Tony Abbott

Recently I emailed Tony Abbott (the author of The Coppernicus Legacies) several questions. He is a great guy and got back to me so quickly. I want to make sure to thank him personally for answering my questions. This just goes to show that most authors are really nice people and if you email them they may get back to you. Here are the questions I asked him and his responses.

1. What inspired you to write The Copernicus Legacies?

I had always loved mysteries involving the historical past. In college, I became fascinated with medieval and Renaissance science (and literature, of course), and with the idea of any sort of science done without any real technology. The story of Copernicus, particularly, was critical, because he came up with his theory independent of the Greeks, who might have postulated earlier that the sun was the center of the planetary system, and independent of the telescope, which Galileo invented a couple of generations later. So it was observation — and math — that led him to his conclusions. When the idea was proposed to write a big, long mystery series based on a historical character, my heart went back to my old studies. When I did more and more reading about Copernicus, it deepened all the facets of the mystery, because he was not only a mathematician and astronomer, but a soldier, a farmer, a figure in the Church, and a politician. And he traveled widely across Europe. These facts opened up all sorts of avenues to thread plot lines. 

2. I felt many of the characters in The Copernicus Legacies are portrayed as loyal, brave, and shy like Becca and Wade. Do you feel those are some traits you have?

Ha! I would love to believe that every good trait is simply one of mine, but the truth is that when a character appears in a story (or on the page in front of a writer) he or she comes with weaknesses and frailties just as we living people have. When characters — like real people — are put into extraordinary situations, they can exhibit an unseen level of bravery and loyalty. Writing a story gives writers a chance to see how such emotions and traits play out. About shy, well, yes, I suppose I am. Over the years I may have built up a sense of being public, but generally, I like being alone, and reading, like Becca. I don’t like confrontation, so in that way, I imagine heroism in my characters from what I might personally lack (since I’ve not been put to any test like they have). 

3. Do you identify with any of the characters in The Copernicus Legacies? If so, who?

Yeah, it would be Becca. I like her frailties, her book knowledge, her quietness, her standing by, like a wallflower, for so much. And I love her for her sharp internalism — her working things over in her mind until she arrives at some sort of realization or solution. If you have a chance to read Becca and the Prisoner’s Cross, the second of the two Archives books, which Becca narrates, you’ll see the deeper side of her character, her worries, faults, and lovely abilities. This one is hard to find, but to my mind, one of the best of the six books. 

4 Many accomplished authors like you don’t get writer's block. Did you ever experience writer’s block while writing any of your books,If so how did you get past it?

For my entire career, I have sort of denied this demon writers have created called writer’s block. I’ve always felt that if you give it a name, it begins to breathe and live and suddenly you have a nemesis, an enemy. What is really going on, I think, when you can’t seem to write, is that your imagination is tired, or distracted by too many outside things, the noise of the room or the house or the news or the world. You can short-circuit a slump, many times, I think, by shifting gears and doing something else. Something physical, something away from the desk. It may take an hour or a day or a week, but your imaginative machine will come back humming. If you find that no matter how hard you try you cannot get beyond the incident with the waterfall and the jeep in chapter six, you may simply have failed to think through some part of the story up to then. Restart at the beginning, and as if you were a reader, follow your story closely and you may find that a voice in the back of your head says, “Wait. What? That doesn’t feel right. That doesn’t work.” You make mistakes, you go back, find them, and correct them. Also, if at all possible, give up the idea that you need to write something quickly. A few words a day is fine. One of the big revelations of my late career is to write things that no one has asked for or even knows about. I find I am writing more slowly — and joyfully — because I can take my time and be “in” the work for as long as I want to be. I hope that makes sense. 

5. Sometimes I find it hard when writing a passage to come up with good names. How did you come up with your character names?

Oh, gosh. Names (and voices — and conversations) are always swimming in my head. I don’t know if there is a method. But I pay attention to names, author names, names in the newspaper, names you mix together from different sources. For example, Terence and Julian Ackroyd. Well, Ackroyd is the last name of a writer, Peter Ackroyd, of whose books I have several, and I’ve always liked the name. Terence comes from the Roman playwright, but it’s also the correct spelling of my middle name, which is spelled incorrectly as “Terrance,” some sort of error on my birth certificate. Julian is just a cool name that goes well with Ackroyd. I don’t know if you’ve met Archie Doyle yet, but Archie (now also the name of Harry and Meghan’s son) is a kind of British underworld gangster name. Doyle? Hmm. I don’t know, but the first and last names have to go together musically, and it just seems to fit well for a British killer.  

6. Coming up with puzzles seems pretty hard. How did you come up with all the puzzles in The Copernicus Legacies? Did you think about different clues first and then found a way to put them in the story or did you figure it out as you went?

The whole mystery that arches across all the books was rather laid out in my head from the beginning. It had to be, because with such a vast story, I had to be able to dole out the clues and events in a certain sequence or it might founder. Also, the idea that a parallel story was taking place in the early 16th century had to be woven in correctly, too. That doesn’t mean that there were surprises to me as I wrote, but I threaded them in as well. The puzzles . . . I am bad at puzzles, actually. They are simply not my strongest thing. So I worked a long time on them, even creating them physically — in the case of Holbein’s code wheel, from the Becca story. I love languages, too, and collected a number of books on ancient languages and symbols and about codes and code-solving. Weaving in a historical element was tremendous fun here. To research the Becca locations, I went to England, spent a good amount of time around the Thames and the embankment in London, traveled to Bletchley Park — where codebreakers solved the German Enigma codes during the Second World War — and so on. I really did plunge fairly deeply into Nicolas Copernicus’s life and history, and history in general, to come up with the texture of the series. 

7. Did you know you wrote a great book when you were done with the first book of The Copernicus Legacies?

You always hope for that, of course. But to tell you the truth, with The Forbidden Stone, I really did feel that something was different and very much larger than other books I’d done. And the fact that it was the cornerstone, so to speak, of a long and intricate adventure was tremendously exciting and energizing. I loved my time working on those books, and amassing a fairly substantial library of work to help me make it as historically interesting and accurate as possible. For instance, the bit about Magellan and how he figures into the story was something I researched quite deeply, to the point of using the journals of his voyage for background on his movements, and the original illustrations from the first published edition about his circumnavigation of the globe. All of that was so very exciting to be a part of.

8. When finishing the first book of The Copernicus Legacies did you feel the story had to go on or did you feel pressure from your publishers to continue on?

Oh, no. I knew the series would be big. In fact, as you may know, the number of books we had originally planned was scaled back, from twelve to six, causing me to pull together several books’ worth of story into a much smaller package. It remains a regret, but I do like the final volume, Crown of Fire, since I was able to provide a satisfying (to me) ending for the several thousand pages of adventure. 

9. What was your favorite book as a child?

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, one of the great animal-character stories ever written. It is so musical and funny and fast-moving, with the most heartwarming episodes. It was written in 1907, I think, and is one of the great golden-age children’s stories, like Peter Pan, for example. My mother bought a picture book version of Willows when I was very young, and I read it hundreds of times. I still read it every few years. It is marvelous and taught me to read. 

Thanks for the great questions! I hope some of this works for you!!

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