Uys showed such a mastery of and predilection for plotting that again and again he came up with dazzling ideas which immediately attracted my attention. I am no good at plotting, hold it to be almost an excrescence, and pay far too little attention to it, so that Uys's bold suggestions were often appreciated. I judge that he could plot six novels a year with intricate beauties...

James A. Michener

Your perseverance is the eighth wonder of the world. I'm glad to see that you've not lost your Gift for the epic novel.

Herman Gollob, editor of Brazil,

Editor-in-Chief of Doubleday (retired)

 

No one before knew how to bring to life Brazil and her history. Uys's characters are brilliant and colorful, combining elements of the best swashbuckler with those worthy of deepest reflection. Most stunning is that it took a South African, now a naturalized American, to evoke so perfectly the grand but interrupted dream that is Brazil...

Claude du Fresne, Le Figaro, Paris

 

Uys is the first to have, in the necessary proportions, the talent required for the task; the first one who could see us from the "outside" with the sympathetic integration (in the etymological sense of the word) that was required for the work; he was the first one to understand Brazil as an imaginary creation, coherent in its apparent incoherencies, organic in its historic development, complimentary in its contradictions and antagonisms, unitary in its differences and obscurely answering to the famous "will of being a nation" that Julien Benda identified as the motivating force in the history of his own country.

Uys has accomplished what no Brazilian author from José de Alencar to Jorge Amado was able to do. He is the first outsider with the total honesty and sympathy to write our national epic in all its decisive episodes. Descriptions like those of the war with Paraguay are unsurpassed in our literature and evoke the great passages of War and Peace.

Professor Wilson Martins on Brazil

Michener always lamented that he had not spent more time grooming an author to fill his shoes. In the end, he did -- you.

Stephen J. May, Michener: A Writer's Journey

 

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On the 21st Century Unlimited — Why Big Books Can Fly With the Web!

 

A market note by Errol Lincoln Uys

 

Today, half a century since James A. Michener was writing his breakthrough novel Hawaii (1959,) the market for epics like Boston: An American Trilogy; Mexico; Africa holds a world of new possibilities.

 

"The Book is Dead," "Attention Spans Shrinking," "Data Smog Suffocating Minds"— for every dire headline, there's another that sees a bright future for one of the world's oldest professions, a prospect as vital as when the first story-teller sat beside the glowing embers and began, "Once upon a time, when the sky was new..."

 

In a speech to Book Expo America 2007, Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company draws a distinction between short-form information — dictionaries, cookbooks, for example, their content easier to access via a search box — and "long works:"

 

"...Not so easily substituted for by the internet. Some books are, effectively, large pieces of art. The bigger and better-rendered the art in a book, the less able the net and the devices we know today are to substitute for it"

 

"...It is easy to imagine that the opportunity to immerse oneself in something large and long will become even more attractive to some people in an increasingly attention-deficited world. We all know the wonderful feeling of reading a long book, we wish would never end. That's not an inherent desire for length speaking; it's just good writing and a compelling story. They don't go away."

 

With a big book that's not only a good read but has content of substance that can both entertain and educate, the internet opens a new world for the writer and reader to explore. It provides numerous innovative avenues for the publisher to promote and sell the printed book...

My novel,Brazil, was written well before the rise of a web-driven book market. On my website, I have examples of the potential for interacting with my readers:

 

• Brazil: The Making of a Novel tells the story of how I wrote the book from conception to final manuscript, including research notes, original drafts, proof copies.
• The Journey, Parts 1-3 is a transcript of the journal I kept on a four month, twenty-thousand mile fact-gathering trip.
• The Paraguayan War, an excerpt from the novel, provides a good example of web interactive material with battle plans and maps, field paintings, images of real characters. In this and the previous example, the pages could be further enhanced with selected external links. In Brazil, numerous other subjects dealt with in depth in the narrative offer similar possibilities for backgrounders with "reach-out" potential. So, for example, anyone googling "Paraguayan War" or "Brazilian Slavery" will find my site.
• The Spike — Requiem for the Devil's Railroad. This item appears on my Gather home page, along with other pieces related to my writing. The Gather community is approaching the 500,000 mark, its core members more mature and book-oriented than other mega social networks. For most writers, a Gather home page can reach a far wider audience than an individual website blog.

 

Comments on The Spike by readers show how a writer can build a following on Gather. As anyone who has done a book tour knows, it's not unusual to pitch up at a store and find a handful waiting to meet you. Maybe one or two will ask questions. On Gather, I have dozens of contacts with people interested in what I write.

 

My website archive of Working with James A. Michener tells the story behind The Covenant and is similar to the Brazil examples, the sections on plotting and research even more incisive in taking the reader to the heart of a big book.

Potential for building a reader base on a social network didn't exist ten years ago, and will surely be rapidly refined, cross-niched and personalized with the online world both expanding and contracting as it is tagged and focused.

The possibilities increase exponentially as more and more computer savvy baby boomers retire with time on their hands for the "long works." For many, too, an age of loneliness that makes the internet a place of real community, where an exchange with a favorite writer can be meaningful.

 

The challenge for the writer lies in the time it takes to engage his or her audience and maintain their interest, which may mean anything from two to twenty hours a week at sites like Gather, Shelfari, Goodreads, Amazon Daily, My Space.

 

A writer has also to decide just how much of his or her creativity can be shared without breaking the secret cord that ties the pieces together magically.

 

For the writer and publisher of big books like Boston: An American Trilogy; Mexico; Africa, the promise of the 21st Century is unlimited, a horizon as far as the web is wide. The trick is to navigate it as freshly as when the sky was new.