Author! Author!
Best-selling novelist Beatriz Williams of Lyme to talk at luncheon benefitting Child & Family Agency
Beatriz Williams is a New York Times bestselling author whose works of historical fiction have drawn admiring reviews from USA Today, NPR and People magazine — and she’s also an impressively prolific writer. She released “The Golden Hour” in July of this year and has “The Aviatrix” pegged for publication next July.
In December, “The Wicked Redhead,” a novel that is part of her prohibition series that began with 2017’s “The Wicked City,” will go on sale.
In January, her latest collaboration with friends/authors Lauren Willig and Karen White comes out.
She recently finished writing a screenplay of her 2018 novel “The Summer Wives.”
And Williams is already hard at work on her next book, which is set in the 1960s and involves Cold War espionage and the space race.
She’ll obviously have plenty of material to reference, then, when she speaks at this year’s Celebrity Author Luncheon, held Saturday at the East Lyme Community Center. The event is held by The Thames West Auxiliary of the Child & Family Agency and Bank Square Books, and profits go to support Child & Family Agency and its projects to help children and families.
A native of Seattle, Williams lives in Lyme with her husband, Syd, and their four children (the oldest just started college and the youngest is in sixth grade).
“Beatriz Williams has made a name for herself as a historical novelist with a knack for the obscured whisperings and yearnings of women’s lives, those so often absent from the historical record …Williams’ particular gift as a writer is peeling back the pages of history to breathe life into the interior lives of women — how they lived, loved, and lost within the expectations and limitations of their time,” an Entertainment Weekly review stated.
That review was of Williams’ “The Summer Wives,” in which famous actress Miranda Schuyler returns to the island she lived on during her teenage years — Williams based the locale on Fishers Island — and confronts
her past. Her visit also happens after her first crush, a lobsterman convicted of killing her stepfather, escapes from prison. The book delves into Miranda’s life at different points, in 1930, 1950 and 1969.
“I want my characters to be authentic … I want them to think and speak and act like historic figures, but the way I tell the story — I want to keep that fresh,” Williams says.
Women in the 20th century
Williams says that, to her, what is particularly fascinating — and what is a theme through all of her books — is how women negotiated their place in society at various stages through the 20th century, an era in which there was so much change.
She thinks that women are good at making the social structure work for them. She’s not diminishing the oppression they had to deal with but, she says, “I’m interested not so much in how women were victims but in how some women overcame a social structure or just a deck that was stacked against them.”
Writing, delayed
While Williams has now developed a thriving writing career, she shied away from it early on.
“Writing was what I always wanted to do, from the time I was small. But I was just afraid to do it. You really are putting your ego just naked out there for people to kind of demolish. I was a high achiever in school. I was sort of expected to be. And you don’t want to do anything unless you can be a smashing success at it, because what’s the point? The odds with writing and being successful at it (aren’t great). This was always my special talent, but I was afraid to risk myself,” she says of the fear of possibly being told she was no good.
So, after majoring in anthropology at Stanford University and earning her MBA from Columbia University, she moved into the business world. She worked as a communications and corporate strategy consultant in New York and London.
A family, a new career
Williams’ decision to make a serious effort at writing started after she wed and had children. The Williamses had their first baby, and then two more followed in quick succession.
After the third child was about a year old, Williams thought if she was going to pursue writing, now was the time.
“I had that creative side to me that I needed to explore. I thought, ‘Well, I’m at a point where I have kids who need me and love me regardless of whether I’m any good at this thing,’ so it was less of a risk. It was not an existential risk to start writing and put it out there and see if I might be published. My husband at that point had left his job at an investment bank, so it was like I need to do something. I need to contribute in some way,” she says.
While finding time to write when a mother of three youngsters might seem impossible, that wasn’t the case. When the Williamses were living in London, they had a maternity nurse who put the first two children on a schedule; the kids were in bed from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. from a really young age, and they had nap time as well.
“So I actually had three hours in the evening to write and maybe an hour in the day. It was really a matter of, like, not cleaning the house,” she says.
Williams says she writes best when she’s writing quickly. And, she notes, much of writing is the thinking aspect of it.
“You’re in the shower trying to figure out how to solve a plot problem. You’re not going to figure that out, sitting staring at your screen. You’re going to do that thinking about it in other settings and then get yourself all revved up so when you do sit down in front of your computer, you’re ready to go, theoretically,” she says.
Headed for TV?
Williams’ novels read like miniseries, with sweeping stories that often shift back and forth in time. When the miniseries comparison is made, she responds, “We are in fact in development for a television series for ‘The Summer Wives.’ I was asked to adapt the screenplay, which I did. That’s one of the reasons I ended up being so late on writing ‘Aviatrix.’ I was also writing a screenplay, which I had never done before … We finally finished up the final draft of the screenplay, so now it’s going out to buyers.”
The production company she is working with is John Wells Productions, which was behind such shows as “ER” and “West Wing.”
She says that now is a good time for a project like “The Summer Wives” in Hollywood.
“They are actively looking for women-fronted projects, and they are teaming you with female showrunners and female producers,” she says.
Inspired by Amelia Earhart
As for her novel that is being released next summer, “The Aviatrix,” Williams thinks it might be the best thing she has written and says, “I’m so excited about this book. … You just get in that creative flow — that’s really when you produce your best stuff.”
When she met a reporter at Ashlawn Farm Coffee in Old Saybrook for an interview, Williams had her computer with her and was working on an author’s note for the novel.
The book was sparked, in part, by the story of Amelia Earhart. As Williams started doing research, she learned about other “unbelievably talented, fearless, amazing female pilots in that era” who also provided inspiration for the novel.
“Women were really out there, in the open, in the ‘20s and ‘30s, consciously breaking down walls. It’s not that there wasn’t plenty of sexism in the culture, but they were out there doing it anyway,” she says.
The book is set in 1947, and a writer suspects that the owner of a small local airline in Hawaii is an iconic female pilot who disappeared during a flight.
A 1920s flapper and a prohibition agent
And here is more about her other upcoming works:
In “The Wicked Redhead,” Ginger Kelly is a 1920s flapper, originally from Appalachia, who gets drawn by a straight-arrow prohibition agent into an investigation of a criminal enterprise.
That character, Williams says, “has got a very original voice, a vibrant, fun and candid voice, and I love writing her. I love these books so much.”
Meanwhile, her third collaboration with Willig and White is “All the Ways We Said Goodbye.”
“We all write in a dual or multinarrative format, so we each take a character, we develop the whole plot together — it’s a total sisterhood,” she says.
The trio develop very detailed chapter outlines, something they don’t do when writing their own novels. Then, they have a round robin writing the chapters. Each has one character, and even their editor can’t tell who wrote which character.
“The best part is we get to go on the road together for a couple weeks (for the book tour). That is a ton of fun,” Williams says.
“All the Ways We Said Goodbye” is set in France and centers on three generations of women, living during World War I, World War II and the 1960s.
Discussing the fact that she has so many releases in a short period, Williams says it just happened that way because of a variety of factors.
“Next year won’t be quite so crazy,” she says.
The impact of storytelling
Williams believes in the intrinsic power of storytelling. She notes that the way that human beings develop and preserve their culture over generations and centuries is through storytelling.
“Nobody cares about a lecture. They want to hear stories that illustrate and make it human. Storytelling is so powerful. …. You’re taking a moment to live inside that person’s skin, to see the world how they view the world. To me, that’s the most wonderful thing about reading and writing,” she says.
We should read not necessarily to relate to the main character but to discover characters who are not like us, she says, so we can understand, for instance, “somebody who has a more timid personality, a less timid personally … somebody who wants to write, somebody who wants to paint, somebody who wants to solve equations. (It helps you) to understand that’s no more or less than your experience. And maybe that experience is what paints our view of the world and how we react to that world.”