I’ve been asked a lot about how I came up with the idea for Diamonds in Auschwitz. I usually

describe it as a lightning bolt. One minute I was driving, thinking of a book I had just read, the

next minute, the entire outline of the story was in my mind.

If I had been a cartoon character, the lightbulb would have appeared above my head.

That’s a really nice story, and you can read more about it in my blog post here. But I realize that

it’s not entirely true.

It’s easy now, three and a half years later, for me to romanticize how I came up with Diamonds

in Auschwitz – for me to exaggerate or misremember the details.

It’s definitely true that the idea was sudden. Within a half hour drive to work, I saw Rachael

picking up the ring from the mud outside the gates of Auschwitz, and I pictured Samual buying

the ring from a Prague jewelry story with Nazi banners hanging up across the street. I had

already named Hanna and envisioned her face. I knew how the timelines were going to work

and how the ring would drive the narrative.

But that’s not an entire book. It’s certainly not the 117,000+ (yes, it’s a bit of a long book) words

that I wrote.

Thinking back, there were a lot of things that I didn’t realize until I started digging into the

research, and then, even later, as I was writing. I knew nothing about Terezin, the ghetto

outside of Prague where the Nazis sent many Jews (often writers, artists, musicians, etc.). I had

certainly never heard of real-life hero, Friedl Brandeis who appears in the story. I hadn’t

decided to create Chaya, possibly my favorite character of the book. There was no art, no

resistance work, none of the details that made my lightning strike of an idea a true story.

Those things came after I got started.

The problem with romanticizing the strike of lightning that was Diamonds in Auschwitz is that it

paralyzed me to start my next work in progress.

The idea for the book I just started writing has come slowly, building over two years.

I heard a great haunting legend when visiting Charleston and I thought: that would be a cool

story. Later, I thought maybe I’d like to do a retelling of a famous Shakespeare play. Then I

thought it would be fun to have a story with hidden Easter eggs of different low country ghost

stories. Maybe, a strong female lead in a time when women were told their only path in life was

marriage and motherhood. And wouldn’t a bit of a murder mystery would be interesting? Then,

I thought about adding pirates and poisons and prejudices.

Instead of a lightning strike, the idea(s) for this book were more like a soft rain shower – some

ideas hit me on the head and sunk in, others rolled on down.

But I was afraid to write it for a long time. I had in my mind that it needed to be completely

worked out before I could put words to paper. If that’s the case, though, Ettie (my new main

character) would never come to life.

So I had to just get started and make this rain shower a storm of words.