(Seated left to right) Jeffrey Lent, Edward P. Jones, host Gene Edwards and David Anthony Durham

“Even when I'm not working, I'm working,” says Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones of his life as a novelist. “I can be waiting for the bus and, you know, and working out something out in my head, a particular scene in my head.” Jones joins fellow historical fiction writers Jeffrey Lent and David Anthony Durham for an hour of insight into their craft. “I don't know how the creative mind works. It just does.” He calls writing a great pleasure.

 

Much of writing goes “on at the subconscious level,” expands Lent. “Your imagination just has to take over and the characters have to come up and walk and talk and speak for themselves.” He jokes that he spends most of his time with a group of imaginary friends—and he is doing exactly what he wants to be doing with his life.

 

“I really have no idea what I would do otherwise,” adds David Anthony Durham. He tells of his eighth grade journal, “It says what I want to be when I grow up, I want to be a writer.” After a few detours in high school, he began writing seriously while in college, and says he hasn't stopped since.

 

Host Gene Edwards notes that all three have written about slavery and its aftermath. Jones' The Known World chronicles daily life in antebellum Virginia . Through his understated yet complex prose, he tells the story of whites who own slaves, free blacks who own slaves and the slaves themselves. He says that he never faltered when writing about whites. “The thing I would do with them is the same as for the black characters, that you stay as far away as possible from stereotypes and that you give every single character his or her due.”

 

Lent's debut novel In the Fall begins in the last days of the Civil War and explores the impact of slavery through three generations of an American family. He says, “America would not be the country it is today without African Americans and the legacy of slavery,” and later adds,“If we are to get anywhere with these issues, we have to recognize the common humanities between us all and part of that recognition is being able to develop true empathy for other people's situations.”

 

Durham's Gabriel's Story is a western, a coming of age story which begins in Kansas just after the Civil War. Walk Through Darkness tells the story of a fugitive slave and his pursuer. When it comes to writing African American stories, he says he doesn't feel an obligation to meet anyone else's particular need. “Writing stories has more to do with my working through and questioning and letting the characters act out things that I wonder about.”

 

Featuring sidebars on Mississippi's late Margaret Walker Alexander, author of the bestselling Jubilee, and on William Johnson, a free black in antebellum Natchez who owned slaves, Historical Fiction Writers looks at the art of stepping back in time. “Research has killed far too much from far too many books,” says Lent, “because it kills, it stifles your imagination.”

 

Jones had a whole shelf of books about slavery but never read more than a couple of chapters. “Were you worried about getting the history right?” asks Edwards of the details and census records. “Well, it's my own place,” laughs Jones. “I can say whatever I want.” But he did create the word gallumpin “because it sounded quite nineteenth century.”

 

Jones worked ten years on his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, most of the time not taking notes or actually writing. “But thinking,” he says. “The other part of my brain was creating and it could not be held back. I was working on the book in my head.” Durham's writing process is five days a week, a sort of meditation, while Lent claims to be a writer by procrastination. He works in the afternoon, after he's checked his mail, run errands and spent time with his family.

 

All the authors have plans for future books. According to Durham , “Your next novel should be kind of the hardest.” Jones agrees, “It's all hard work, and you're always starting at the bottom of the mountain again.” “You just have to keep pushing forward,” adds Lent. “I think the issue is to keep working, and the work propels itself.”