Within the past six years Theodore Wheeler has published three novels, Kings of Broken Things (2017), In Our Other Lives (2020), and The War Begins in Paris (2023), all three of which are set during periods of war. Set during World War I and culminating with the Red Summer of 1919, a period known for outbreaks of racial violence across more than thirty U.S. cities, Kings of Broken Things examines the economic, political, racial, and social conditions that precipitate the Omaha race riot. Following Karel, a young Austrian refugee who seeks to find himself in baseball, Evie, a sex worker who yearns to be a seamstress, and Jake, a farmer at heart-turned-goon, Kings of Broken Things features a cast of Nebraska transplants who’ve landed in Omaha to seek their fortunes after fleeing their native towns and cities, and depicts a city of social unrest that will allow one to reinvent oneself as long as one doesn’t go too far. Set in the early twenty-first century during the War on Terror, In Our Other Lives is told through twelve FBI files. After a young American man with a missionary bent goes missing in Pakistan, he is presumed dead by family and friends until a video of him being held hostage by jihadists is released. Now the lives of those with whom he’s made contact are upended and dissected to uncover the circumstances which caused him to go to Asia and to determine if he is indeed a hostage and patriot or if he is a traitor. In Our Other Lives explores portrays a post 9/11 world of increased surveillance and religious fanaticism and shows how weaponized patriotism can make the most innocent lives and innocuous behaviors seem sinister. Wheeler’s latest novel The War Begins in Paris follows Mielle aka Marthe Hess, a quiet, unobtrusive journalist living abroad in Paris. Having left her Iowa home and her Mennonite community she finds herself struggling to fit in with the gaggle of journalists, reporters, and correspondents in Paris. While others are there to cover the disturbing rise of Nazism and Fascism, she writes uncredited fashion and style columns for midwestern housewives. Raised to be meek, to dress plainly, to never raise her voice, Mielle goes unnoticed, invisible among her cadre of reporters, never quite fitting in until she strikes an unlikely friendship with the notorious Jane, whose influence drags Mielle into the war’s dark center.
Necessary Fiction spoke with Ted Wheeler about his three recent novels.
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NF: You’ve had a very long career as a court reporter and now you teach creative writing courses at Creighton University. How has your background in reportage influenced your fiction writing or your approach to thinking about creative writing? For example, does it make you more interested in certain types of stories?
TW: My background as a reporter has led me to write more topical fiction that depicts real, notable situations and people—generally the idea of depicting human experience as shaped by social, cultural, and political forces. I don’t think I would have been pushed so far in this vein if it wasn’t for my experiences as a journalist. Although I’ve always been interested in politics, so maybe it was inevitable that such an interest would have led me to these two destinations.
For years I reported from courthouses and met a lot of different kinds of people there, many of them who were in the middle of what was probably one of the more difficult days of their lives. That’s kind of a weird place to work on a daily basis, but it helped me appreciate the dignity of people and to respect humanity in a deeper way. As someone interested in stories, there was certainly a lot to think about, even just walking down the hallway, whether it was someone who was being sued or getting divorced or facing jailtime or confronting someone who had done them great harm. This is something I talk to my students about now, the idea that everyone has history, trauma, or some noteworthy thing that made them who they are, so we all deserve to be treated with dignity.
NF: These novels are so different from one another. Kings of Broken Things and The War Begins in Paris are set in much earlier historical periods whereas In Our Other Lives is more contemporary. What does research look like for you when you’re working on a novel and how does the research differ when you’re working on something historical?
TW: There isn’t a huge difference in process, except reading more straight history books for the historical novels. But even with In Our Other Lives (which is mostly set in 2008, in my early adulthood) I went back and read all the newspapers I could find from that year and read Tim Weiner’s great history of the FBI to get a sense of what it would be like to be an FBI agent and William Vollman’s amazing memoir An Afghanistan Picture Show, about his efforts to sneak into Afghanistan as a young man, to understand some of that kind of mindset (along with the terrain west of Peshawar, Pakistan, where my novel is also partially set). The process is pretty similar when it comes to the historical novels. For The War Begins in Paris, which follows a group of American foreign correspondents in Europe at the start of World War II, it was a bit easier to research the characters, as many American foreign correspondents from that period published memoirs and diaries about their experiences. These were such gifts, as not only did I have first-hand accounts of what their jobs and living conditions were like at the exact moment my story is set, but also what clubs and bars they hung out at in Berlin and Paris, what rumors they heard about each other, and what they food was like. Getting the facts straight is important, of course, but mostly I was interested in what their experience was like.
NF: What inspired The War Begins in Paris?
TW: The intersection of a couple different things. About a decade ago I came across the story of Jane Anderson, who, in her twenties, was a pioneering woman journalist during the First World War, a sort of adventuring reporter who reported from airplanes, submarines, and trenches. Jane isn’t remembered for this, though, but for being one of the “radio traitors” who broadcast fascist propaganda for the Nazis in 1940-41. There’s still a bit of a cult about Jane—an Atlanta debutante turned fascist propagandist. She seemed like a great character for a novel, though, at the time, I wasn’t really sure what that story could be.
Then, when I was working as a political reporter during the presidential election in 2016, I started to think more and more about journalists who were acting in bad faith, political opportunists, and American fascists. I guess most of us were thinking about these things in one way or another. But working from the press pit at Trump rallies, or getting booed and taunted at those same rallies, or seeing young men dressed up like nationalist shock troops at the fringes of other political events, it was a visceral experience. The reaction I had was to start working on a novel about reporters from the 1930s who acted in good faith and used their abilities to fight against fascism. Once I was writing a novel, not about Jane Anderson, but about a reaction against what Jane Anderson stood for, the project really took off.
NF: Where did you get the idea for Mielle and what made you decide to make her the novel’s focal character? Was she always the protagonist of The War Begins in Paris?
TW: It took a long time to come up with Mielle. She came from the desire to have a protagonist who would be a counterweight for Jane. While Jane was cynical, an opportunist, I wanted the protagonist to be a true believer and earnest; while Jane was bombastic and charismatic, Mielle should be shy, young, a bit at sea in social situations. From that, while driving back from covering a Democratic primary event in Sioux City, Iowa, I had the idea that this character should be a fallen Mennonite. Someone who was raised to be radically pacifist, who was taught to live-and-let-live, who would see navigating the modern world as a challenge.
Putting a young woman like this into a situation where she couldn’t just ignore what was going on around her felt like a very interesting story, and one that could be combined perfectly with Jane’s drift toward fascism.
I knew very little about what it’s like to be a Mennonite, much less a twenty-four year-old fallen Mennonite who finds her way to Paris in 1938, but that made her story even more irresistible to me. What I love about writing fiction is learning about other people and empathizing in a profound way. Writing off-platform feels almost like an antiquated idea in contemporary fiction; personally, I love the challenge and the experience of being in someone else’s skin.
NF: What are the accompanying challenges of writing about real-life figures? How constrained are you by the historical record and where are you free to imagine/innovate?
TW: I do stick to the historical record as much as possible, with the story still holding together. Writing a whole book about a famous figure (like Russell Banks did wonderfully with John Brown in his novel Cloudsplitter) isn’t something I’ve ever thought about, largely because it feels so hard to find much space in the story to fictionalize. A character like Jane Anderson is perfect for historical fiction because there are so many gaps in her biography. She’s obscure enough (and was secretive enough when she was alive) that there is plenty of room for the story of the novel to develop organically without constantly having to hew back to the historical record. Not that there isn’t a constant pressure to keep the dates straight (and to fictionalize the real-life characters in a way that’s both entertaining and faithful to what we know about them) but it becomes much less about fact-checking than it does about trying to write a good novel.
NF: All three of your novels depict ambitious deployment of point of view, with you frequently using upwards of five points of view. For example, in Kings of Broken Things we get Karel, Evie, Jake, Anna, and Tom’s point of view, and in In Our Other Lives, we get files for five different characters. Talk to readers about the choices you make about point of view. What are the challenges of keeping so many balls up in the air?
TW: Multiple points of view are helpful in telling a historical or topical story, when the story is bigger than the experience of just one person. For my first two novels, I think it was about seeing POV characters as pressure points that would help expose more of the big picture. Kings of Broken Things follows a political boss, a kept woman forced to connive her way to survival, three young immigrants trying to find their way in an often cold and cruel city. In Our Other Lives features a cynical FBI agent, a young woman whose brother has gone missing while on a missionary trip to Pakistan, that missing brother, and the young woman’s long-lost husband, who himself disappeared years before. While they’re different, all these perspectives focus on shared experience and, in both, the story is still told by more of a collective voice—even if that voice isn’t personified in a true multiple first-person point of view, like Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. In Kings there’s this idea of the story being told by the boys of a German immigrant neighborhood who witnessed the lynching of Will Brown; for In Our Other Lives, it’s the concept of a domestic spying campaign itself being the narrator—that the stories being told were collected and are being held on government servers, toward the question of whether anyone can actually disappear in our world today. The difference in perspective is subtle, and still largely functions as more of a traditional third-person story, but it helped me to write the novels to think about them in this way.
In some ways, I think it’s easier to write a novel like this. There are more opportunities to transition to something new. More variation of voice, pacing, tone. There’s less pressure on a single character to carry the whole show. There are challenges too, of course. To keep the novel from getting too long, for one, with so many characters wanting to be indulged. And, once you have five POV characters, what’s to stop you from going to seven or ten? There’s a lot more writing that gets cut in the end, in my experience, along the way to finding what’s relevant from each character and what doesn’t need to exist in this particular novel.
The War Begins in Paris is different, as almost the entire story stays in Mielle’s perspective. There was the challenge to see if she could bear the whole story and to dream up new calamities that could be visited upon this one woman. But we get to know her so well by the end, it is a more satisfying experience in many ways. And there was less that needed to be cut away because I knew that the story belonged to Mielle. I didn’t need to puzzle together the stories of many different characters to see what matters for her.
NF: Of the three novels, Kings of Broken Things has the most straightforward narrative structure i.e. it moves chronologically. The chapters in In Our Other Lives are structured as files and The War Begins in Paris intersperses short news reels articles between traditional length chapters grouped by geographical location. What are the challenges when it comes to deciding upon a novel’s structure? How do you know when you’ve gotten it right?
TW: It’s hard to know what the structure of a story should be until I know who is telling the story. Kings of Broken Things is a coming-of-age story, so chronical order felt natural. In Our Other Lives is a crime story, so more thematic or episodic files felt best. When I started writing The War Begins in Paris, I thought about the story as journalistic dispatches, mostly as a way to get words down on the page. I even told myself, like it was an assignment, to write five hundred words about a meetup between foreign correspondents for breakfast or a brief about what happened a press conference later that day or three thousand words for a feature about Kristallnacht. But then what started as a conceit to trick myself into writing just became the structure of the novel. I didn’t second guess it too much.
The actual drafting of a novel comes pretty quickly once the voice and structure are married. That moment, when it clicks together, feels like running with the wind. It’s so freeing to say, “All right, let’s go,” without having to keep searching any longer. But getting to that point can take years of trial and error.
NF: You’ve published a short story collection and three novels, with The War Begins in Paris being your fourth book. What has the process of writing these four books taught you about yourself as a writer? For example, what’s the one thing you now know about writing that you wished you’d known when you first began?
TW: I wish that I wouldn’t have agonized so long to make work stories and scenes that just weren’t going to work, or not work in my original conception of what they should be. The idea of the uncompromising, tortured artist is too attractive in youth, I guess. Not that I don’t rewrite and revise now, but not in such a contrived way. I think of myself more of a medium than an originator. (This could be another influence of working fourteen years as a journalist with a deadline every single night.) I tell myself all the time to keep moving and to let go of parts that don’t work. It’s better to write something again, or start someplace new, than it is to endlessly tinker sentences, though the idea of just throwing away writing, even if it was dull, used to be so scary to me when I was younger. There will always be time to go back and rewrite (or so I tell myself) so keep moving forward. If I write a good sentence or description, I build off that. Follow what has life and energy. Pay attention to your characters. Let the story go where it wants to go.
Along these lines, I think it’s helpful to not decide how a story ends until you have to write that scene, so that you can follow the mystery with awe and curiosity, the same as you want your reader to read your work. That being said, it can be helpful to have an idea about a choice that the protagonist will have to make at the end. This gives you something to write toward, a lifeline that pulls you through to the climactic moment. That too is helpful, and really exciting when the moment arrives, with the pressure on, when you finally get to write that unforgettable closing scene that your readers will love you for. (Or so I tell myself.)
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Theodore Wheeler is the author of three novels, most recently The War Begins in Paris (Little Brown, 2023). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Nebraska Arts Council, and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. For fourteen years, Wheeler worked as a journalist who covered law and politics, and he now teaches creative writing in the English Department at Creighton University. He is also director of Omaha Lit Fest and, with his wife, operates Dundee Book Company, an independent neighborhood bookshop.
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Amina Gautier is the author of the short story collections At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, The Loss of All Lost Things, and The Best That You Can Do. For her body of work she has received the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.