The shelters of stone - Jean M. Auel [473]
RH: Your research is praised throughout the world for its accuracy and detail. Can you tell us a bit about your process?
JA: Most of the information comes from reading and library research, but I have also learned a great deal from asking questions, taking classes, and traveling. For example, I took a class from an expert in arctic survival, where we spent a night on the snowy slopes of a nearby mountain to learn how to live in cold conditions. From a class in aboriginal life skills, I learned how people live off the land, and how to brain-tan a deer hide into wearable buckskin. I’ve taken plant identification classes and classes on how to cook wild foods. Ayla’s medicine-woman skills come from a combination of first-aid books, books on herbal medicines, and asking questions of doctors and other skilled health practitioners like nurses and paramedics. I have visited many of the sites I write about to get a feel for them, even though conditions are most likely different now. I even worked for a short time at an archaeological dig so I could understand where information comes from and how scientists find it.
RH: How much in your books is based on fact, and how much is fiction? That is, do you fill in the gaps left by history?
JA: My books are entirely fiction, based on as much factual information as I could find on their subjects. They take place 30,000 years ago, and the only things left from that time are hard objects—things made of stone and bone, such as stone tools, carved items, animal and human skeletal remains—and, as it turns out, microscopic residues. Pollen has been found in Neanderthal graves. Hair from various animals and DNA traces of animal blood from stones and knives add information. Inference fills in a certain amount. For example, if the skeleton of an old Neanderthal man shows that from a young age he had been blind in one eye, had had an arm amputated, and walked with a limp, it is fair to surmise that he was not hunting woolly mammoths, which raises interesting questions: Who amputated his arm? Who stopped the bleeding? Who treated the shock? How did he live to be an old man? Obviously someone took care of him; the question is why? Could it have been because they loved him? Or that his culture took care of their weak and wounded? Perhaps “red in tooth and claw” is not an appropriate way to describe those enigmatic human cousins.
RH: The Earth’s Children® series is an epic adventure spanning many years. Have you always known where the story is going, or has each book been planned separately?
JA: When I started, my question was “I wonder if I could write a short story?” Then I got into the research and got all fired up, and I realized I was writing a book. At the time, I was calling it Earth’s Children®, and as it grew, I thought it would be one big saga that fell easily into six parts. I wrote about 450,000 words, and thought I would cut when I rewrote it. But when I started to reread it, I realized that I didn’t know how to write fiction, so I read books about how to write a novel. When I went back and began rewriting the book, instead of editing and cutting down, I found that putting in the dialogue and the scenes to make a story made it grow. It was with some surprise and trepidation that I came to realize that each of the separate parts was a complete story, and that I had a six-book series. I have been working from that original rough draft as an outline for the series, so I have always known, more or less, where the story is going.
RH: Your own books have a great heroine in Ayla. Who is your favorite literary heroine?
JA: I don’t really have one. It may once have been the princess in