In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 241.
My debut novel, Restitution (Regal House Publishing, September 2025), is a family drama that takes place against the backdrop of German reunification. Although my narrator lives in the United States, large portions of the book are set in East and West Germany, as well as reunified Germany in the early nineties. When I started to write, I grounded my story in the knowledge I had gained from my own summers and school years as a child in West Germany, as well as years living in and visiting former East Germany as an adult. I pored over legal treatises about property disputes in the aftermath of reunification. I read firsthand accounts of living in and fleeing from East Germany in the 1950s. I interviewed friends, their parents, and their neighbors about their lives in the East before the Wall came down. I am not a historian, but I felt certain I knew enough to write the book I wanted to write. Above all, I had a sense of the everyday fabric of life in the places I described. I’d lived much of it myself, and I’d listened carefully to people who’d lived through the times I hadn’t.
It turns out there’s a downside to knowledge. As I wrote the first draft, I found myself dropping nuggets into the text: The 1970 World Cup semifinal in which the heroic German footballer Franz Beckenbauer played much of the game with his shoulder in a sling. Or the aptly named Moby Dick, a whale-shaped boat with an open mouth and rows of teeth that travels up and down the Rhine. Sometimes I included these nuggets because they were tied to my own fond memories (all those afternoons watching Moby Dick float past my high school in Bonn). Other times I included these details simply as signposts. Look, I wanted to say to my future audience, I know my stuff!
But as I revised Restitution, I made sure to reassess each of the historical or cultural details I had included. Did the fact that I knew about Beckenbauer’s shoulder or Moby Dick’s teeth make the rest of my story more believable, more coherent, or more compelling? Not necessarily. I began to ask myself not whether such a detail was correct, but whether it was relevant to the story in that moment.
Neither Moby Dick nor Franz Beckenbauer made it into my final draft, but plenty of other details did. To make these choices (what stays, what goes) I asked myself three questions: Does the detail inform the reader’s understanding of my characters? Does it move the plot forward? Does it help ground the reader in a time or place? The last question was the most complicated, because all details arguably add to an understanding of time and place. So, I added a refinement: Does the detail relate to the characters’ understanding of their own time and place rather than mine as the author? Using these questions helped me weed out information I had included for information’s sake alone. As you consider which details elevate your work and which do not, I encourage you to let your story and characters lead the way, not your knowledge or memories.
Tamar Shapiro’s debut novel, Restitution, is being released in September 2025 by Regal House Publishing. A former housing attorney and nonprofit leader, she is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at Randolph College.
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