Everything You Need to Know About Writing an Epic Novel

On my website  I tell the story of the incredible quest for my historical novel, BRAZIL, the original manuscript a staggering  750,000 hand-written words --  736,200 to be precise.

I searched for the story of Brazil for five years, a literary bandeirante - a pathfinder - wandering through Brazil's past. At times I felt the thorn-studded entanglements of the caatingas closing in and couldn't see the wood for the trees! Like those bold adventurers with their magnificent obsessions, I'd no choice but to press forward. What fired my enthusiasm wasn't golden El Dorado but a real treasure - the untold story of the Brazilians and their epic history.

On the 20th anniversary of my novel, for the first time I share my mighty journey of twenty thousand kilometers across the length and breadth of Brazil in 1981. I traveled through the heart of a nation in which the flame of freedom was newly lit after years of military dictatorship, the journal I kept colored by the voices and emotions of the era.

 I explore the exhaustive processes that go into the making of a monumental novel with a first draft of three-quarters of a million words written in the old-fashioned way, by hand. I reveal the early genesis of my ideas for plot lines and characters, the detailed planning of my outline, the initial burst of reading and inquiry that brought a broad grasp of my subject.

I give examples of the detailed research and background work that went into shaping my fictional characters, both major and minor, as I went along and remained constant to the end. While not bound by the constraints of the historian, I felt myself obligated to get the facts right. 

The writing spanned four years with five drafts in the shaping and editing of the manuscript. Examples of this creative process are shown in the pages reproduced from my handwritten originals and various drafts to proof pages.

Of all the accolades a writer could hope for at the end of an epic work like Brazil none brought more joy than a simple question asked by the famed Brazilian historian and sociologist Gilberto Freyre: "I should like to know if Uys had an unpublished jornal intime of a Brazilian family?" There was no private journal, just the will to understand the Brazilian "thing" and a passion for writing and storytelling, which lies at the heart of every good novel.

Over the years, readers and reviewers have sung the praises of Brazil, most notably Professor Wilson Martins, one of Brazil's most renowned critics 

In the second archive on my website I share my experience as James A. Michener's assistant for two years on his South African novel, The Covenant. I tell my story of Working with Michener  drawing on hundreds of items from my personal collection, from Assignemt through final Manuscript.

Both archives offer an extraordinary look at what went into the making of two major novels.