Olive Collins on Breathing Life into Historical Fiction

Have you ever found yourself enthralled by the whispers of history that echo through the pages of a novel? I had the pleasure of hosting Olive Collins, a celebrated Irish-American author who masterfully brings history to life. During our enriching chat, Olive and I exchange insights into the magnetic pull of historical sagas and the craft of embedding generations within a narrative. We delve into the inspiration drawn from Ireland's rich tradition of storytelling and the imprints of the Irish immigrants on the American landscape. 

You are invited to wander through the vibrant scenes Olive Collins paints in her novels, where resilience and the unforgettable past come alive.

Thank you for listening.

Be sure to visit the Restless to Renewed website for pictures and more information about episode guests at www.RestlesstoRenewed.com.

Chapters

• 0:04 Authors and Historical Fiction Discussion
• 12:13 Creating Characters and Crafting Stories
• 19:21 Author's Inspiration and Writing Process
• 31:57 Guest Visit in Tennessee Olive Collins

Transcript

Janice : 0:59

Hello everyone, welcome to Restless, to Renewed Women Redefining the Silver Years. I'm your host, Janice Neely, and today my guest is Olive Collins. Olive is an award-winning and best-selling Irish-American author who writes historical fiction. She grew up in Ireland, traveled abroad for several years and now once again resides in Ireland. Welcome, Olive,

Olive: 1:23

Janice, thank you for having me. Lovely to be here on a Monday afternoon. This is the joy of writing and working for yourself. Is that you can, or I can, have a nice chat on a Monday afternoon rather than watching the cup ticking in the day job? It is nice to be on your own time. It has its advantages and now sometimes it has its disadvantages, and I take my time writing books and I schooled myself for being too relaxed and finding too many distractions, but anyway, it's part of it.

Janice : 1:56

Yes, it can be hard to stay on task when there's no real time clock.

Olive: 2:01

Yeah, that's it yeah.

Janice : 2:03

Right, so I want to let you know I'm very excited to talk to you because I've read some of your work and I just want to start off with where do you currently live in Ireland?

Olive: 2:15

I live in the Midlands, in Tipperary, and from here I was born, raised here and I moved away for about 30 years. So before the last lockdown I came home, I did the first lockdown with a friend in Dublin. It was like an adventure, it was wonderful. And then, when the second lockdown was looming, it became very difficult. So at the time we were going to sell my parents house because both of them passed away and I came down there was no internet, there was no television, there was no phone, there was nothing. But I thought, gosh, it's easier than a small two room flat in Dublin. So I actually ended up staying here. So I'm back living in Thurles for about the last two years. It's very nice. There's a great sense of community, small town, our land is flat and our accents are flat.

Janice : 3:04

I'm in a small town also. I'm not originally from here, but I moved here about six years ago and I'm really loving this environment.  There's a great sense of community in the smaller towns. Yes, yes. So one of the things I was wanting to know is who is your favourite author, other than yourself, of course?

Olive: 3:23

I'd have a few different authors. I read a variety of books. I love Elizabeth Strout. I'm loving the Covenant of Water at the moment and I have read his other books. I can't pronounce it. Is it Verghesi? Abraham Virghesi? I think that's how you pronounce it. He wrote Cutting for Stone, so I love historical fiction books. I loved the earlier books from Edna O'Brien. Gore Vida,l I love his big sagas on American history. I would read contemporary. I couldn't say I had a favorite writer, but as soon as Elizabeth releases a book I'd buy her a book. Yeah, so generally women, I find myself reading. Now, apart from that, I read another very good book by Philip Meyer. I love big sagas and his book was called The Son. I've read that twice because I was so fascinated by it and how he did it. He told it in a dual timeline and I had written books like that, so I was interested to see how he did it. Zadie Smith I like her. I read her recent one and it was fantastic.

Janice : 4:30

Well, now I have to check some of them out and see what kind of work they've done, because I'm always interested in learning about new authors after working in the publishing industry. You said something about contemporary books. I really love historical fiction, but I'd also love Maeve Binchy.

Olive: 4:46

Maeve Binchy is lovely and cozy, and reading her books is like getting into bed with an electric blanket and a nice duvet. Yeah, I've read a lot of her books. Most, I'd say. And there's another very good writer. She wrote a book called Academy Street.  I think it's Mary Costello, and that book is small and concise and there isn't a word wasted. So that's another one to look out for. Academy Street, beautiful.

Janice : 5:12

Okay, I will put these up on our website. I'll also be placing your books on our website for recommended reading. Great, so yeah, we have a page just dedicated to that. So how long have you been writing?

Olive: 5:27

I'd say my whole life I had been toying with books. I remember when I was a kid I read a book called The Outsiders and I suppose it would be called young adult fiction now there was no genre name for it at the time. And then I you know, it wasn't a priority. I was young and I flitted around the world for a while, but it was always in the back of my head and in my, I'd say, early 30s I got a publishing deal for a contemporary book. Now I am really pleased that I got the rights back and nobody can get that book because you know, at the time you're writing you think, I can't wait. I want this to be published and you want it so badly. I have found drafts of books I've written and I'm so relieved that they weren't published. So for a while then I looked at contemporary fiction. You know that kind of Chick Lit and all about. So there was a darker side to it and so I suppose, on and off all my life really, but only when I started taking it seriously, I began a historical fiction book.

Olive: 6:29

My first book I wrote was called the Memory of Music and it was based in Ireland. Over five generations of women. We had an Easter uprising in 1916, so the book was told over 100 years with each generation. And then I just love historical fiction because I suppose with contemporary I'm living through it, whereas with the historical aspect it's something that I'm interested in and it kind of sparks my curiosity and I'd love to explore the timeline that went with it. So each book I write interests me enormously and it's the historical aspect of it and how did they live through it? At the moment I'm working on a book on missionary nuns in South Africa. I've always been interested in that because I think everybody in Ireland had some relative who was a priest as a missionary, or a neighbor who was a missionary nun, and I grew up in the 70s and 80s and it was still a conservative country then. So yeah, that kind of thing. So it has to spark my own interest.

Janice : 7:41

Well, like I mentioned, I love historical fiction. I've been reading more business books, things about self-improvement and so forth in the last few years, but I'm hoping now to get back to some books that are more relaxing. And as far as the historical part, I love history. I love hearing about people's lives and am not as interested in the geography as much as the social interactions of the people.

Olive: 8:09

Yeah and they had it so hard, you know, even 50 years ago it was very, very difficult. You compare it to now. You know, I suppose, emotionally, mentally, physically, it was just such a tough time. Since I started writing historical fiction I keep saying to myself thanks be to God, I'm born in this era when I suppose we have our own difficulties, but it's nothing compared to foraging for food. Or we were talking about the American West earlier, how they just packed up, moved out west with everything they owned and began to work the soil. So we have it so much easier.

Janice : 8:49

And knowing that they probably would never see their family again. I think about the mothers whose children left and you had to say goodbye and that was going to probably be it.

Olive: 9:00

That's it. And then we had our American wakes, where the son or the daughter would go to America. The mother would never, ever again see them. They call them American wakes because that was it. Very few came home. I'd say 95% never returned. Then, at a certain point they began to come home, after the 60s, when airfares were not as astronomically priced.

Janice : 9:27

Yeah, a letter would have been it.

Olive: 9:29

Yeah, and some of those letters are absolutely heartbreaking. I love diaries. It's actually diaries and letters. It's a great way to research and some of those bring a tear to your eye. I think there's a song called Kilkelly and it's about a son writing home to his mother. There are several letters and in the end somebody writes to the son to tell him his mother is dead. It's heartbreaking, but it's actually based on a real letter or a real series of letters.

Janice : 10:00

It's amazing. This is off base a little bit, but we have a display here in Tennessee and it's about the Titanic and you can walk through the replica of the ship and you get a name when you walk in and at the end you find out if you lived or not when you're finished.

But there's a point when you stick your hand in the water. They have you go out and it looks like the front of the ship and you stick your hand in and they have it at the temperature that those people drowned in and, oh my goodness, it was frightening. And to think people endured that and that's just one thing. But yeah, there was a lot of pain and suffering.

Olive: 10:37

Yeah, I actually had a cousin of my Grandmother who was on the Titanic. She was called Mary Titanic and she never came home after. She was too afraid of water but she lived. But they called her Mary Titanic.

Janice : 10:53

I can imagine yeah, oh, I wouldn't get on one either. After that, there's no way. No, no, I don't blame her. So let me ask you this: how many books have you written?

Olive: 11:06

I have four historical fiction books. I've written all the books but they're not available. Thanks be to God, and I hope they never see the light of day.

Janice : 11:15

Is there a reason?

Olive: 11:17

Well, when you're young when you write these books. And it takes years for a writer to find their voice unless you're very, very gifted. Then you find it very quickly. Some of my books were very mature and they were available online. But I managed to get the rights back to this commercial fiction and then I took down anything else. So I've actually written four adult historical fiction books and one children's book.

Janice : 11:44

What's the name of the children's book?

Olive: 11:46

It's Firsts for Irish Women. It's only a small book on seven different Irish women, like the first president, the first Irish woman to receive an Oscar, first Irish woman to fly a plane, that kind of thing.

Janice : 11:58

I saw that book and I looked it up and it was Nutshell Publishing so they're very concise.

Olive: 12:04

It's part of yeah, it's part of Pool Book Publishing.

Janice : 12:06

Yeah, okay, but I thought, well, it must be because they're concise.

Olive: 12:10

In a nutshell, that's it they are. They're concise.

Janice : 12:13

Okay, so what's your method when you decide to start a book?

Olive: 12:18

Generally what happens is it's something I heard or saw and it festers in my head for years and years and years and I think about it maybe once a week, and then when I sit down to start it, I'm all over the place. So there's books on the subject and there's videos and there's music and there's diaries and there's everything. And then I have to reel it in and I bring it back to the character, to the main character. And you know, my books are between 95 and maybe 105,000 words. So my first 10,000 words are really trying to find the character. So then I try to have a routine. Now I have one at the moment and I want to hold onto it. Now the reason I say that is because I'm living in the Midlands.

Olive: 13:07

It's a small town. I have friends who think I do nothing and that I'm just waiting for them to call in and just get coffee. And recently I offered to give somebody a lift. Now I have told everybody don't come near me 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. So recently a friend of mine needed a lift somewhere. She had a health issue and she was getting the results and I said I'd drive her because it was very difficult. And there were a few of us in the room when I was offering my service and somebody pointed at me like that and said she does nothing all day long, meaning me.

Olive: 13:44

So I have it down to a fine art now. I just tell people don't come near me. And then, once I establish the characters, I love the process of how it's like typing on the laptop and all these rising balloons, and some of them I just let go, and there are other ones that I think oh, that's interesting, tug that back down. And I love them. When I get to know the characters and I'm in my routine and I'm sitting at this office every morning, I don't kill myself by half nine, sometimes 10, sometimes half 10. And then I have the whole day just to work on the book. So I like the process of trying to find the characters and then I like how the story presents itself to me as it evolves. I need the routine and especially now I'm trying to finish the first draft of a book and I have a deadline. I've given myself a deadline. So I have 65,000 words. I have to reach 90,000. So I keep saying to myself 5000 words, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 will bring it up to 90,000 in five weeks time.

Olive: 14:51

But each book I have written has been different in that I always scolded myself. It takes me too long to write the book, but the research is painstaking and several times I say to myself why don't I just write a contemporary book? I have to bring it back, that it doesn't interest me, because of the research. For example, the one I'm working in at the moment: I have to know everything about the vegetation, the climate, the folklore, the music, the culture, the atmosphere at the place, and so the routine I have it good at the moment, so it's really just delving into it. Then the beginning of a book is always difficult because and it's the same with every book that I have one main character and then I might have a couple of characters just to present different aspects of the story or to convey the history, and each time I might keep the main character, but somebody else becomes completely more interesting than another character.

Olive: 15:50

So I started this one and I had the whole plan of who will be the main character and then the other secondary characters. But now one of the secondary characters has taken off. And I love this process because I sit down in the morning and I think what is Pious going to reveal? Pious is this woman's name. What is Pious going to reveal to me today? You know, you feel you know them. I sound like it should be a medication. What is this fictional character going to tell me today?

Janice : 16:17

When I read Manhattan Amber, I was surprised at the change in who I thought the characters were from the beginning to the end. And it's a commentary in some ways about how people do change with life.

Olive: 16:32

Yeah, that's it. And that book spans over 1866 to 1936, I think, yeah, and I like that as well, because that's the thing that takes the time. You know, sometimes I sit down here and I think, okay, a thousand words, that's it. It has to evolve. And even when I leave it and I close the door and I go out of the office in the evening, it does stay with me and then it presents itself in different ways during the day and I love that. But it takes a lot of writing. It could take about 20,000 words to finally get to the nutty pretty of the characters and know their flaws and their good sides and know what they're running from and know what haunts them. And when I have all of that established then you know it kind of writes itself.

Janice : 17:29

My goodness. Well, yeah, I think the best characters are multidimensional and there's times when you dislike them strongly and then there's times when you love them, become attached to the characters.

Olive: 17:39

You do, and long after I finish a book I always find myself, especially the orphan Galleher in Manhattan Amber, you hold on to them long after the book is finished and that's a very difficult part to do. When I finish one book, it takes me ages to rinse out of my head the characters from the last book. So when I started the one I'm currently working on, I realized that I was bringing the characters from the previous book into this book. So that's a big thing to keep reminding myself these characters are not those characters and to start fresh. So it takes a lot of thought on the scene and what they're doing and their function, and so it takes a lot of time to dip into that. That's a big difficulty for me is bringing them from one book into another.

Janice : 18:22

Right, because I think most of us who love reading, when the book is finished, you don't really want it to be finished. No matter what has happened, you want the storyline to continue and it's hard to think nothing else has happened. They've just dropped off the face of the earth for you as a reader.

Olive: 18:37

Yeah, it's sad, and when that happens it's very hard to get into another book.

Janice : 18:40

Well, what moved you to begin writing fiction?

Olive: 18:48

When I was a teenager and I read that novel, The Outsiders, I thought maybe I could do this. I don't know where the thought came from and then I loved reading and I just thought I'd try my hand. I always have stories in my head, so even when I meet people, I could be guessing about their lives. I could be totally wrong, and probably am a lot of the time and I love watching people and seeing how their own lives evolve and how they react to certain situations. My father is from a lovely little village in North Kerry called Nakhnegashah. It's removed from the main road and there are great storytellers from there and he was a storyteller himself. And there's a great turn of phrase and I have uncles and aunts who are very good at poetry and good storytellers and writers themselves in a local sense. So I don't know where I got the idea from, but I remember reading that first novel and thinking I could do something like this. Now, how arrogant of me to think that I could do something like this at 13 years of age or whatever I was. And then I always feel there's a story to tell. So even when I'm working on one book, I try not to think about the next one, but there are several going on in my head, you know, and when I finish one book I think what am I going to work on next? And you have an idea and I think about it. You know, maybe once a week like Manhattan Ember, the New York book.

I remember my first time in New York I went with my mother and I was in my early 20s and all the sights to see in New York and all she wanted to see was St Patrick's Cathedral and she told me about the great history of the cathedral and that it was built by an Irishman. And then a few years ago I read an article about a raffle. I can't remember where it was. It was one of the archives and there was, you know, five points down in the south of Manhattan where all the Irish lived and there was a local shop raffling a stove and all proceeds were going towards the building of St Patrick's Cathedral. So on and off I would have read articles just out of curiosity about building St Patrick's Cathedral.

Olive: 21:03

And the more I read, the more fascinated I became as I thought about these poor people. They had nothing living down in tenements. Now they had an awful lot more in America than they had in Ireland. But yet, a little and all as they had, they made the time to contribute to the building of their cathedral. And the story in itself is fantastic. You know that Charles Hughes built this cathedral up in North Manhattan where nobody lived, and they called it Hughes´ folly because they said he was cracked. There was nothing up there but field mice and grass, and he had the foresight to know that eventually the city would move up there. So the Irish were so proud of this cathedral, you know. And all those years later my mother went over and all she wanted to see was the cathedral. Oh yeah, it was the tallest building of its time.

Janice : 21:57

What's the favorite book you've written? 

Olive: 22:01

You know, I can't honestly say, because I think you develop with each book. I had periods where certain books were hard to write and I look back on the books and I have an association with what happened at the time. So when I was writing my book, the Weaver's Legacy, my mother died in the middle of it and I remember struggling, trying to write one of the characters and then I can't honestly say but then there's parts of each book that I associate with what was happening at the time. It'd be like asking a mother which was her favorite child. I couldn't say, not that I have any children. I have a different association from each of them and I've never reread them because I'm always afraid that I get the red pen and start thinking, oh, that's rubbish, remove that. And oh, I had this here, so they're kind of done.

Olive: 22:45

And I love the story in the West and I love the stories of how the Irish went out to the American West. You think if they left those cities all they needed was $20 for 160 acres. Now, a lot of them didn't have it. That's why so many Irish stayed in the likes of New York and Boston and Carolina, South Carolina. And they went out expecting to find these 160 acres were going to be similar to what they had in Ireland, with plenty of rain, green fields, and there was neither wood, trees, or water. You know, I read some of them set up these colonies. You see, that just fascinated me how they were prejudiced against in the cities and then they set up these colonies, hoping to be their own masters, if you like.

Olive: 23:37

Now most of them failed. Some of them are still going, like O'Neill in Nebraska. It's one of those colonies, one of those Irish colonies, and actually I read about a priest who went to Nebraska and he bought a huge quantity of land. They were going to form their own Irish colony there. The year they arrived it happened to be very wet weather, so they had ponds and green fields and everything was green and loads of food and fodder per cattle, but over a couple of years and a few heat waves and various extremes, there was nothing. Everything. The ponds were gone, the grass was burnt. They have a little cemetery, I think, called Garian, which is that there's a place here in Ireland called Garian and that was it, and they had to get up and leave and the only thing left is the cemetery.

Janice : 24:31

There was an interesting story that they consider Oklahoma part of the Great Plains. But when they did, I'm calling it a land grab. people ran out to get the land. That area was not really a part of any state. There's a panhandle and it was called no man's land and you'll still hear people in the United States talk about this.

Janice : 24:50

Well, that's no man's land because nobody was there and so all these people ran out and they would shoot cannons and guns, release them and people would run as fast as they could to put their stake in the ground and then go back and get their families. And I'm sure there was a lot of cheating going on.

Janice : 25:08

I heard there was. You know if you were wealthy, you were probably going to get the early start or even remove somebody's stake. But yeah, of course people thought that that was going to be that their dream come true, because if they are going to own something.

Olive: 25:31

Yeah, and to own a hundred and sixty acres, was huge, the land that the parents here at the time were very, very small right.

Well, and it's amazing how they present themselves in the different characters and how they evolve as you're writing it, because they have to grow, you know. But I love the stories of the Indians as well, and, gosh, my heart went out to them because, you know, there were so many agreements written and so many reneged on, and they were so spent in the end.

Olive: 25:52

So it was heartbreaking to strip people of their culture and absolutely educate them the way they did and take them out and send them to those schools. And what's that saying? Kill the Indian. I can't think of it now, but they were destroying the Indian within the human.

Janice : 26:10

Yeah, there was enough heartbreak to go around. I don't know if you've ever read about the orphan trains. Oh yeah, those were children that were taken from New York and places like that. Their parents even put up signs - children for sale and they would put them on the trains and we call it farming it out and that means they were given to farmers in the Midwest for free labor. That's it more essentially slaves, really slave children, more yeah and some had decent lives and some were beaten and you know, just completely broken.

Olive: 26:43

Absolutely, and it was the time as well. I think in the 1860s there were something like 30,000 street children in New York roaming streets and sleeping in doorways right. We are very lucky to have our times.

Janice : 26:58

I often think about the future and think that in 50 years will they look at us and say, oh, poor things, you know what a life they had to lead? So you mentioned you're already working on another book, and I guess my next question is what would you tell aspiring authors about taking first steps?

Olive: 27:17

I'd say just sit down and begin to write the book and read. I'm very inspired when I read books. Now, there are certain books I read that I think I will never be able to achieve that. But I would definitely say sit down and write the book, because the amount of people I meet would tell me. You know, I say right, the book is very easy. And I always say the same thing, yeah, just let me know when your launch is on and I'll go and I'll support it, because people think it's very easy. But if you enjoy it, there's nothing better. It's so wonderful.

Olive: 27:47

I work from home, I sleep in a room over there, I come in here every morning, I hang out with women called Pious, Valerie and Cecilia, and they're all living down in South Africa or in Nigeria at the moment and nothing beats it. You know it's fantastic and if the motives are there, your motives are right. You know it's a joy, absolute joy. But it's about sitting down and writing the book. And I tell myself that because if I wasn't in the routine now, when I'm not in a routine, I would find any excuse not to write.

Olive: 28:18

I'd have to say the ironing needs to be done and the oven needs to be cleaned. The oven doesn't need to be cleaned because I can't cook and I'd say the oven has not been turned on in about two years. So the main thing is sit down and write and join a writer's group Now a writer's group that has writing as its priority, because I've been in groups before and you might pour your heart out on this piece and you might spend hours writing. You can go to the writer's group and read it out and somebody will say my Granny used to do that. Then they all start talking about their Grannys and nobody critiques the social club. Yeah, so it's important to go to a writer's group where people are interested in writing.

Olive: 28:59

So I would say write, join the writer's group and read, read, read, read, even read bad fiction.

Janice : 29:04

What do you say to someone who thinks they don't need an editor? And maybe you don't need an editor, I don't know.

Olive: 29:10

I would say that is really the worst advice I could hear. I need an editor. I need several editors, because I'm too close to it to see the mistakes I've made. So I have a structural editor, a line editor and a proofreader. Absolutely vital and you can tell when somebody doesn't use an editor. You know. It's very valuable.

Olive: 29:31

I learned an awful lot with each book and I remember writing my first book and I had the publishing deal and I had an editor and I thought it was bulletproof and there were no mistakes in it. And I remember there was a scene happening, and it was happening in June, at 10 o'clock at night on the banks of the canal in Dublin and everything led up to that point. And then there was a whole load of events that happened after it. But this was a crucial meeting and my editor wrote back and she said at 10 o'clock, in the middle of I think it was July, she said it's still bright and I thought, oh, because I was under the cover of darkness. Then I had to go back, unravel the whole story, bring it forward, change it all over, oh my gosh.

Olive: 30:13

Yeah, absolutely.

Janice : 30:15

Yeah, I think that's another thing that authors don't think about. I've had so many people come up to me when I was in publishing and say I have a book in me and that's about as far as they get. They just want to be a writer, but I don't know if they really understand how much work there is that you have to put into it. It's not something that just flows on a piece of paper. Everybody edits it and you go on a book tour.

Olive: 30:43

Yeah, there is, and that's why, when people say that to me, I'd say it's easy to write a book. I say, yeah, just let me know. They tell me they're going to write this book and the book has gone great. And I say, grant, let me know when the launches are and I'll go and support it.

Janice : 30:59

Are you planning on continuing writing throughout your life?

Olive: 31:02

Well, I hope so over and over, even if I had to get a day job I hope I don't. If I did, I would always be toying with some book. I'm working on a book and I'm thinking about another book. I'm thinking about other books that would be interesting. Now I can't go near it until this book is finished, you know, but it is a long process. Actually, going back to the point we were talking about there, because I'm still working on the first draft and, as you know, there's about 10 drafts. I know the main thing is to get the first draft, but then, after that, there's 10 drafts and by the time you're finished, did you go?

Olive: 31:37

And I never again want to see Pious or Valerie or I never want to think about Nigeria again, and then I let it settle for a while and then it comes back.

Janice : 31:47

Right, well, I hope you do continue writing forever, and is there anything you want to say to the listeners that we haven't mentioned today?

Olive: 31:57

No, just thanks for having me on, and I haven't been to Tennessee. It's one of the few places I haven't, so you know, just prepare the guest room there. You might see me now once I find an excuse to visit. Yeah.

Janice : 32:10

Well, you're absolutely welcome. My husband and I live here alone. We're out here kind of in the country, and it would be a wonderful place for you to sit and think and write. I would enjoy that thoroughly. Well, we hope you will write many more books, Olive. Thank you.

Janice : 32:26

And I want to thank you again for joining us. And if any of you would like to know more about Olive Collins, visit her website, olivecollinscom. You can also find out more about her page at our website. Stay updated about future guests by following us on Facebook and Instagram. And, finally, throughout your life, try to find new paths to renewal. I'll leave you with a quote by St. Francis of Assisi. Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.¨