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3.
AOTW: How did you change your book?
Philip Jolowicz: The book was originally entitled Towers of Silence and the artwork that had been finalized a day earlier showed the Twin Towers with vultures circling around it. Whilst the name of the book was partially intended to evoke the skyscraper landscape of Manhattan, the "Towers of Silence" actually refer to the funeral precinct in Bombay where members of the Parsi religion lay out their dead. There was no hesitation on the part of myself and my publishers in the US and UK that the title and the cover had to change.
In addition to title and cover, the plot centers around the impending merger of a major US law firm and a UK firm that has an office in New York (where the central character, Fin Border, works). The US law firm originally occupied several floors of WTC Tower 1 and its UK counterpart had a slice of WTC Tower 2. Now the US firm is accommodated in Rockefeller Center while the UK firm has been given a home in a fictional Wall Street district establishment called the Credence Building.
I also wrestled with the issue of whether the book should be set, timewise, before or after 9/11. If I'd set it after, then the whole landscape of the story would be informed by the events of that terrible day and that wasn't the story I'd written. On the other hand, it struck me as crass to ignore what had happened in a book set in Manhattan and which was due to come out in July 2002. My solution was to place the main body of the story pre 9/11 with an epilogue concluding in the present day. Whether it is really a solution, I don't frankly know, because I wasn't sure at the time I could articulate the problem I had to solve. All I can say is that now, from the perspective of the book itself, it doesn't strike me as a contrivance and that it works well in the context of the characters, plot and the overall dynamic of the work. Others may disagree --- but, at the time, I felt I had to do something.
William Carman: I had to change a series of illustrations, which originally had a little boy imagining an airplane crashing on his house. It was changed to a UFO landing in the back yard.
Jim Fusilli: The most radical change was in the character of Terry Orr, my protagonist who's a private investigator. In Closing Time, Terry is in the grips of a crippling obsession over his late wife. I realized no one could sustain that level of personal obsession in the face of so much collective death and devastation. So the events of September 11 served to shock Terry into a new world view and open him somewhat to the people around him.
I decided that, in the context of a story in which Terry is digging into a 30-year-old murder and diamond heist, I was going to write about the events in a very direct, terribly urgent way --- and part of A Well-Known Secret depicts what happened to Terry, Bella and other key characters on that day and for weeks afterwards, even as they try to return to their daily lives. I was very committed to documenting what I saw and felt in TriBeCa, and I believed there was no way to do it but to put the readers there when the first plane struck.
Earl Merkel: I was surprised, actually --- relatively few changes in the actual storyline were required. My bad guys aren't Middle Eastern or Moslem, for which I will be eternally grateful --- I think we'll see a rash of those stereotypes showing up now, if not in print then in submissions to all the agents out there. For me, I didn't have to reconfigure the story or the characters to reflect what, all of a sudden, everybody with a TV set already knew about violent Islamic radical organizations.
Don't get me wrong: in some ways, I did have to deal with the level of information I originally used. For instance, my research had included interviews with acknowledged experts in terrorism and biological weapons. All of a sudden, the same people I had used as content sources were showing up on the TODAY Show and CNN, telling the nation the same information they had shared with me.
And certainly, what did change was some of the historical context I had used in Final Epidemic. For instance, one passage in the book previously used the thoughts of my main character to note that:
"Many Americans believed that the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 had constituted the climax of domestic terrorism. It had not, as the litany of antigovernment conspiracies through which Beck was plowing showed vividly; it had been only the most dramatic, at least thus far. Since them, several hundred major bombing or other terror plots - generally unknown to the public at large - had been shortstopped by the intensive efforts of the FBI and other police agencies throughout the United States.
It had become a savage game of odds and numbers, Beck realized. Even in the most draconian police state, no government could stymie every terror plot; the difficulty was a magnitude harder in a democracy that protected the Constitutional rights of even the most cold-blooded criminal.
Inevitably, the statistics dictated, terrorists would slip past the cordon of American law enforcement, and win another one to rival - or even surpass - the horror of Oklahoma City.
As they had now, Beck thought..."
In retrospect, that passage was prescient --- but obviously, after Sept. 11 it had to change.
Did I try to make changes to keep up with the new bureaucracy that has been created to deal with terrorism? Actually that received only relatively minor revamping; by and large, I changed little about the fictionalized bureaucratic hierarchy that, in Final Epidemic, mobilizes to combat the deadly virus as it spreads through the US population.
Even today, with the Office of Homeland Security a reality, the actual bureaucracy that would respond to a biological attack changes almost on a daily basis. We did make some changes in the interest of accuracy.
But in many other instances, I left it as I had written it originally. Otherwise, two things would have happened: I would have gone nuts, and my editor would still be inserting changes in the manuscript. And in several cases since the editing ended, the government has already changed its procedures back to what they had been when I wrote about them. So it worked out well, by and large.
If you're a New Yorker --- and even if you're not, but you saw the Time magazine Man of the Year issue --- you'll probably recognize the fictional mayor in Final Epidemic. I wrote that character as a forceful leader, calling him "a former prosecutor, and a tough-minded one at that. He had used the same approach as Mayor, and was credited with spurring a renaissance in the city's quality of life."
I wrote that passage, and the chapters where the Mayor appears, back when Rudy G. headed up the city --- and it certainly fit the description of a man who I believe was a critical factor for New York in the days and weeks after Sept. 11 . There was no way I was going to change a damned word of it.
Bruce Feiler: Within two weeks, I had scrapped the book I was working on and replaced it with another. If you listened closely, one name echoed behind all the conversations after September 11. One person stood at the newsiest of all three religions that suddenly seemed to be at war: Abraham. The great patriarch of the Hebrew Bible is also the spiritual father of the New Testament and the grand architect of the Koran. Abraham is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He is the father --- in many cases, the biological father --- of twelve million Jews, two billion Christians, and one billion Muslims around the world. And yet, he is virtually unknown.
I wanted to know him. I wanted to understand his legacy --- and his appeal. And so, two weeks after September 11th, I got up off my couch and went on a search. I went back to the Middle East, I went back to the text, I went deep inside myself, and I tried to answer the question that countless of generations have tried to answer before: Can Abraham save the world?
Jennifer Blake: My first move was to contact my editor about the problem. Others at the publishing house were brought into the discussion, along with my agent. A major concern for everyone was to avoid the appearance of attempting to profit from the disaster, especially since publication of Wade was already set for September 2002, the one-year anniversary of the attack. At one point, I even suggested scrapping the whole idea and starting over with a new story. After the pros and cons were hashed out, a decision was made to continue with the book but remove any reference to actual persons and relocate the setting to a fictional "mirror" country. These changes would allow mental distance and relieve the need to align the plot with daily news reports from the Middle East. Accordingly, I created Hazaristan as a substitute for Afghanistan, invented a fundamentalist government derived from the Taliban model, and removed all Afghan place names, all reference to Osama bin Laden. The basic plot and Middle Eastern setting remained the same.
Lori Woolridge: I totally rewrote the entire thing. I suppose I could have simply changed the way the character died, but after 9.11, I lost all interest in that particular story, which in its essence looked at infidelity from both female points of view (the wife and the mistress). The topic seemed trivial and unimportant after such a huge tragedy.
I was able to keep all of the character sketches and about 50 pages, but my focus had changed. Instead of simply looking at infidelity as "cheating" I wanted to examine a relationship between a man and woman who are lovers of the soul in a society where emotional intimacy outside of marriage is taboo. To look at it as a gift instead of a moral deficiency. I began to explore the idea that if we all stopped worrying about capturing and/or keeping someone else's love and instead focused on our huge capacity to give and receive love, maybe this world might be a better place. In other words, stop throwing away so much God-given love because it comes in what we perceive to be the wrong package, i.e., sex, race, religion, economic or marital status, thus replacing fear-based affection with the genuine thing.
So Hitts and Mrs. is now about romantic friendship. About sexual energy enjoyed but never consummated. It's about allowing an outside love in your life that makes you a better man or woman; husband or wife; human being. It is now a much better book, by the way.
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