Extensive Research and Revision
Fuel Bestselling Author

Clara and Mr. Tiffany
by Susan Vreeland
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Bestselling author Susan Vreeland had what is perhaps the best training a writer can have, repeated exposure to the work of Shakespeare as a teacher. After graduating from San Diego State University, Vreeland taught high school English for 30 years.

“I taught Hamlet every year and each time I discovered something, like his reuse of metaphors. He would adjust them slightly as the story went on so that they would carry the present meaning and all the weight of the previous references,” said Vreeland.

It was a technique she employed in Girl in Hyacinth Blue with pearls: eyes like pearls, a pearl earring and teeth like pearls.

She honed the essential skill of dealing with rejection when she began writing features for newspapers and magazines in 1980, on topics such as art and travel.

“When I sent out a travel article and got rejected I learned to say this will send it closer to its home,” said Vreeland. She went on to publish 250 articles.

She ventured into fiction in 1988 with What Love Sees, a biographical novel about a woman's determination to lead a full life in spite of her blindness. The book was made into a CBS television movie.

“A biographical novel was my first step into narrative from nonfiction and provided a transition. I began to see that the story needed to have an arc,” said Vreeland.

Her short fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Confrontation, Alaska Quarterly Review, Manoa, Connecticut Review, Calyx, Crescent Review, So To Speak and elsewhere.

Vreeland credits the kindness of editors who, though they might reject her work, would offer suggestions for revision and where to send the piece. One such suggestion led her to send a story to the Missouri Review, whose editor wondered if it was part of a larger collection. It was, and the connection led to the publication of Girl in Hyacinth Blue.

Other novels, fictionalized accounts of artists, including Luncheon of the Boating Party, Life Studies, The Passion of Artemisia, and The Forest Lover, followed. Her latest book is Clara and Mr. Tiffany, the story of Clara Driscoll, the creator of the iconic nature-themed leaded-glass lampshades for Louis Comfort Tiffany.

“I read letters she wrote to her mother and sisters. She worked for Tiffany for 17 years and wrote once or twice a week. She was a vibrant woman, sometimes wry, sometimes rhapsodic, who was intensely engaged in a city in flux. During that time there was a flood of immigration and it was the Gilded Age. It was a rich time period, and I don’t always have that in a novel,” noted Vreeland. When she is in the throes of writing Vreeland works six days a week, eating lunch at her computer and stopping only for a dinner break. She goes back and reads the chapter she completed, polishing it, before she continues, in effect doing multiple revisions as she goes.

In her keynote address to the Amelia Island Book Festival this year, Vreeland noted that she does “one hour of first draft writing to 40 or 50 hours in revision.” During revision, she is “looking for embedded connotations, multiple dimensions yet undeveloped, carelessness, facile satisfaction obscuring greater possibilities, phrasing too easily achieved, wrong turns in the narrative, and yes, excesses.”

Her goal is not to finish a book, but to develop it fully. She wrote The Forest Lover in over a period of 17 years returning to it periodically.

Vreeland’s research is extensive. She may use between 80 and 100 books to write a book of historical fiction based on art. She also keeps a reading journal with snippets of writing organized by categories including grief, love, and anger.

“When I have trouble expressing a character’s grief I look at the grief pages to see how other writers have done it,” said Vreeland.

Her inspiration varies. In the case of Luncheon of the Boating Party she wanted to know more about the people in the painting and how they lived. One of the group of stories that makes up Life Studies was inspired by a story of boys throwing rocks at Cezanne and his paintings.

In regard to the fine line that is walked when creating historical fiction, Vreeland said, “I never change history on any point that is significant. I invent characters when history doesn't give me a person with whom the main character was intimate.”

One example is the nuns in The Passion of Artemisia, who were created to give the main character someone to interact with when she was young.

Rarely, but when necessary for narrative purposes, she has shifted events, as in the case of Clara and Mr. Tiffany in which George actually died three years prior to the episode of his death recorded in the novel.

That book was written over 3 ½ years. Vreeland said the great challenge of the book was to balance the focus on her art and Clara’s life, so that the book was about more than how to assemble lamps.

The book was edited by a group led by editor Jane von Mehren at Random House. Vreeland advises writers to be humble when dealing with editors. “Your editor is investing his or her company in your work and it represents her career as well as your own. She wants it to be the best book it can be. I trust her training and experience in editing and know she has read and seen more books that went on to succeed or fail,” she said.

When seeking her agent Barbara Braun, Vreeland made a chart that listed types of writing an agent might be interested in, such as mainstream fiction, literary fiction, women's fiction, and art in literature, across the top of the page and put the names of agents who might be a good fit down the side of the page. Then she put a check mark in each area that matched the agent’s interest. She sent letters to the agents who were the best match.

Vreeland is currently at work on her next novel which she said “won’t be on the life or a portion of the life of a single painter.” Stay tuned to her Facebook page for a contest related to the subject of her next book.

Susan Vreeland is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including Clara and Mr. Tiffany, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Life Studies, The Passion of Artemisia, The Forest Lover and Girl in Hyacinth Blue. She lives in San Diego.

Ellen Birkett Morris is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in national print and online publications including The New York Times. She also writes for a number of literary, regional, trade, and business publications, and she has contributed to six published nonfiction books in the trade press. Ellen is a regular contributor to Authorlink, assigned to interview various New York Times bestselling authors and first-time novelists.