Beatriz Williams, HER LAST FLIGHT
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[1:03]Summer Bundle, by it is a gift, a housewarming, if you actually go somewhere, or just give it to
[1:08]yourself. Everybody needs a treat without a long spring. PageOneBooks.com. This is Day Five,
[1:14]the last day of this week for my July book blast, and today is Fiction Friday. I'll be releasing
[1:20]a few episodes of novels that I think are pretty awesome, and can't wait to introduce you to these
[1:25]authors. I'm doing the July book blast, because I interviewed a lot of people during quarantine,
[1:30]and the books came out during quarantine, and I would love them to get the airtime they need now
[1:35]to get the word out. Also, a lot of these books are great beach reads, and if you have any time
[1:40]this summer, I would love for you to hear more from these authors directly. So please enjoy fiction Friday
[1:46]and stay tuned. This whole week was memoir Monday, debut Tuesday, beach reads Wednesday,
[1:51]thrilling Thursday, and now today, fiction Friday. I hope you've had a chance to listen to
[1:55]a few this week, and enjoy this one by Beatrice Williams is The New York Times USA Today, an
[2:01]internationally bestselling author of The Golden Hour, The Summer Wives, The Secret Life of Violet
[2:06]Grant, a hundred summers, and several other works of historical fiction, including her latest book,
[2:13]The Last Flight. She is the screenwriter for the television adaptation of The Summer Wives,
[2:17]which is currently in development with John Wells Productions, a graduate of Stanford University,
[2:22]with an MBA in finance from Columbia University. Beatrice worked as a communications and corporate
[2:27]strategy consultant in New York and London, before she turned her attention to writing novels that
[2:31]combine her passion for history with obsessive devotion to voice and characterization. Beatrice's
[2:37]books have won numerous awards, have been translated into more than a dozen languages and appear
[2:42]regularly in bestseller lists around the world. Born in Seattle, Washington, Beatrice now lives
[2:46]near the Connecticut Shore with her husband and four children, where she divides her time between
[2:50]writing and laundry. Welcome Beatrice, thanks so much for coming on Moms, don't have time to read
[2:55]books. Thank you so much for having me. So you have such an interesting background for an author
[3:00]having gotten your MBA and all that, and I actually got an MBA too. I wanted to talk to you a little
[3:05]about that and how your sort of traditional sort of more consultant strategy type brain
[3:11]morphed and now started writing all this fiction. So tell me about that. It's actually the other way
[3:16]around. Oh, no way. I was somebody who never wanted to do anything but write books. What was I doing
[3:21]in the business world getting an MBA finance and all that? I mean, I think it does help my father's
[3:25]an engineer. So I was never that kind of writer who like is allergic to numbers in science. I always
[3:31]love numbers in science and in fact a couple of my books have dealt with sciencey issues in the
[3:36]secret life of violent grant. I was sort of in the world of a physics in pre-war Germany and in
[3:42]actually my current book that's coming out at her last flight deals with early aviation and of
[3:47]course I'm not you know going into long technical explanations. But that will process fascinates me
[3:53]and the science of flight and you know sort of the various things that pilots would have to do
[3:58]in the age before GPS and sophisticated instruments to figure out where they were on the face of
[4:04]the earth. This is all very fascinating to me. But you know, my love has always been literature
[4:09]and writing. I always wanted to do that and I think I was just scared. You know partly because
[4:13]you know my father is British and having grown up in a post where rationing Britain sort of really
[4:18]wanted to have me do something practical with my life. So you know I went to college and I actually
[4:24]majored in anthropology which he was very proud. I said yeah it was more like trying to get a
[4:30]liberal arts education and wanting to kind of square that circle. How do I find a way to make a living
[4:36]and yet right? You know right it's very it's you do have to have a lot of guts or else just an
[4:41]enormous amount of unjustified self-confidence. It's you're putting yourself out into the world
[4:47]kind of naked and you know people will judge you. They will say things to you that your boss
[4:51]would never say to you in a normal job you know and and you just have to take it. You're not
[4:57]even allowed to respond back to criticism. So you know so you do have to go in there with a certain
[5:02]amount of courage as my father would say many are called fewer chosen. You know what if this thing
[5:08]that was supposed to me my big talent all my life. What if I'm not actually good at it. You know so
[5:14]I had all these fears and so I went into and also going to a college where people were very
[5:19]success oriented. You know if you there was no point in doing anything if you were unless you're
[5:23]going to be wildly successful. So you know I went into business world wall straight a lot
[5:28]believe it or not a lot easier to succeed on wall straight than to succeed in publishing.
[5:33]And and and then I got married had kids I'm with the kids and I thought okay this is the moment
[5:38]for me to actually do what I really want to do with my life which was to write. So I started taking
[5:42]classes and sort of learning the more technical side of writing and storytelling in particular
[5:48]and eventually got to the point where I thought I had something other people might actually want
[5:54]that's amazing. I love that story. Thank you. So he's here overcome. No it always it really I feel like
[6:02]it really informs the reading when you know where the author is coming from and how you had to
[6:06]keep coming back to that passion of yours and I don't know I think it's really always nice to hear
[6:11]yourself. I sometimes I had this enormous burst of creativity when I first started writing and you
[6:16]see I have so many books and I even have a pen name I was writing under. So I just know what's
[6:20]there and it was partly because it was just I had so much inside me all this like pent-up decades
[6:26]of stories that I wanted to tell and you know now you know that kind of has slowed down a bit
[6:31]for me and I'm I think a little more measured about my books and the you just the sentences
[6:35]and everything that goes into them there's a complexity there but you know maybe that that initial
[6:41]freshness that burst of huge creativity. It's definitely transitioning for me into something
[6:46]more nuanced and thoughtful and you know I think the books are getting more complicated and not
[6:53]quite the sense of a you know an ending that's that's obvious and Pat and you know if you're
[7:00]somebody who doesn't like ambiguous ending yeah I'm starting to kind of transition into that where
[7:04]you know just that sends an ambiguity to me so fascinating because it's it's just so much of what
[7:10]we encounter in real life. And I read you said somewhere that even though you write a lot of historical
[7:16]fiction it's really just the people in those moments it's not the history itself that draws you
[7:20]to the stories tell me a little more about that. Well I'm obsessed with history I have just
[7:25]from my childhood and in my you know my pair we were out there in suburban Seattle but here my
[7:30]parents you know we would go to the Shakespeare festival in Ashland Oregon every year that was
[7:35]a family vacation everyone else got to go to beach. I was watching Shakespeare plays and we had
[7:40]season tickets to the Seattle Opera which was actually quite certainly at the time and I think even
[7:44]now very innovative opera house they had a really dynamic company there. So you know but
[7:50]obvious historical fiction I mean they were doing historical fiction and Shakespeare was doing
[7:55]historical fiction even in his own time and so to me the past has always been a window into
[8:02]the present and the best way to understand what is going on today is to understand what happened
[8:09]but to me again it's not and I go here I go back to Verde again it was Verde who said facts are not
[8:15]important which it is heresy right now if you're historical fiction right a facts are obviously
[8:20]important you want to create that verusimilitude but what is more important because people can
[8:25]disagree about the facts and the interpretation of the facts to me what is important is understanding
[8:31]how people lived and breathed and talked and ate and encountered the world around them
[8:39]in a particular historical era so I will do everything I can to make sure that the facts are right
[8:45]or if I need to sort of bend a few dates and so on for the purposes of storytelling I will
[8:51]try to make it very clear in my author's note but to me you know it's not the facts I mean you can
[8:57]refacts in nonfiction and there are some amazing nonfiction writers who do it brilliantly
[9:02]what you're coming to with fiction is the human story and what it is like you know to exist within
[9:08]a certain historical environment and what we learn is like not just that wow these people are the
[9:14]same as us but that also history is repeating itself we are so often in the same making the same
[9:23]choices or I guess faced with the same impossible sometimes choices that we were in the past how do
[9:29]we get through that how do we square human nature with you know the sort of sense of civilization
[9:35]and learning to become better human beings you know that to me that's kind of the core of my project
[9:41]as a historical fiction author and tell me a little more about her last flight so her last flight
[9:48]kind of goes back to and you know I keep talking about my dad you know it sounds like but I mean
[9:53]he really did have an enormous influencing on me as a child and he actually was a pilot back in
[9:57]his college days until they figured out he's actually
[10:00]the color blind. But he was, he was flying with, I call it the University Air Squadron,
[10:04]which is sort of like in the UK, it's sort of like the ROTC for, you know, pilots going
[10:10]into the RAF. So I always had this sort of, you know, just a background of aviation going
[10:15]on in the household, loved to fly, and had read some books that were set in that period.
[10:20]So I'm fascinated by it. And particularly by the pilots, I mean, your chances of dying
[10:26]were so high. So I wanted to write a book about a female pilot. My initial prompt was the
[10:32]Emilia Earhart Mystery, which of course is one of the most fascinating mysteries in recent
[10:37]human history. What happened to her? I sort of posed a what if. And then I kind of went off and did
[10:43]research and realized that she was not the only fascinating female pilot out there. She just had a
[10:47]really good publicist who happened to be her husband. So that's kind of one part of the story.
[10:53]A female pilot who has a really good publicist for her husband and is not quite sure
[10:58]that this is the life she wants to lead. She wants to fly. And all this other stuff going on to
[11:03]her gets in the way of sort of the purity, the beauty of flight. But the stories actually
[11:09]told through the eyes of another character, a photojournalist or reary. She has been taking photographs
[11:15]on the European battlefield in the Second World War. She was there during the Trials of
[11:20]Normanburg. So she's at a moment in her life when she really wants to find something worthwhile.
[11:25]And she goes in search of actually the pilot who had been this Irene Foster, her flying partner,
[11:31]who also disappeared around the same time. So she goes all the way to Hawaii. She follows
[11:37]clues and ends up in Hawaii and discovers a woman who's living there who she thinks is actually
[11:44]Irene Foster, the vanished pilot. That's actually the starting point of the story. So we go back
[11:49]and forth between Irene's story, which is told as excerpts of a biography written by our photojournalist,
[11:56]Janie Everett many years later. So we hear Irene's story through Janie's eyes. And then we hear
[12:03]Janie's story as she slowly starts to unpeel the layers and we start to realize why
[12:09]she's been so obsessed with these pilots and their disappearance.
[12:13]Oh, that's a great, I mean, that's like the best cell, right? That's like,
[12:17]yeah, I just realized in the middle of it that I haven't actually done the cell speech yet.
[12:21]So I would really make it up as I went along. I hope it wasn't too convoluted there.
[12:25]No, it's great. I'm sorry, I always put people on a spot, but I like to hear what people come up
[12:29]with. Just covering the mystery, you know, behind what happened to this person. And you know,
[12:35]and it's not Amelia, I certainly borrow some biographical details from Amelia Earhart because
[12:40]she is a fascinating person. But so much is woven in there, all these other pilots. And just to
[12:45]me, that sense of God, the courage it took to get out there and fly back then, whether you were
[12:51]man or woman, the odds were good. You were going to crash and die. What kind of person does that?
[12:58]Why do they do it? What's driving them? Where are these people today, by the way? You know,
[13:03]what are they doing now? This type of person. So to me, the psychology that is so fascinating,
[13:09]particularly when you're telling it, you know, and sort of I use that device of the
[13:14]biography excerpts from a biography because I kind of wanted to tell that story a little bit from
[13:20]the outside in trying to understand this person as a public figure, but also the private figure
[13:27]behind that public figure. So it was really kind of a, you know, I wrote that part first, the
[13:32]biography first. So I kind of knew, Janie, before I started writing her actual story on the
[13:39]page. So that was a really interesting process as well. How I, you know, created a voice for a
[13:45]character that we hadn't actually met yet because of course the biography is inevitably in
[13:50]Janie's voice, not that of Irene. So I'm always trying to kind of challenge myself a bit in terms
[13:57]of storytelling technique. And this was certainly a fascinating challenge for me to get into. I was
[14:03]like I was trying to understand two different women at the same time, but I think that adds a
[14:08]layer to the story and you kind of find out why as we get towards the end and the mysteries
[14:13]start revealing themselves. What does this process look like? Do you use note cards? Is it spread out
[14:19]all over? Is it all in your head? Like where do you do all this work? It's in your head?
[14:25]I have a notebook and I scribble things down in the notebook, but I don't do, you know, and there's
[14:31]this sort of the classic debate between the plotters and the panthers, the panthers, you know,
[14:35]plot by the seat of their pants. They make it up as they go along. I kind of do a little both.
[14:40]I have a kind of, I know where I want to go. This is one book where I kind of knew what the
[14:45]twist was going to be going in, which was good because it's kind of essential to the story. But,
[14:50]you know, I kind of visualized it in my head almost just like kind of a three-dimensional piece of
[14:55]architecture. And I can see this scaffolding, but I can't see all the sort of the layers and the
[15:01]cladding and everything that goes on top. So, you know, gradually, you know, everything gets kind
[15:07]of, you have this bare bones and then you just keep adding flesh onto it and flesh onto it until
[15:12]it becomes a real thing. But I am linear. In fact, I'm so linear. That's why I write, you know,
[15:19]that sort of piece that takes place in the past first. And then I layer the other piece, the sort of,
[15:26]mystery hunting piece of it on top, because I need to know what happens from beginning to end.
[15:32]You know, the actual mystery taking place. I need to know the solution. I need to know how it
[15:36]happens. I need to know who these people are before I can send my sleuth, you know, on the hunt
[15:42]and picking it apart. So, I know a lot of writers who do the dual narrative go back and forth,
[15:47]right, back and forth, even as it's written. I'm so incredibly linear that I have to do it,
[15:53]you know, literally from one beginning to end and then start the other one beginning to end.
[15:58]So, but everyone's got a process. So, everyone's astonished when I say that's how I do it.
[16:03]And I just literally can't imagine writing it any other way.
[16:06]So, you're clearly like super smart. In fact, as an aside, I think one of the smartest things
[16:13]you did was decide to write to co-author books with two of your good friends so that you could travel
[16:18]together on thrift stores. The best idea ever and it is breaking our hearts right now that we
[16:23]can't get together. We're usually together two or three times a year and it's so much fun because
[16:27]we need to plot out our next book. So, we're managing to do it by Zoom, but it's not the same.
[16:34]So, yes, it did start out as sort of, you know, very much wanting to spend more time with each other,
[16:41]but also really loving each other's talents and getting together and creating stories together is
[16:47]just the most incredibly creative process ever because there's three of us, you know, and it's sort
[16:56]of like, you know, we like to say it's like three brains and one body when we're really tired we
[17:00]accidentally say that it's one brain and three bodies, but that's a completely different scenario.
[17:06]And but just that sort of, you know, I think the challenge with plotting on your own is that you
[17:11]don't know what you don't know. You can't foresee the problems that lie ahead. So, suddenly you realize
[17:17]you've written yourself into a corner and you've got to kind of go back and sort of rework something.
[17:22]When it's three of you, you know, you've got everybody sort of picking apart all the ideas as
[17:28]we go along so that by the time we finish plotting something out and in this case we do actually
[17:34]plot the whole thing out very carefully before we start writing. We're able to sort of troubleshoot
[17:39]and foresee all these, you know, these problems before we get to them in the writing. So,
[17:45]I love doing it because it's just a much more efficient process than using one singular feeble brain
[17:51]that needs to consider about the caffeination in order to work properly. So,
[17:57]so you've written so many bugs. As you mentioned, you also have written a ton of historical romance
[18:01]and all these and mystery, like, how many books have you written in total? You know what? I kind of
[18:06]stopped counting because I mean, so that I wrote some books as Juliana Gray, so there were two
[18:11]romance trilogies and then I moved into more sort of historical mystery and there's two,
[18:17]so there's two of those plus a novella that connects. So, I'd like to have my worlds all sort of be
[18:22]the same. So, there's a novella that kind of connects the romance to the historical mysteries.
[18:28]So, I guess that's six, seven, eight plus a novella and I kind of left some threads dangling
[18:34]and historical mystery number two, so I would like to get back to that at some point.
[18:39]And then, of course, we have now written three books as Willick White and Williams. And then,
[18:44]I think her last fight is my 12 book as Beatrice Williams. Amazing. I have to,
[18:50]I count it out, I literally kind of count it by God. Because, you know, after a while, it's not that I
[18:55]don't want to count. It's just that it doesn't matter to me. You know, I don't sort of,
[19:00]it's not something I kind of keep a tally board how many books I've written or how many words I've
[19:04]it's really, you know, the stories and some of them connect and some of them are a little more
[19:09]standalone. I have three books that literally were sort of a sequence and not exactly a trilogy
[19:15]because they're three different women, but they're sisters. And so, the stories kind of flow a
[19:19]little bit into each other. So, that's the most connected books. But then, I've got my Wicked City
[19:24]series as well, which is a definite series. Wicked City, Wicked Redhead. And, you know, the next one
[19:30]is still in my head. So, I kind of try to see the books that way rather than, you know,
[19:34]oh, I've written my 12 book. I sort of have to literally count them up when we do the biography
[19:39]for the book jacket and be like, okay, how many is that? So, what does writing do for you? Like,
[19:44]what do you get out of it? You know, it's a little bit like what I hope my readers get out of it
[19:49]when they're reading, which is not so much escape is just immersion in a different world. I think that
[19:55]when I'm writing well, I'm writing fast, I'm writing...
[20:00]in that sort of flow state that we all try to get to when we're writing, which is just a total
[20:04]immersion in a story. And that is what keeps me going through the harder bits when it's just not
[20:11]working. And I need to sort of figure out why it's not working and kind of get these characters
[20:15]where I know them well enough that everything that happens to them just seems preordained.
[20:21]So it is really that process I think getting myself into that flow state and creating that world
[20:27]is what motivates me, what gets me in front of my laptop every day. I think that I don't
[20:34]want to sort of make this sound magical, but I think that to a certain extent it's just you have
[20:39]kind of a story, maybe just the way some people are born mathematicians. They have a knack for
[20:45]mathematics and they see something more in mathematics than we do. They see the story that is in
[20:51]mathematics. They see the truth that is inside the numbers, you know, like when you're
[20:57]laboriously graphing out, you know, what an equate you're graphing an equation and sort of so these
[21:03]numbers actually mean something real intangible. They translate into things, right? So I think that
[21:11]you're somebody who instinctively feels that or not. And I think with storytelling you're somebody
[21:17]who when I write a story, it's like the words on the page or maybe 10% of the story that is in my
[21:24]head, all the details of a person's life and personality and so on. It's really just kind of distilling
[21:29]that. And so I think a part of that is just innate. I think, you know, our DNA kind of gives us
[21:36]certain jobs that we're good at because that's what I was here. Here's the anthropology major
[21:41]speaking here because we need storytellers, we need mathematicians, we need inventors, we need,
[21:46]we even need a couple of sociopaths to sort of make the tough choices that the tough moral choices
[21:51]that we don't want to make. You know, so that's why whatever five to 10% of the population is,
[21:57]you know, is technically psychopath. I think we kind of need them in some way and we just have to
[22:01]channel that evil energy into, into good. You know, so I think that's kind of what my role is in the
[22:07]hunter-gatherer group. I'm the one who, you know, we're by the campfire. It's nighttime. We need to
[22:12]process and understand what's happened to us today or the past few weeks. And so you spend a story
[22:17]that helps people come to terms with what has happened and who they are and sort of just,
[22:22]you know, literally put that to bed. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?
[22:27]Read. You know, definitely read. But read widely, you know, read, you know, I was, I'm on
[22:33]deadline right now, but I do try to get some fiction in the evening. And I finally started the
[22:39]secret history, Donna Tarts, the secret history. And I'm just, maybe it's because my brain is so
[22:45]occupied during the day because I'm also, by the way, running a B&B for I've got four kids at home,
[22:50]including three of them are teenagers. One's like almost 12 years old plus my husband and all these
[22:55]pets and everything. I'm literally, I don't know. These people were like, lockdown is so boring. I'm
[23:01]like, are you kidding? I'm on my feet all day long. And then I get these little pockets of time to
[23:05]write. And so I was trying to read. And it's just, I was like, you know what, I need to read
[23:11]something kind of more fun right now. So my lovely friend, Eloise James, you know, wrote her
[23:16]latest. And I have a red, a historical romance. And actually quite a while. So I was just like,
[23:21]you know, I'm just going to read something that is fun and engaging and romantic. And she always
[23:27]delivers. And so I started reading it last night. And I felt so much better. But, you know,
[23:31]that I actually learned a lot from from romance authors. I mean, they're just good storytellers.
[23:36]They know instinctively what certain elements of human relationships are irresistible to us. And
[23:45]also how to tell a story to keep the reader engaged on the page. So I would say read everything.
[23:50]Romance, mystery, you know, literary fiction, classics, you know, books that were, I find right
[23:55]reading novels that were written in the period that I'm writing about are just so much more
[24:00]useful than many other sources. And you get the feeling and the rhythm of human interaction
[24:06]and storytelling. So read all you can. And we spend so much time worrying about the words.
[24:13]I feel like the words come when the story is there. You need to think about what is the story you're
[24:20]trying to tell. And why would people be interested in this story? Anyone, you know, other than you
[24:27]yourself. So those are kind of my two pieces of advice. Read all you can and really think of yourself
[24:34]as a storyteller. Worry about the writing later, the writing obviously comes with the editing,
[24:38]you know, focus on the story. Think about why it is you're telling the story and why it's
[24:43]important and why people would care. It's great. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your
[24:49]life experience and your technique and all the rest of it. Well, thank you so much. You know,
[24:53]I like I said, I'm sitting in front of my laptop. So talking to somebody outside my family is
[24:58]just a really exciting moment for me right now. So I agree. I'm glad we got this tour again.
[25:06]And by the way, like you, I have four kids and I like loved how you said that you write, like,
[25:10]well, you're not doing laundry because I feel like I do laundry all day every day. It's like,
[25:13]that's what I do. So I have got a load right up there now. As soon as I'm done here, I have to go
[25:20]put that in the dryer and make sure, you know, the right stuff is hung up. I could, I could hand it
[25:25]off to somebody with my clothes. I just don't trust anybody else with the laundry. No, maybe
[25:30]there. Yeah. Anyway, all right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Send me any laundry to
[25:36]we will get through. I need a microphone like that. Yeah. That is very thank you. All right. Have a
[25:44]good day. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for listening to fiction Friday.
[25:50]Part of the July book blast of mom's no time to read books. I hope that you found some really
[25:54]great reads this week. All five days, I've launched tons of episodes so that I can entertain you and
[26:01]you can connect with stories and just feel a little better in the world knowing that these stories
[26:06]exist and that these authors are out there. So I hope you enjoyed all of these fiction Friday
[26:12]episodes and that you had a great day. And I hope you have a really great weekend. And come back
[26:16]next week because I'm doing one more week, one more five days, I should say, of another July
[26:22]book blast week and I'll have five new fan days then and then back to normal. But anyway,
[26:27]you can have a little like binge podcast fest or something. Anyway, I have a great weekend.
[26:33]Thanks again for listening to my podcast. Moms don't have time to read books. If you liked this
[26:37]episode, please follow me on Instagram at zippyowans and at moms don't have time to read books
[26:44]and sign up for my mailing list at zippyowans.com so you can always hear about the latest
[26:48]things I'm up to you. Thanks a lot. Thanks so much to Page One Books for sponsoring today's
[26:52]episode. I hope you'll all check out my summer beach bundle at page one books.com. Thanks so much
[26:58]to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the Sound Editing and thank you to Morning Moon
[27:02]Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music. Thanks for listening. You could
[27:07]always email me at zippyatzippyowans.com.