When I write, I find that images help spark my imagination.
I kept this photo of my father, Stephen Flanders, in the newsroom of the New York Herald Tribune in the late 1940s, nearby when I wrote Herald Square.
When working on all of my novels, I’ve tried to find as many images and pictures as I can to give me a sense of what a given time and place looked like. Some have stood out.
For The North Building, it was an iconic image from the great American photographer David Douglas Duncan of an exhausted Marine during the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir.
For The Hill of Three Borders, I was inspired by the faces of the demonstrators as they marched in the streets of Budapest in the early days of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
Some have told me that they find my novels “cinematic,” and I take that as a compliment. I hope readers find a strong visual element in my storytelling and that it helps them in picturing the past, that foreign country, where they do things differently (to borrow from L.P. Hartley).
©2015 by Jefferson Flanders