537 | Thomas Young | BOOK DISCUSSION: "The Mapmaker"

Tom Young joins the Protectors podcast to discuss his ninth novel and third World War II standalone work, "The Mapmaker," which explores the dangerous operations of the French Resistance.

• The novel follows Charlotte Deneau, a French-American woman who uses her artistic skills to create maps of German positions for the Resistance
• Charlotte becomes hunted by the Gestapo for her exceptional mapping abilities
• The second protagonist is Philippe Girard, a French pilot flying dangerous moonlight missions for the RAF's special operations squadron
• Philippe must locate and extract Charlotte from occupied France while determining if intelligence is reliable or a Nazi trap
• Tom draws inspiration from real-life resistance figures like Virginia Hall and Violette Sabo
• Tom describes his writing process as "by the seat of his pants" rather than outlining extensively
• Writing daily with a goal of 500-1000 words helps maintain progress on long-term writing projects
• Tom's writing career began unexpectedly during an aircraft emergency layover in South Korea
• Research for historical fiction includes nonfiction books and WWII training films on YouTube
• Tom's next potential novel may explore the little-known story of Jewish teenagers who escaped Germany to Virginia before joining the US military
• Advice for aspiring writers: attend conferences, network with the writing community, and remember it's normal for first drafts to need improvement

Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing Tom Young and The Mapmaker
• 8:36 Tom's Writing Process and Journey
• 9:36 Characters and Plot of The Mapmaker
• 12:48 Research Methods for Historical Fiction
• 13:14 Historical Inspiration for the Novel
• 19:17 Literary Influences and Future Projects

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hey, welcome back to the Protectors podcast. Tom Young is back on the show. Tom, let's talk, brother, let's talk about your new book.

Speaker 2: 0:10

Well, thank you so much, Jason. It's good to see you again. I certainly appreciate the opportunity to chat with you on the Protectors. My new novel is my ninth novel and of those novels it's the third one that I've done set in World War II. It's not part of a series. Those novels, those World War II novels, are standalone novels and the mapmaker is set within the French Resistance.

Speaker 2: 0:35

I have two main characters. One is a French-American woman named Charlotte Deneau and she's an agent for the resistance. She was an art student and she has turned her talents to drawing charts and diagrams and maps on German positions and capabilities to give targeting information to the resistance and to the allies. The problem is she's a little too good at it and the Gestapo knows about her and she's on the run across occupied France, trying to stay a step ahead of the Gestapo, and what she really needs is a ride because she still has important information. She has yet to get to the Allies and she's trying to get out of France before the Gestapo drag her into an interrogation center.

Speaker 2: 1:23

My other main character is a French pilot, philippe Girard, and he flew for the French Air Force until the fall of France and then he got out of occupied France and made his way to Britain and as the novel opens, he's flying for the British Royal Air Force in what they called a special duty squadron Nowadays we call it special operations and he flies a light single engine aircraft, a Westland Lysander, and his job is to fly in and out of occupied France by night, navigating by moonlight, to bring in supplies and ammunition and so forth, sometimes to pick up agents and bring them to Britain for consultations and then fly them back into France to send them back into the fray.

Speaker 2: 2:08

It's a hell of a way to commute to and from work, but they really did that in real life during the resistance. And he gets tasked with trying to find Charlotte and bring her out. But that's not as easy as it might sound, because she's on the run and she can't stay in any one place for any length of time. And even if Philippe does get information about where she's located, does he trust that information? Or is it a Nazi trap? So that's that's the setup to the mapmaker as it begins.

Speaker 1: 2:38

Now, what inspired this? Why did you pick this topic? And was there like real life people you modeled this book on this?

Speaker 2: 2:45

Why did you pick this topic and was there like real life people you modeled this book on? Yes, there were. The reason I picked this topic is, by now World War II is pretty well tilled ground for fiction. So I try to look for some of the lesser known corners of World War II history for my novels. And one of those lesser known corners at least it was lesser known to me in the beginning was the air operations that supported the French resistance.

Speaker 2: 3:08

You know, as an old airlifter myself, I was an Air National Guard flight engineer. Anything to do with airlifts fascinates me and these characters are inspired by reallife figures. There really were French pilots, and pilots from other Nazi-occupied countries as well, who escaped occupied Europe and flew for the RAF. As a matter of fact, just back in May I was in Normandy and I just happened to stumble across a memorial to Belgian pilots who flew with the RAF in the liberation of France. So all of this stuff is based on real-world history and my character, charlotte, is inspired by real-life resistance figures, women who worked with the resistance, people such as Virginia Hall, violette Sabo.

Speaker 1: 3:56

So I didn't have to make up a whole lot except specific scenes and dialogue and that sort of thing, but the historical background is real you know you talk about the historical background, but how does your background like, how do you interject yourself into your, into your novels as well, with your background?

Speaker 2: 4:20

well there is. There is probably less of me in this novel than in my previous novels that were set in modern-day conflicts. For example, in my first novel, the Muller Storm, it was a war novel set in Afghanistan and I had flown in Afghanistan, so my experience is somewhat less relevant when it comes to World War II fiction. But some things never change. I mean things like the camaraderie among air crews, the tension you feel before you go into action, that kind of thing. Those things are universal, so that stuff still applies.

Speaker 1: 5:01

Well, you know, a lot of us in the Protector community always think we have a novel in us, and there's a lot of inspiring writers that listen to the show a ton of us, myself included, now, we always want to know what the process is. So, with this, how long did it take you to write the Mapmaker, like from start to finish, from the initial idea that went popping in your head Probably two years For all of my novels.

Speaker 2: 5:28

It has taken me anywhere from a year to two years to write a novel, depending on how busy I am with other things and what's going on with the day jobs, but I've never written one in less time than a year. I know of authors who can write a full-length novel in less time than that, but that's just never worked for me and for you and anybody else in the Protectors community who feel you have a novel in you. Go for it. By all means, start putting pen to paper. I urge people who are interested in writing novels to get connected with the writing community. Go to as many writers conferences and workshops as your schedule and your wallet will allow, because that does two things for you it helps you hone your craft and it also puts you in contact with people who can help you. That's how you meet agents and editors and so forth. So by all means, go for it.

Speaker 1: 6:29

Yeah, absolutely. Networking is one thing I always tell people. It doesn't matter what process you're in right now, start building that network when you're coming to these books. I've talked to a lot of different authors over the years and everybody has different processes, some of them heavily outline and some just let the story go organically as you're writing it Now. Do you outline heavily or how does your process work?

Speaker 2: 6:55

I would rather take a beating than write an outline. I've never done it that way. I've never done it that way the way I do a novel is. I'll begin with a good idea of what the conflict is going to be, who the characters are and how the novel will open. I'll have a vague idea of how I want to end it and I won't have any idea of what happens in the middle and I'll literally make it up as I go along.

Speaker 2: 7:25

And when I first started writing novels I thought I was crazy to write that way, because in high school we're all taught the way you're supposed to do it by outlining. But that just never worked for me. And now that I've been doing this for a while and meeting other writers and going to conferences and things, I would unscientifically guesstimate that about 60% of the novelists I run into do it the way you're supposed to do it an outline and about 40 percent of us do what we call writing by the seat of our pants. And the distinction between those two approaches to writing a novel is so well known that you know if you go to a writer's conference and you go down to the bar on the first night and you're chatting with somebody and you ask them to get to know you questions. One of them is always so. You're an outliner or a pantser?

Speaker 1: 8:12

You know, when you're talking about like the writing process and outlining and writing organically, it kind of gets down to like the actual sitting down and writing. How do you sit down and write? Is it like a daily routine? Are you like, hey, I'm going to do 400 words tonight, I'm going to do a thousand words? How do you write?

Speaker 2: 8:38

It's a daily routine nowadays, Now that my life is in a place where I am able to do that, and I do my best work first thing in the morning. So if I'm actively working on a novel, first thing in the morning I'll make myself a strong cup of coffee and sit down at the computer and usually what I do is I tell myself I have to write at least 500 words, and sometimes I make it a thousand words, but I'll set a word count goal and if I reach that goal in two hours, great. Now I'm going fishing for the rest of the day. But if it takes until dinnertime, it takes until dinnertime. But in terms of finding time to write, that reminds me of a funny story about how I actually found time to begin writing my first commercially successful novel, and that was the Afghanistan war novel titled the Mullah Storm, which came out in 2010.

Speaker 2: 9:28

I was still flying in the Air National Guard at that time. I was a flight engineer on the C-5 Galaxy and in 2007, I had had an idea for an Afghanistan war story rolling around in the back of my head for some time, but I was just so busy flying and everything else, I just didn't have time to sit down and write it. And then one day in 2007, I was with the C-5 crew and we were flying a load of cargo into Osan Air Base, South Korea. And on the way into Osan we had multiple problems with the airplane. We lost a generator, so we had electrical problems. We blew out a hydraulic generator, so we had electrical problems. We blew out a hydraulic system, so we had hydraulic problems. And then there were a couple of other things going on with the aircraft. I don't remember everything that was wrong with that darn airplane, but it was enough that we declared an emergency and as we approached and landed at Osan, we were greeted by the flashing lights of the crash trucks. But fortunately we landed safely. And as we taxied off the runway and down the taxiway and across the ramp into parking, we dripped a trail of hydraulic fluid like a wounded pterodactyl.

Speaker 2: 10:37

And when we shut down that airplane and started writing up everything that was wrong with it and started talking to the maintenance people, we found out we were going to get stuck for days waiting for parts. So I found myself at Osan with time on my hands. Parts. So I found myself at Osan with time on my hands. So the next day I woke up in Aircrew building it's actually a nice hotel-like facility there at Osan and I walked to the BX, the base exchange, and I bought a yellow legal pad. And then I went to the coffee shop and I got myself a big, strong cup of black mil-spec coffee and I sat down on a couch in air crew building and I wrote at the top of that legal pad Chapter One and that became my first successful novel. It was published by Putnam. It led to a six-book series and then, after that series, I turned to historical fiction set in World War II. So you might say this all started with an aircraft emergency in South Korea.

Speaker 1: 11:31

Well, you know, thank God for that aircraft emergency and nobody got hurt. But hey, you know what the thing is with this. It's like you need that catalyst, that step-by-step point Right Now. Your writing has changed over the years as far as your setting, like where you're sitting to write. Now, when you're actually physically writing, do you sit in silence? Do you sit in front?

Speaker 2: 11:53

of the TV. Do you have music going? What kind of music? I always write in silence. I never have music on when I'm writing and when the weather is nice, my favorite place to write is right here on my deck. If it's cold, I'll be downstairs in my study and the computer will be wherever I want to be to write. But when I got my first contract with a publisher and the contract included a deadline for another novel, I realized OK, if you're going to do this professionally, you need to be able to write when you have time and not just when you feel like it. So you know, writing out here on my deck or down in my study is ideal. But I've written in the crew bunk of airplanes. I've written in a tent in Afghanistan. You learn to write when you have time and not just when the spirit moves you.

Speaker 1: 12:49

And you know, when you're throwing historical facts in with fiction, how do you make sure that it's accurate when you're doing the writing?

Speaker 2: 12:56

That's a good question. You want to be as accurate as you can but at the same time you have to realize well, in my case, for example, with a World War II novel, there's always going to be somebody out there who knows more about the M1 rifle than I do. There's always going to be somebody who knows more about the B-17 Flying Fortress than I do. You're never going to learn it all, but you try to do enough research so you don't make any egregious mistakes. And along the way, all writers do make some technical errors and along the way, all writers do make some technical errors but you try to minimize that.

Speaker 2: 13:34

So I do a lot of reading of nonfiction books. And oddly enough, youtube is a great resource now because somebody probably several somebodies has done us authors and historians a great favor by uploading a lot of World War II training films to YouTube. And the training films they did back then were terrific. You know, back then the War Department enlisted a lot of A-list Hollywood talent to write, produce and appear in those training films. They were really, really good and you can find one on anything you can imagine how to field strip an M1, how they packed parachutes back then, how they operated those great big backpack radios, how to do the checklists from startup to shutdown on all of the aircraft of that era. It's just amazing what you can find.

Speaker 1: 14:24

You know that gets into, like you know, info dumping and making sure they have the accuracy and stuff. But you don't want to go too crazy with that stuff. Exactly Because everybody always knows something more than you, and the more you go into that, it's almost. I always look at these things as kind of like a courtroom, like no matter what, whatever you say, it has to be accurate or the defense is going to be like boom all over you.

Speaker 2: 14:47

Right and and answer the question that was asked and nothing but that. And that's relevant to fiction writing too. You want to use just enough technical detail for authenticity, but you don't want to overdo it. The best piece of writing advice I ever got was from one of my mentors who said let the reader overhear the technical details. Ernest Hemingway put it a different way. He said if you know a subject well, enough.

Speaker 1: 15:19

You know what to leave out. You know you bring up Hemingway and you bring up a lot of other authors here and there like when we talked before.

Speaker 2: 15:30

But who's your biggest influence? You think it would be hard to pick one biggest influence because I have a lot of literary heroes and Hemingway is one of them. But I will fess up to how another of my literary heroes impacted part of how I wrote the Mapmaker. But I've always admired the novels by Herman Wook, world War II novels like the Winds of War and War in Remembrance. And if you read those novels you see that he intersperses them with memoirs from a fictional German general, general Armin von Ruhm. And he does that to give you the German perspective as the story advances, that give you the German perspective as the story advances. So I kind of stole an idea from him and I intersperse the mapmaker with memos from Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie as he's reporting to Berlin how he's pursuing Charlotte and other resistance agents. And of course those memos are completely fictional. I made up those memos. Unfortunately I did not make up Klaus Barbie.

Speaker 2: 16:38

He was all too real. In fact he was known as the Butcher of Lyon. He was known to have personally tortured resistance agents and for a long time he evaded justice. He got out of Europe at the end of World War II and he lived in South America for decades under the alias Klaus Altman, but then, in 1971, the Nazi hunters, serge and Beata Klarsfeld, identified him as living in South America. After a lengthy process, he was extradited to France where he stood trial for war crimes, and in 1987, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But he did not live long after that. He died of cancer in 1991.

Speaker 1: 17:23

Yeah, I like. One thing I like about reading books like this is getting history and learning and piquing your interest in understanding history, because history repeats itself. One thing I do want to ask is and this is one of our final questions because I really want people to pick up the map maker and just kind of keep these. I've been keeping my author interviews really short just because I want people to get the gist of it and to be able to go out there and read it themselves. But there are a lot of aspiring writers. I told you that before. It's like what piece of advice would you give them when they're first getting off on this?

Speaker 2: 18:00

The main thing I would say is, as we discussed before, go to conferences, go to workshops, network and make time to sit down and write and remember that it's a long-term project. Don't be intimidated by thinking oh my goodness, I've got to write 80,000 words. Well, you don't have to write 80,000 words today. Today, just tell yourself you're going to write 500 words and that's a pretty reasonable goal. You can make yourself write 500 words even on a day when you're not really feeling it, but if you do that every day, at the end of the year you have a manuscript of significant length. And another thing that I tell people to keep in mind is don't be discouraged if your first draft isn't good. It's the job of a first draft to not be good and to lay the groundwork for your second, third, fourth, fifth draft, which is going to be better. There's nothing magic or mysterious about riding. It's a learned skill, just like flying an airplane or shooting a rifle or learning a martial art. It's a skill like any other skill you can learn.

Speaker 1: 19:13

Now what is up for Tom Young next?

Speaker 2: 19:17

Ah, good question. I don't know exactly what my next novel is going to be, but it might be another World War II novel, and I've been researching some other lesser-known corners of World War II history, including a little corner of World War II and Virginia history here in the state of Virginia where I live. But and this is something that people even here don't don't know about Not many people anyway but there was a group of 38 young Jewish teenagers who were studying at an agricultural school in in Germany, studying at an agricultural school in Germany. A Jewish businessman in the US arranged to get them out of Germany. He wanted to save as many Jewish refugees as he could, so we arranged for them to get visas to come and work on a large farm that he had bought. He pulled it off, but he did it barely in the nick of time.

Speaker 2: 20:25

Either the day before or the day after Kristallnacht the Gestapo raided that school and the male students were sent to Buchenwald. But the US found out about this, communicated to Berlin. This was before Pearl Harbor, so we were still a neutral country. Then the State Department communicated to Berlin hey, you just arrested a bunch of kids who have visas to come to the US. Maybe it's not in your interest to tick off a large industrial country that is neutral. So these kids were released from Buchenwald. Not a lot of people were released from Buchenwald, but these guys were. But then later, after they came to the US and the US got involved in the war, most of them joined the US military and one of them went back to Buchenwald as part of Patton's Third Army. That's quite a story. So that's that's what I've been researching lately.

Speaker 1: 21:14

That'd be a really cool story. I I think that's your next one. It's going to be like this little, like little Jewish soft group going to head over there.

Speaker 2: 21:23

Yeah, yeah. Oh okay, you're giving me ideas.

Speaker 1: 21:27

Yeah, it's almost like. Yeah, I think that'd be really cool. It'll like you know, I have this idea in my head of like Red Dawn.

Speaker 2: 21:44

You know in my head of like red dawn, you know you have the teens who become like you know the resistance. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Oh man, it's funny how few people know that story. In fact, a few years ago I happened to be hunting on a farm very close to the farm where these kids were working before they joined the military. And I'm talking to my buddy who lives on a nearby farm and I'm telling him the story I just told you and I I said have you ever heard of that? And he said no, no, I've never heard of that. And I said oh man, it happened right over there. Over that tree line is where all this stuff.

Speaker 2: 22:06

And even people in the local area don't know.

Speaker 1: 22:09

Oh my gosh, you could have like the dirty dozen type of like yeah, I see the whole thing going here with the kids, whole thing going here with the kids. They know the area, they know the layout, so they're almost like a guerrilla force, you know trained in the us and oh, it's gonna be gum. I'm excited, here we go.

Speaker 2: 22:24

I think the real life figure who was part of patton's third army was, was there more in uh, in an advisory role, with an intel role? But you know, with, with fiction you can with fiction.

Speaker 1: 22:34

You do what you want. It's a covert covert thing. It's classified. Nobody even knew what was going on.

Speaker 2: 22:40

Exactly.

Speaker 1: 22:48

And they were assassinating key figures that were part of the Germans, the camps. Hey, I'm writing this in my head with you. I'm here with you. Just give me a text or a call. We got this thing going.

Speaker 2: 22:55

Keep talking and I'll just take notes.

Speaker 1: 22:57

Yeah, exactly. Hey, Tom, I appreciate you coming on, but everybody make sure you check out the Mapmaker and definitely, definitely, definitely pick it up.

Speaker 2: 23:05

Well, thanks so much, Jason. I certainly appreciate the opportunity to chat with you and your audience. It's always good to see you.