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My guest today is Nancy Burkhalter, author of The Education of Delhomme, listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/RNohgRLMv4c

• Why Chopin needed a piano tuner: how Nancy, tuning pianos herself while listening to Chopin, realized he "had to have" one, and that's how the novel's narrator, Delhomme, was born.
• Blending fact and fiction: the wall-sized timeline, real history on top, novel's action below, that kept Delhomme's Paris anchored to the actual events of 1848 without letting fiction outrun fact.
• A poor man's bargain: why Delhomme, broke and desperate, falls prey to Vidocq, the monarchy's real-life spymaster, and agrees to spy on George Sand, the very woman he ends up competing with for Chopin's attention.
• Writing an unsympathetic narrator: Nancy's surprise at hearing Delhomme called an anti-hero, and why she never saw him that way, just a man doing what he had to do.
• Falling out of love with George Sand, then back in: how Nancy resented Sand for leaving Chopin, until a visit to Sand's home at Nohant, complete with a puppet theater Sand built for her son, turned her around, and why she gave Sand her own voice through diary entries woven into the book.
• Tuning by ear, writing by feel: what years as a working piano tuner taught her about touch and temperament, and how much of that craft to hand readers without losing them.
• The piano as character: why the instruments in the novel feel like living things, wood that expands and contracts, vulnerable to a fireplace or a spilled glass of wine, and how a tuner's instincts shaped Delhomme's reactions to Chopin's world.
• Finding Chopin's real tuner: a thin, out-of-print book written by the daughter of Chopin's actual piano tuner, discovered by chance in a University of Washington library.
• Vidocq, the spy who wrote himself: how the real historical spymaster, found in a reference book called Spies, handed Nancy a ready-made thriller plot, con-man origins and all, that she couldn't have invented herself.
• What's next: a novel about Franz Mesmer and his quest for medical legitimacy, and a subplot inspired by Nancy's own grandmother's history with mental illness.
• Reading from The Education of Delhomme: the Jardin des Tuileries scene where Delhomme meets George Sand for the first time and stews in jealousy as Chopin describes a ruined Bösendorfer and his plan to give Sand a prized ring.
• What Nancy learned: how a two-year manuscript completion class taught her to find the goal of every scene, why she still doesn't outline, and her advice to track down living historical experts, since "they love it" when a novelist calls.

Read more about Nancy Burkhalter on her website: https://www.nancyburkhalter.com/

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Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...