Sara Donati

Sara Donati (a pen name for Rosina Lippi) she is the author of the Wilderness series, historical novels that follow the fortunes of a group of families living in the vast forests in upstate New York from about 1792-1825, with particular attention to the War of 1812. Her newest series (the Waverly Place Series) is about the extended Bonner family and includes The Gilded Hour and Where the Light Enters. The story in this series jumps ahead two generations to follow Nathaniel and Elizabeth Bonner’s grand- and great granddaughters into the twentieth century.

Donati's new novel, The Sweet Blue Distance, is set in 1858 in New Mexico Territory; it serves as a bridge between the Wilderness series of novels and the first two novels of the Waverly Place series.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I have never had much luck naming my own novels. Editors and marketing people have more control than I like. I wanted to call this newest novel Little Birds -- and I admit it would give the reader no real sense of the story. The Sweet Blue Distance does provide some insight. This is a novel about moving west and into a new life, and thus far it seems that readers agree that the title evokes the images I was hoping for.

What's in a name?

Character names are a universe to themselves. I have a total of ten historical novels in print, and the same families feature in most of them. This provides an anchor, of a sort -- the first and primary couple are Elizabeth and Nathaniel. As their universe grew (children, children-in-law, grandchildren) I found it harder and harder to find compelling names, almost certainly because I didn't know those characters very well yet. I have used 'Martha' multiple times in various generations, and the name has deep connotations for me because of the last Martha -- born to Jemima Southern, who readers love to hate, and to Liam Kirby, who they love unconditionally. Martha is a conflicted young woman with some awful childhood memories (thanks to her mother) but she finds her footing and grows into one of my own favorites. I suppose that she had to develop in that direction because she married into the Bonner family; she had to earn that privilege. At least, that's what my writer's brain worked out.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings are awful. It may take me months of rethinking and rewriting an opening, and I won't get anything really written until that's done. A bit morbid, by it's something like digging a grave. Just how deep do you need to go? How wide? If I start out and convince myself I'm on the right track -- when I know that I am not, really -- I will pay for it not so far down the line. The worst experience with this cost me about five thousand words. That discarded chapter still lives deep in the bowels of my hard drive. I won't go looking for it.

I'd like to point out that dozens of hugely admired and successful writers agree with me on this. Agatha Christie put it very clearly: "Starting to write a book: there is no agony like it" (1977). My favorite quote is what George Orwell had to say: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

A few of my characters have traces of my personality, but only slightly. Many of my female characters are more capable of violence than I think I would be in similar situations. It's more likely that I draw on a person from my life for a character, and most often this is not a compliment. There are two female and two male characters that I drew pretty much from life, People familiar with my work will recognize the name Moncrieff, but they have no way to know who he's based on, and I'm not going to go into detail. At least, not until the real-life Moncrieff is dead. It occurs to me that I should ask my readers for the five worst characters I've come up with. I wonder what they will say.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The biggest influence on my writing mind has always been history. Or better said, hidden histories. As a teenager I was truly angry to find out that Anne Frank's diary had been severely edited by her father, who wanted a neater, cleaner story. Later reading about the War of 1812 I was shocked at how little we had been taught about that war. Reading extensively about slavery and the way colonialization destroyed whole nations of people put another set of stories in my head. And I have always been interested in the way women survived in a world where they were pinned down by the demands of survival. You can find all these topics and others in my historical fiction. My purpose is to turn a small light on. The very best compliment I have ever had about my novels goes something like "I didn't realize... so I went to read about it... and now I'm still reading because wow, why did I never learn any of this in school?"

Visit Sara Donati's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Gilded Hour.

--Marshal Zeringue