologues of Draft 1 became the ribs of Draft 2. The description of Jonathan’s journey to the Galilee to conduct these interviews became the musculature holding those ribs together.

For an hour each weekday throughout the next year, I researched ancient Palestine: where the characters might live, their clothing, their occupations, their tools, their homes and food, the flora and fauna of their region, their Hebrew names. That is, I researched the setting of the novel.

Using this research, I wove the monologues into dialogues between Jonathan and the characters he met as he journeyed throughout the Galilee and Judaea asking his question.

Two friends— Lea Ann Gregerson and Al Rashid—came up with the title for this second version: The Jesus Interviews. Using that title, I sent out query letters to several editors to see if anyone was wanted to read the manuscript. Only one responded.

She praised the writing of the second version, but turned it down. “It’s too predictable,” she said. “Most people already know what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. There’s no suspense. No tension. To create suspense, focus on Jonathan. He’s a wholly fictitious character. Do something with him beyond having him simply interview other people. Give him a life!”  

So that’s what happened next: I began to come up with a background for Jonathan and his life. That led to a third draft of the novel. However, when I asked a biblical professor at a local college to read it, he found much detail that wasn’t accurate. Moreover, both characters and culture weren’t authentic. Clearly, if I wanted a novel, I needed to do more research.

That’s next week’s posting!

Peace.

Map of the Galilee, circa 50 CE, from Wikipedia