Brazil
The Making of a Novel
©2007
Errol Lincoln Uys
an online literary archive
I
searched for the story of Brazil for five years, a
literary bandeirante, a pathfinder wandering in quest
of Brazil's past. At times I felt the thorn-studded entanglements
of the caatingas closing in and couldn't see the wood
for the trees! Like those bold adventurers with their magnificent
obsessions, I'd no choice but to press forward. What fired my
enthusiasm wasn't golden El Dorado but a real treasure —
the untold story of the Brazilians and their epic history.
In these web pages, I share my mighty journey of twenty thousand kilometers across the length and breadth of Brazil in 1981. I traveled through the heart of a nation in which the flame of freedom was newly lit after years of military dictatorship, the journal I kept colored by the voices and emotions of the era.
I explore the exhaustive processes that go into the making of a monumental novel with a first draft of three-quarters of million words written in the old-fashioned way, by hand. I reveal the early genesis of my ideas for plot lines and characters, the detailed planning of my outline, the initial burst of reading and inquiry that brought a broad grasp of my subject.
I give examples of the detailed research and background work that went into shaping my fictional characters, both major and minor, as I went along and remained constant to the end. While not bound by the constraints of the historian, I felt myself obligated to get the facts right.
The writing spanned four years with five drafts in the shaping and editing of the manuscript. Examples of this creative process are shown in the pages reproduced from my handwritten originals and various drafts to proof pages.
Of all the accolades a writer could hope for at the end of an epic work like Brazil none brought more joy than a simple question asked by the famed Brazilian historian and sociologist Gilberto Freyre: "I should like to know if Uys had an unpublished jornal intime of a Brazilian family?"
There was no private journal, just the will to understand the Brazilian "thing" and a passion for writing and storytelling, which lies at the heart of every good novel.
|
