It’s easy for non-writers to understand how writing can be an emotional experience, but most people who went to college probably remember research papers as dry-eyed experiences–especially if they involved all-nighters!

I can’t imagine any historical novelist sticking with a topic that didn’t leave him or her speechless from time to time, needing to step away and let the magnitude of some events seep into a mind reluctant to believe.  I have had many such moments, beginning with my first trade book, Until Our Last Breath, a nonfiction work on Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, through my sixth, the just-completed novel The Intuitive.

The latter provides the freshest moments of emotionally wrenching research, and I want to share one of those with you now and the second in a subsequent post.

Ever since reading the late Stephen Jay Gould’s magnificent 1981 work, The Mismeasure of Man many years ago, I’ve known about the history of intelligence testing, and the blatant racism, sexism, and classism that went into early efforts to stratify people by intelligence (and therefore worth). American scientists were major participants in this, as a means of justifying slavery, and later to support anti-immigration sentiments.  In the early twentieth century, an American psychologist, H.H. Goddard, known as the father of modern eugenics, received permission to conduct research at Ellis Island, whereby women he considered gifted with special powers of intuition would scan incoming immigrants and identify on sight those they believed were feebleminded.  Few could pass tests that were so out of the realm of their life experience, and those who could not were deported.

I read Gould’s book long before I had any idea I would become a novelist, but I was so moved by the vision of the “intuitives” at Ellis Island that years later the story of these women and their impact on other people’s lives jumped to mind as something important to tell. The topic had to stand in line, however, and finally in 2011 I got around to it.

But the teary-eyed part of the research didn’t come from reviewing Gould.  It came when I was digging further into Goddard’s most famous work, a 1912 study of a young woman, “Deborah,” from a family living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey whom he called the Kallikaks.  She was the central case study in his theory that “feeblemindedness” was inherited from shiftless, criminal ancestors, and the only way to avoid moral and intellectual degeneration in America was to build colonies where the current generation could live away from “good” society and, most important, be kept from breeding.

“Deborah” came to the Vineland School for Feebleminded Boys and Girls when she was eight. She was never permitted to leave because it was believed that “morons” (a term Goddard coined) had no moral sense and would fall into criminality if left on their own. She was treated as retarded her entire life, though the many abilities she showed, including excellent skills as a tailor, were commented favorably upon and she became a kind of unpaid assistant to the staff.

What took my breath away was the conclusion of contemporary psychologists looking at  “Deborah’s” file. They believe she was not retarded at all, but had a learning disability affecting her performance on the kinds of tests they were using to judge her.  The file is full of laudatory references to her many capabilities, but nowhere does anyone appear to have questioned whether she should have had her freedom taken away. Though life on the outside was not that pleasant for any working woman, still there’s something about that story that sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

And of course Deborah was not alone.  All over the country, men were institutionalized for being gay, and women for being “hysterics, which often meant no more than being defiant.  All over the country one could go to jail for loving a person of another race.  All over the country, Jews and people of color found doors slammed in their faces.  “Life is so nice the way it is,” was the cry of the comfortable.  “Why do all of you want to spoil everything for us?”

The Intuitive has a fictional protagonist, wealthy socialite Zorah Baldwin, who serves as one of Goddard’s “intuitives” at Ellis Island. Through her work there and a budding friendship with “Deborah” that begins during a visit to the Vineland School, Zorah breaks out from the narrow world she grew up in, to explore the realities of the Lower East Side and the exploding social issues of the time, including Women’s Suffrage which I will discuss in my next post.

And of course, for her to do that, I had to explore these realities first, taking a lot of breaks to catch my breath, as I staggered my way through some history I think most of us would prefer not to know too much about.  But since my self-appointed job as a historical novelist is to bring to light forgotten women, I present a bit of the good, the bad, and yes, the ugly in my new work.  The Intuitive is with my agent now, and I will keep you posted here and more frequently on my “Laurel Corona, Author” page on Facebook.

I guess we all know we aren’t going to live forever, but learning what is likely to kill us or someone we love, and in roughly how much time, is brutal.  Fortunately the prognosis is still measurable in plural years, but that’s about all I know.

I forced myself to finish a first draft of novel number five, THE INTUITIVE, just so I didn’t have an uncompleted story hanging over me, then without any of the usual fanfare, I just set it aside.  I’ll get to it sometime. Priorities.  I need to keep my head clear.  I need to live up to my own expectations of myself as a teacher.  I need to be there for Jim, whatever he needs.

I often catch myself wishing some event in the future would come more quickly–the end of the semester, a much anticipated event, a visit, a piece of news.  Then I pull back on the reins of my desires and remind myself how finite time is and how quickly the clock is ticking.  Why should I possibly want it already to be mid-December?  Don’t I want all the time in between?

Especially now.

This isn’t the first overwhelming crisis I’ve dealt with, and I’ve noticed two basic ways people respond to their own problems and those of others.  The first is catastrophizing and the second is rosy denial.  This doesn’t correlate to simple pessimism and optimism, though, at least for me.  I am one of the most sunny and cheerfully optimistic people you’ll ever meet, but I still fall into the first category, at least initially.

It works well for me to imagine the worst.  It enables me to preview my emotions, think of strategies and plans, remind myself what grief feels like.  I envision Jim’s treatments not working, I picture the markers of his decline. I place this in concrete time–next summer, next fall, next year. I picture the end.  I think about life without him. I imagine my own end, and know that unlike him I may face it without a loving partner. I hate every minute of all this, but I stay there as long as I need to, just to keep myself oriented and rational.

Then–and here is the important part–I tell myself it’s highly unlikely to be as bleak as that.  I dial back the catastrophe.  I tell myself the worst is almost certainly not what is in store for either of us.  Some things we can control.  Others we can assume won’t happen, or won’t be as awful as they could be.

That’s why it can be hard to deal with all the sweet and wonderful people who try to help  by saying that the treatments designed to keep the cancer at bay for several years could give scientists enough time to find a cure, those who tell me about all the exceptional cases, all the “miracles,” all the people still alive after ten or twenty years. I know it’s done out of love for me, mingled with a large dose of their own fears, but it’s very draining.   It’s a bit like when I lost loved ones and ended up spending my limited energy listening to things that might have made other people feel better but only exhausted me.  Things that, in an odd twist,  made me feel like the consoler rather than the consoled.

I have on occasion called myself an optimistic fatalist, and though that might sound weird, to me it makes perfect sense.  I can’t change what will be, but the one thing I am confident of is that I will weather it somehow.

The project seems so silly that I am surprised at how much pleasure it has given me. Today I found two pennies on my walk to school, and I was so excited I sent a text message to my partner. But as I walked on, I started thinking about something that happened during the summer, when I was running along a grass easement in front of the Convention Center.  It was already a good day—about ten minutes into my hour-long run I found a dime in a crosswalk used by conventioneers to get to the Gaslamp District. That will put a spring in the step!

Not more than a minute or two later, I saw a glint in the grass and saw two quarters. Two quarters!  The dime had brought me up to twenty-seven cents at that point, and suddenly I was more than seventy-five percent of the way to my dollar.  I was astonished!

As I ran along, I started thinking about the fifty cents.  It was on a stretch where a few homeless men sack out during the day, and it must have fallen out of someone’s pocket. The rest of the run I pondered a lot of things—starting with how much more important it was to him that he had lost the money than it was to me that I had found it. I started thinking about my desire to get lucky and I realized how it was hard to get much luckier than I already was.

I decided not to keep the fifty cents but to give it to another homeless person.  A tattered, sunburned woman always sitting on a retaining wall near the end of my run and calls out “have a good run!” every time I pass by.  If she was there that day, I would give the money to her.

The rest of the run I was happier about the fifty cents than I was when i first spotted it.  I felt more of a connection to the nameless, faceless soul who patted his pockets and knew the buying power of that money had drained from his life. I thought about how it would make some small difference in the day of the woman I was running toward. But mostly I thought about the Jewish concept of a mitzvah, which is sometimes translated as “good deed” but  is so much more than that.

A mitzvah is when we do something in keeping with God’s intentions for our behavior. Take God out of the equation, and the meaning doesn’t really change that much. The world isn’t fair, and that’s not right. It’s up to each of us to do what we can to bring a little more balance, a little more equity, into it.  Call it dharma, call it words carved by divine lightning onto stone tablets on a mountain in the desert–it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t keep the money because it made the world even more imbalanced than it already was.

As I transported the coins from their old owner to their new one, I didn’t really think of it as a good deed, but about my membership in something bigger.  “Have a nice run!”the woman called out as I strode to a stop.

“I found two quarters back there,” I said with a grin.  “I think they belong to you.”

She jumped up and hugged me, despite the sweat.  “Thank you so much!” she said, almost dancing.

Her name was Kelly. I never thought to ask before.

What happened to the dime? Reader, it’s in the pile on my desk.  Finders keepers!

Maybe there’s a blessing now on my quest for a dollar’s worth of lucky change, but I don’t care.  It’s a game I’ve already won.

Winners at the 2011 San Diego Book Awards

I have completed the first fifteen chapters of my work in progress, THE INTUITIVE, and I now have only three chapters and a short epilogue to go–probably eighty pages or so.  It’s an odd point in the process of writing a book, and my guess is it may be the most misunderstood by non-writers.  Barring the unforeseen, I should be able to finish the first draft by Labor Day, but right now I know from experience I am at no more than the fifty percent mark on the work.

How can that be?  I’m at the eighty percent mark, but only half done?  Here’s  ten reasons why.

1. The last part is the most intense. I have to continue to weave together and differentiate the stories of a dozen or more characters, most of whom are at pivotal moments in their lives.  In some ways this writing is easier than the first chapters because I know the characters so much better now. On the other hand, I am so much more invested and that can make some of the writing really painful.
2. My protagonist is involved in some new things in the last few chapters, and that means more research to get the facts right.  There’s no coasting to the conclusion on settings, events, and situations I’ve already described.
3. Writing is like a continuous loop.  I reread and revise what I’ve already written more times than I could count.  The first two hundred pages of the book are in good shape, the next hundred pretty good but the newly drafted last twenty pages or so will tak almost as much work to revise as to draft.  When you work like I do, you don’t worry about the quality or even a lot of the details as you’re drafting, but the time eventually comes to do that.  So I have more to do than just those last eighty pages.
4. My first and best critic, my sister Lynn, hasn’t weighed in yet, except to say she likes the first twenty pages.  No one else has seen it at all.  There will be a stage where I make a lot of changes based on early feedback.
5. Revising is truly an endless process, until the editor says it’s too late to do any more.  The revising now is all on my own initiative to get the book ready to sell, but my agent may want to see some tweaks and the editor may as well.  There will be a hiatus between the time it sells and the editor is ready to pay serious attention to it, but once that happens it is back to the drawing board.  By that point revision is no fun.  I feel done with the book.  I am probably writing another.  Still, these last flurries of work are part of publication too.
6. Writing the book isn’t all the writing in the book.  I will need to write an afterword where I “fess up” to any little facts I might have adjusted to fit the story, and provide interesting information that isn’t in the novel.  I also will interview myself (yes, most of the author interviews you read in books are done by the author, a discussion guide for book clubs, and anything else that seems like a good idea (glossary, pronunciation guide, timeline, etc.)  It is way easier to do this now than later.
7. There’s other writing to do too.  I write the copy for the book pages on this website, for example, and may need to write out other materials that will be useful when publication nears.  As above, everything I can do now, while the book is fresh in my mind, I try to get done immediately.
8. As I get close to publication, the writing becomes intense again, because I am sent questionnaires from bloggers or journalists, and get requests for guest posts on blogs.  For FINDING EMILIE I did around twenty of these, and each takes several hours.
9. When the book comes out, I need to be prepared to talk about it.  For now, I just need to work on what people call the “tweet pitch” (describe your book in 140 characters) and the “elevator pitch” (describe your book in thirty seconds or less).  Later I will need five minute, twenty minute, forty-five minute, and one hour versions of a “stump speech” about the book.  I will also need to come up with variants on demands for audiences interested in specific aspects of the book (suffrage, planned parenthood, unionizing, Ellis Island, intelligence testing, etc.)
10. And here’s the biggest reason I’m only half-done:  I keep on believing the book can be better.  I believe this because it’s true.  In every read-through, I see phrasings that could be tightened, details that could be more vivid, important emotional resonance I have missed, characters and settings I’ve lost track of, factual errors I’ve made, and even things as mundane as spacing and typos.

And, might I add, I have other things to do?  Most notably, I am headed off tomorrow to spend the weekend with my college roommates in Napa, California.  I have been trying not to let more than two weeks pass between posts, so I am writing this instead of packing!  At some point this weekend, I’ll raise a glass and toast the beautiful muse who has made my life so interesting and rewarding.  For now, I just need to figure out if I need one pair of shorts or two.

“Feebleminded?  How archaic!” I imagine you saying, and you would be right. Much has changed since the early days of intelligence testing in the United States, when it was essentially a pseudoscience designed to make the case for the natural superiority of affluent white males, and a means of getting the upper hand on what was seen as the menace of low intellect to the American gene pool. Henry Herbert Goddard, the director of research at Vineland in the early 1900s, advocated institutionalizing the “feebleminded” in colonies like Vineland, to give them the opportunity for a dignified and productive life and of equal importance, to take away the opportunity to “breed” future generations.

Here I was, at “ground zero” of the eugenics movement in early twentieth century America.  I’d come for little more than to get a few details to add color to my novel and fix anything I had imagined incorrectly.  Now, however, I was hearing the words that historians and historical novelists may wait in vain to hear once in their entire careers:  “There are a lot of boxes of files upstairs.  Would you like to take a look?”

“It’s not air conditioned on the top floor, and the books and files were just dumped there when Goddard’s laboratory building was torn down,” Jane Detweiler explained.  She wasn’t kidding.  It was brutally hot, worse than outdoors for lack of any breeze. Dozens of boxes, many with their contents littered on the floor, filled several rooms that had once served as dormitories for some of the residents.  In one, a rotting wooden file cabinet held decrepit drawers, full of hundreds of file folders, each containing the records of a young person living at Vineland in the early twentieth century.

Faces of those who might have lived in that very room looked out at me from photographs.  Lives of the long-dead pieced themselves together before me.  A world that had been vibrant and real only in my mind was literally in my hands.

Intakes at admission were done in the neat hand of an era when penmanship mattered and spelling not so much.  Checklists of possible characteristics, like “sullen,” “whiny,” or “cheerful,” were marked.  Test results, and even raw data like the pencil tracks made by a patient trying to complete a maze, were in the file.  Quarterly reports revealed whether they made their bed neatly, dressed and bathed themselves, ate well, got along with others, and remembered what they had been told.  Because Goddard believed that weak intellect and poor morals went hand in hand, the reports were full of value judgments about the character of these children.  Diseases and conditions such as tuberculosis, epilepsy, and left-handedness were all treated as corroborating signs of degeneracy.

In another box, I found tools used for the tests–puzzles matching wooden shapes of stars and squares to the outline of the shape on a piece of paper;  cards with keys, dogs, and other objects used for identification and sentence-generation exercises; and cubes with different patterns of dots used for matching.

Elsewhere, I found a field notebook of visits to the families of children living there, containing information about the presumed mental capacities of family members, including guesses about the “moron” status of people dead or disappeared, based on anecdotes.  Again the snap judgments about the morality and intellect of these human beings made me wince.

Sweat-drenched, I left when everyone was preparing to close up for the day.  I sat in the car for a moment pondering the fact that there is no money to do anything with these files.  They’re brittle and crumbling from exposure to heat and constant light, and will be lost unless someone sees the value of a funding a project to preserve them.

I had one more stop, the Vineland School’s cemetery. On rows of markers so small the weeds nearly obliterated them, I saw the names of the dead. Experts now suggest that some of those lying underneath my feet spent their life at Vineland as a result of a misdiagnosis of a learning disability rather than any real retardation. Goddard himself lived long enough to recant many of his views about the prevalence and problems of “morons” in American society, and Vineland changed over the years to accommodate– and pioneer–better diagnostics and treatment plans.

How do we weigh the freedom these children lost by being confined at Vineland? Were the people whose files I read better off there even if they were misdiagnosed?  Many of them were from destitute families living in total desperation, children whose lives improved immeasurably when they came to Vineland. How do we evaluate the tradeoff of enforced childlessness in exchange for opportunities to live a peaceful, more interesting, and higher functioning life? Was it a “Village of Happiness,” as Goddard liked to call it?  I’d like to think so, but in a culture that values freedom above all else, it’s more than a little difficult not to squirm.

Files at Vineland