Author Erik Larson entertains sold-out audience at 2016 Southern Voices Festival

New York Times bestselling author Erik Larson paid a visit to the Hoover Library Theatre tonight as the keynote speaker for the 2016 Southern Voices Festival.

Larson, a former journalist for The Wall Street Journal and contributing writer for Time Magazine who has written five New York Times bestsellers, gave a sold-out audience a glimpse of what it takes to put together one of his award-winning books.

The single most important thing he does is come up with the right idea for the book, Larson told the 250 people gathered in the theater. And that’s the most difficult part for his type of writing, he said.

Larson writes narrative nonfiction, which means he takes true stories and writes them in a compelling narrative fashion that could make people believe they’re reading fiction.

His latest work, “Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania,” tells the story of the sinking of a luxury ocean liner that was on a voyage from New York to Liverpool in the first year of World War I.

Larson said he picks historical events that have a powerful narrative on their own and then does thorough research into people and circumstances connected to those events.

It’s the nuggets of details that he discovers that help enrich the stories and bring them to life, he said.

“I don’t’ think of myself as a historian,” he said. “I like to think of myself as an animator of history.”

His job is not to inform but to rather provide enough detail to immerse people into the subject matter so much that they feel like they have lived in that period of time for a while, he said.

To do that requires a terribly rich archival base that gives a thorough look into the lives of people from that time, he said.’

“In narrative nonfiction, you can’t fake it,” Larson said. “You can’t make things up. You either have it or you don’t have it.”

For “Dead Wake,” he stumbled upon diary-type letters written by Nellie Huston, an English woman traveling second class on the Lusitania when it sank. She was one of 600 passengers whose bodies were never recovered, but her letters were found in a purse floating in the sea off the coast of Ireland, and they described her time spent aboard the ship, he said.

Larson also pulled material from love letters written by President Woodrow Wilson to a girlfriend with whom he had become involved after his wife died. He also used the diary of the United States’ first ambassador to Nazi Germany and a rich memoir written by the ambassador’s daughter.

Typically, it takes him two to three years to do research for a book, with the last year overlapping with the beginning stages of writing the book, he said. He starts out writing one page a day and then slowly expands until he is fully engaged in writing, he said.

For “Dead Wake,” he found a lot of material in the Lusitania archives of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives on the campus of Stanford University. He also lived in Paris for six months, researching the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the Imperial War Museum and University of Liverpool historical documents, he said. The U.S. Library of Congress and U.S. National Archives also were beneficial, he said.

One audience member tonight asked Larson how he stays focused with so much historical material to review. He said he really doesn’t stay focused.

“The central narrative is like a Christmas tree,” he said. “I try to put as many shiny ornaments on the tree as I can. Then, I take them out.”

His wife, a smart reader and natural editor, is a big help, he said. She proofreads all of his books and makes notations in the margins that help him pare off details or side stories that are superfluous, he said.

She adds up arrows and smiley faces for good parts, down arrows for parts that are less compelling and sad faces for parts that make her cry, he said. And then there are the long series of zzzzzzz’s to indicate boredom. He can’t be in the house when she’s proofreading because he can’t bear to see her fall asleep while reading his work, he said.

Repeated rewriting helps sharpen the work to get it ready for publication, all the way til the last deadline, he said.

Jan Hilton, an avid reader from Marietta, Ga., who was among attendees tonight, said Larson was quite an engaging speaker. “He held my attention. It was fascinating,” she said.

She and some friends who came with her were expecting an enjoyable night and were not disappointed, she said.

Blake Ballentine, a Mountain Brook resident who has read a couple of Larson’s books, said it was revealing to get insight into the author’s world and the way he does things. He was impressed by all the research Larson does for his books, he said.

Hoover Library Director Linda Andrews said she knew Larson was brilliant but had some pleasant surprises from his talk.

“I had no idea he would be as entertaining as he was,” Andrews said. “I was in the mindset of a serious discussion of historical events. I actually just laughed the whole way through.”

Hilton said she has been coming to the Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library for eight years or so after being invited by a friend from Mountain Brook.

“You never have to know who the authors are,” she said. “Even if you’ve never heard of them, you’re not going to be disappointed.”

The Southern Voices Festival continues Saturday with seven authors in the authors conference: Natalie Baszile, Beth Ann Fennelly, Tom Franklin, Craig Johnson, Jamie Mason, Laura Lane McNeal and Mark Pryor. Read more about them here.

Each author will speak in two places Saturday: the Library Theatre and the Library Plaza. There still are 20 or so tickets left for the Plaza venue, said Amanda Borden, an assistant director at the library who serves as chairwoman for the festival. Tickets are $40, plus a $2.50 processing fee. Saturday’s conference runs from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., with registration at 9 a.m.