Write Now with Scrivener, Episode no. 56: Alexander Rose, Historian

Show notes:

• Alexander Rose
• Phantom Fleet: The Hunt for Nazi Submarine U–505 and World War II’s Most Daring Heist
• Washington’s Spies
• Spionage (Alexander’s Rose’s Substack)
• Voltaire: history of Charles XII, King of Sweden

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Alexander Rose is a historian whose latest book, Phantom Fleet, is about how the US Navy captured a German U-Boat on the day before D-Day.

Alex Rose was born in the United States, grew up in Australia, was educated in Britain, worked in Canada, and now lives in New York. This gives him an interesting perspective on the world, an “outsider’s perspective in a way, even though, theoretically speaking, I’m an insider. I learned how to write in the British tradition of history writing rather than the American tradition of history writing. So even while I write books that are American-based, there’s a British writing style involved with it.”

How do they differ? “I think there’s traditionally in Britain an emphasis on, it sounds odd, but adding jokes. There’s a greater appreciation of irony than in America. There’s generally an emphasis on being much more serious and much more fact-based, much drier in a way. So there’s not as much fun involved in writing [in American style] as there is in the British or Australian styles.”

There are two types of fiction writers: planner and pantser. A planner outlines their novel, and a pantser just starts writing with no plan in mind. I asked Alex how he plans a book of history. “What I tend to do is I tend to work chapter by chapter. I know some of the high points that I want to hit in the chapter, and then I construct it section by section. It’s almost like constructing a screenplay, scene by scene. I tend to think about where I’m going in the chapter. As I go on, it becomes a little clearer, the road ahead to the next chapter. And then the chapter after that. I’m a bit of a planner, but mostly I’d say 70% pantser.”

Alex pointed out that he thinks of his books in the three-act structure that novelists and screenwriters often use. “You usually know where you’re going to start. And you kind of know where you’re going to end; you know, more or less, this is the climax. I’ve got to get to that. But act two is always where the complications are. And if you haven’t thought about it at all, that’s where things become woolly and you can go off in strange directions.”

Having written screenplays for the TV adaptation of his first book, Washington’s Spies (renamed Turn: Washington’s Spies for TV), Alex applies similar storytelling techniques to his books. “There are certain techniques you can take from the movies about the Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 structure. History is like writing fiction in that there is an art to it. It is not just a recitation of dry facts one after another. That just leads to kind of plodding, tedious narratives that go strictly from day one to the last day. There’s an art and style to history writing.”

Alex’s latest book, Phantom Fleet, The Hunt for Nazi Submarine U–505, and World War II’s Most Daring Heist, sounds a bit like a Tom Clancy novel: the US Navy tracked and captured a German submarine just before D-Day. He told me that it’s an action-oriented story. “I didn’t want to just tell the story of the heisting of this submarine at sea. You have to go into the background of it, and how they got there in the first place. How did all of these people meet in the middle of the South Atlantic at a seemingly random point and just take a submarine? These things are in gestation for several years. You have to go to the background of Enigma and Anglo-American military cooperation and submarine hunting and anti-submarine war. There’s a lot of other contextual stuff that goes into this that all leads up to that critical moment on June 4, 1944, when they get the submarine.”

Alex has written four books with Scrivener so far. He has far too many research documents to store in Scrivener and uses DevonThink for the thousands of scans and PDFs for each book. “I use Scrivener for writing, organization, and note-taking.”

I suggested that his pantser approach means that he makes a lot of changes as he writes a book. “I organize it within the Corkboard. I move index cards around a lot. Sometimes when you’re writing a book, you go down blind alleys. In Phantom Fleet, I had a whole chapter on Enigma, because Enigma is much more complex and much more interesting than people think. So you just delete things. But that’s what words are for. You write them, and then you decide, ‘this isn’t going to work here.’ You can’t use everything that you research and investigate. So again, Scrivener is very useful. You don’t have to delete anything, really. You just move it into a different folder.”

Other Scrivener features that Alex uses include using multiple windows, splitting the Editor, and “being able to add footnotes is incredibly useful for history writers. It’s the only software on the market that can actually do all this, that’s built specifically – for me at least – for these kinds of tasks.”