After two and a half years working on The Stones of Le Santucce, about the rebuilding of a bombed medieval Tuscan convent into the Residence Le Santucce, the Tanganelli family, the town of Castiglion Fiorentino (and our reasons for leaving America, and the tragic bombing of December 1943, and Napoleon’s suppression of the church, and Garibaldi’s visit in 1849, and the rise of Fascism …) all the research began to seem overwhelming.
So I went to a writers conference in Florence and met with a literary agent–a really smart, nice guy!–who read portions of the work and and said it was beautiful writing, or to be precise, he said, “You are a beautiful writer,” which is in some ways embarrassing, but then after our 5 minutes together said to me,
“OK, but what’s the payoff?”
Which rattled in my head for months until I realized that the payoff was a theme that ran through the stories I wanted to tell which could be expressed in the phrase “The Split-Second Forever”: moments in life that change everything. The moment Mirella met Carlo on the train. The moment Norma and I decided to move to Italy. The moment Miranda saw Alfeo on the tennis court in his tennis whites. The moment Alfeo decided to rebuild Le Santucce.
All that lay before me then was the writing.
Addendum Thursday, April 8, 2021: So the other day I asked my former editor at Salon.com, Karen Croft, for a little editorial advice, and she said Make An Outline. So in making the outline I realized some of the chapters come alive when read aloud, so I decided to add The Stones of Le Santucce to the podcasting lineup.
