What it was like to write a novel based on a true story!

Miguel is four years old when he is suddenly taken away from his home in Cape Verde and brought to Milan.  Entrusted to Maria, an affluent Romanian lady, he embarks on a turbulent journey, which leads him to question his identity and sense of belonging.  He looks for ways to escape from the pressures of everyday life, which eventually have devastating consequences.

I had always believed that this true story could be novelised.  I talked about the idea of writing it with a former colleague and friend of mine and she encouraged me to put pen to paper, but that was not enough.  And this is the only piece of advice I would give anyone planning to write a novel – get the story validated by at least one person who doesn’t know you and is from the literary world.  Friends have often told me to write about this person or that event, but that’s because they know me, and it was often based on the entertaining way I would recount some of my friends’ escapades over dinner or coffee.  The market is huge, so you need to find something original that is going to be read by people who don’t know you.  

What makes this story unique?

How did I sell this story?  There were many Cape Verdeans who emigrated to the New World (Europe and the Americas) in the early seventies.  So, what made this story original is that a young Cape Verdean boy (Miguel) ends up living with a Romanian Jewish lady (Maria) in Milan, and not his biological mother or an Italian family.  Furthermore, they both have survival stories before they meet, but radically different ones.  Miguel’s family lives on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean, and the equatorial climate means that there is a dry season for most of the year, disabling any kind or agriculture, so daily sustenance depends on successful fishing expeditions.  Compared to the west or any developed country, Cape Verde had a high mortality rate.  And the impact of colonialism is deeply rooted in Cape Verdean history and anatomy.  Portuguese officials would have relationships with African slaves, resulting in a mixed race, the Cape Verdean.  The Portuguese made Catholicism the official religion, prohibited any African customs or traditions (such as erotic dancing) and ensured that all names were Portuguese.  Post-independence, my observations from visiting three of these islands was that the culture leans more towards Africa than Portugal (dancing, food, and the crioulo language).  Yet, being colonised by Portugal gave the Cape Verdean a passport to Portugal, the rest of Europe and the Americas.  

Maria is born in the 1920s into an affluent Jewish Romanian family.  They had to come up with different survival strategies during the second world war and when the Russians invaded Romania.  Consequently, Maria had to move from one district to another, from one country to another, firstly to escape from Nazi soldiers, and latterly to escape from the communist ideology that the Russians implemented.  The circumstances of Maria taking care of Miguel are unusual.  Neither of them is Italian; they have different histories, religions, backgrounds, culture.  And this gave me the structure for the novel:  Part One is set in Cape Verde from 1960 to 1971 at the time that Miguel is born and gives an insight into Cape Verdean life.  Part Two is Maria’s story, written in first person.  Part Three is about them living together.  I did consider starting with the end or jumping from one era to another in a similar way that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie does in Half of a Yellow Sun, but after reflection, I didn’t think that intertwining events would work well for this particular story.

Research

I underestimated the amount of time researching for this novel, and in the end, it took most of a year before I could begin writing.  I already had a wealth of materials to work from:  letters from the protagonist (Miguel) to me, memoires he had written, letters from Maria who took him into her custody, letters from his girlfriend, and photographs.  I had many lunches and dinners with Maria, interviewing her on her life and how the Miguel was entrusted to her.  This was a good start, but I was missing lots of other details, such as how he was conceived, what S?o Nicolau, Cape Verde was like in the 1960s and early 1970s before independence.  To create a realistic picture of what this was like, and to construct dialogues between the protagonist’s family members and friends, I made deductions by reading extensively about the history, geography and culture of these islands, reading university papers about emigration and visiting S?o Nicolau.  Out of the inhabited islands, S?o Nicolau is perhaps the most primitive; unlike other islands, there are no sandy beaches, hotels and restaurants; it is mountainous with steep inclines.  I stayed in a pension and hired a private tour guide, who spoke English and crioulo, and luckily, I met some of the Miguel’s relatives and visited the home where he was born.  For the purposes of the novel, the fact that S?o Nicolau had not changed much for over 40 years meant that I could get a good idea of the culture and behaviour, the living conditions, and the environment.  With my notes, four hundred photographs and videos, books and papers and memoires, I was able to confidently put together Part One.

            In my promotional material to show the uniqueness of this story, I wanted to emphasize the juxtaposition between Miguel and Maria’s lives before they met.  Compared to the research on Cape Verde, Maria’s story was relatively easy as I interviewed Maria many times.  I also read parts of books on Jewish Romanians living through the second world war and the Russian invasion, watched a DVD on communism and watched a YouTube video of Romania in the 1930s.  So, before you read about them living together, you get an appreciation of where Miguel comes from (Part One) and where Maria comes from (Part Two).

Writing a novel based on a true story

I already knew that documenting someone’s story line by line would not make good storytelling, so combining research with evidence was key to giving the story a dramatic appeal.  The storyline was therefore based on the following four approaches:

1.     Patching real events together with fictitious scenes and characters

2.     Omitting some real events and characters because they don’t contribute in any significant way to the overall plot

3.     Creating realistic and probable new scenes and characters based on little hard evidence and lots of research

4.     Simplifying and consolidating characters and events

For example, I had very little hard evidence about what actually took place in Sāo Nicolau from 1960 to 1971.  Miguel had written some vague recollections in his writings, so I had to depend on them, conversations I had with family members when I visited the island in 2013 and reading about the islands’ history and culture.  All the real characters’ names were changed, the dialogue was recreated and, in some cases, the locations were changed.  I suppose the biggest changes I made were to Miguel’s friends.  In his teens and twenties, he was a very outgoing person and had a lot of friends but to include all of them would have made the story too cumbersome so I invented three main friends, and these were based on people he was close to.  Even with these changes, the essence of the story remains.

As I put earlier, it would have been a hard read if I documented every single event that actually happened, so in Part Three, when Miguel is entrusted to Maria, there are many long periods where nothing eventful happens.  For this reason, from early on in this section of the book, the chapters are episodic, where there is a time lapse between each chapter (this could be months or several years).  Later on, they become more sequential.

Most stories have an emphasis on the character (character-led) or a focus on themes and issues (issue-led).  This story being character-led meant that I had to ensure that the development of Miguel, influenced by Maria and external happenings, was credible right from the very beginning.  So, wherever I was in the world, I would always have A3 paper with me so I could sketch and change key plot developments in each chapter and how Miguel would react and behave in each circumstance.  I also used this device to capture themes of racism, victimisation, identity, sense of belonging and how cultural adaptation would impact Miguel’s character as he got older. For dramatic effect, I ensured there were cliffhangers at the end of Part One and Part Two, and at the end of most chapters.

The editing process

            It took three years to edit the novel.  In the writing phase, I was using my right brain to engage in creative writing and for this, I needed several hours to become absorbed in the story.  Half an hour here and one hour there were not enough – I would often need at least three of four hours.  Given that I am in the novel, I had to use triggers to recall events that happened a long time ago – this would often be looking at old photographs, listening to specific songs from Marco Masini, Antonello Venditti, Dire Straits, Fleetwood Mac, and eating pasta and tomato sauce the way Maria used to make it.  The editing phase needed the left side of the brain.  This involved ironing out inconsistencies, removing / adding words and paragraphs, modifying explicit scenes so that they became more implicit, adding chapters (Part One, Chapter One was one of the last chapters I wrote), adding characters and scenes etc.

            Then there is editing for style.  We often use storytelling in business, and I have posted a few blogs on LinkedIn.  Storytelling in business follows a structure, such as the Hero’s Journey, where there is a denouement which captures ‘key learnings’ and ‘take-aways’.  The language tends to be more straightforward, and the story starts with an event based on facts.  Whereas, with a novel which is a mixture of facts and fiction, I had to keep myself in check because words sounded too business-like or formal.  I did run by a few chapters with some friends, who all gave me compliments on what they read – and this didn’t help at all.  I needed criticism; fortunately, one university friend took a few chapters from Part One and sent it back to me with some harsh comments and there was black ink everywhere.  This is what I needed.  So, another piece of advice, don’t get your friends to review your work unless you can rely on them to be critical enough!  Given that this is my first novel, I sought some critical feedback from a professional editor, who suggested I add a ‘stream of consciousness’ for Miguel.  A ‘stream of consciousness’ refers adding his feelings, thoughts and decision-making process.  And I had to improve the flow making it easier to read.   This meant huge rewrites of large chunks of the novel.  He also recommended writing an introduction to explain a bit about Cape Verde, as many people may not know about the existence of this archipelago.  The final part of the editing process was the proofreading – hundreds of punctuation, grammar and spelling errors which all needed correcting.

Promotion

            Thanks to social media, the avenues for promoting novels are relatively straightforward.  The challenge was that I needed promotional materials, an attractive front cover, and a compelling blurb on the back cover, that would also be used by online retailers.  Easier said than done.  Let’s start with the front cover.  I already had a concept in mind of the silhouette of the back of a four-year old Cape Verdean boy looking at the sunset over the horizon - very simple with dramatic colours.  Luckily, my former colleague and friend, Luz Mercurio, from Manila is a very talented artist, and I had seen some of her work several years ago and I loved her style.  She kindly volunteered to paint the cover and I think it represented the novel extremely well.  I checked the font style and colour of the title and my name with a graphic artist, Edwin Mariwa, in Kenya, and solicited lots of feedback on the back cover blurb.

            As for promotional materials, I created two YouTube videos using Final Cut Pro – one is a trailer, and the other is a self-interview.  These would be used for publicity on Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter as well as sites such as goodreads.com.  Once these were complete, the publisher arranged for the book to be available as a paperback and e-book from online retailers around the world.

Trailer:

https://youtu.be/ViQSgvXZ4ek

Interview:

https://youtu.be/ciHLlp9mN9k

            Writing this novel has been a labour of love.  I haven’t mentioned the number of times I had writer’s block for months on end, looking for bridges to connect one event with another.  This is a story close to my heart:  without the protagonist, I would never have studied Italian, I would never have lived in Italy, I would probably never have joined GE.  Originally, I wanted to study media studies at university so I could become a journalist, a writer and get involved in script writing - at school, I used to write stories and scripts.  Then, my parents sent me on a three-week language and sports course in Germany before starting my final year at school, and that’s when I met Miguel and another fifty Italian students.  Then everything changed, and I changed direction and studied languages (including Italian) at university….and the rest is history….

And here is a final video to show the research and the behind the scenes:

https://youtu.be/PHbPj7fCRHY