Welcome to Michelle Cameron, the author of Jewish historical fiction. Her most recent is Napoleon’s Mirage, the sequel to Beyond the Ghetto Gates. Previous work includes Babylon: A Novel of Jewish Captivity, a finalist in religious fiction in the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the award-winning Beyond the Ghetto Gates and The Fruit of Her Hands: the story of Shira of Ashkenaz. Michelle is a director of The Writers Circle, a NJ-based creative writing program serving children, teens, and adults. She lives in Chatham, NJ, with her husband and has two grown sons of whom she is inordinately proud.
Lily, I’m delighted to be back on your blog to talk about Napoleon’s Mirage. Thank you for having me!
And I’m more than delighted to have you as my guest. I look forward to reading this new novel, Michelle.
What’s your favorite stage of writing? The first draft? Revision?
The days when I’m neither writing or revising are difficult for me – I need to be doing one or the other or I can become depressed. Does that make my writing a kind of addiction? Maybe so, but as a practice and process, it fulfills me.
I frankly adore the first draft stage, which is when I discover my story and my characters, letting them surprise me with the twists and turns they take. This is when I write the fastest, too. When I’m in that first draft stage, I will read over what I’ve written the day before and lightly revise it, which helps propel me into the next day’s writing. But I don’t let anything major bog me down during that first draft.
Revision comes harder to me. I find it tough to put on my editor’s cap and be ruthless about my writing. But there’s enjoyment in that as well – rearranging the narrative so it makes better sense, cleaning up the language, killing darlings. I trust my beta readers and would never complete a final draft without their input. But sometimes it’s hard to read their comments and recognize I didn’t fully succeed in getting down on the page what was so clear in my imagination. Rather than stewing over their suggestions, I generally let their comments rest a day or two, so I can come back in a more objective mood to make those adjustments I agree with.
Are you a plotter or a pantser? (And please define those terms.)
This is a question I ask my aspiring novelist students during the first class of my Beginning Your Novel workshop, explaining that a plotter feels the need to have created a complete outline or synopsis for the novel before any actual writing is done, while a pantser envisions a scene, sits down and captures it on the page with no previous planning.
And then I tell them that I’m both plotter and pantser, depending on the demands of the work. When I’m writing a novel where I need to hit upon certain events to move forward – such as Napoleon’s Mirage – I create a timeline to fully plot out which historical points those are. But then I turn pantser, letting my characters lead me from point A to point B.
I’ve been much more of a pantser when writing other projects. Babylon, for instance, was written using what I called the “snippet” technique – literally dreaming up the scenes out of sequence and writing down what moved me that particular morning. I was about three quarters of the way through a first draft of the novel when I finally sat down and figured out how these snippets fit together chronologically and dramatically.
The important thing, as I tell my students, is to understand that there’s no one right way to write a novel but struggling against what works for them is counterintuitive. And I always quote Somerset Maugham: “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
Why did you write Napoleon’s Mirage?
In fact, Napoleon’s Mirage was supposed to be the third book in a trilogy. 
Before I embarked on Beyond the Ghetto Gates, I actually wrote an entire novel about the Jews during the French Revolution. Daniel and Christophe were nine years old in that first book, working in Uncle Alain’s print shop as apprentices and becoming friends despite Christophe’s rabidly antisemitic mother.
I decided to abandon that book when I couldn’t get the story to work and found myself struggling to comprehend the complex politics of the day. But while I wouldn’t recommend this approach to anyone, having written this novel gave me a head start when it came to understanding the characters in both Beyond the Ghetto Gates and Napoleon’s Mirage. Ethan, who is a new character in Napoleon’s Mirage, was fully fleshed out in that unpublished novel, including his romance with his now dead wife, Adara.
And, of course, I needed to contend with the unresolved romance at the end of Beyond the Ghetto Gates. I actually wrote three very different endings for that novel, two of which needed significantly more space to successfully develop them in an already lengthy book. Of course, I knew that Mirelle needed to end up with Daniel, and the fact that it would take another novel to arrive at that fitting conclusion drove me to write the next book.
Finally, there was the fact that Napoleon’s next military campaign – the expedition to Egypt – that struck me as rich fodder for a novel. I couldn’t send him to Egypt without Daniel and Christophe, could I?
This novel is your first sequel. How different was writing a sequel from writing your previous novels?
It was very different in the earlier chapters, when I had to do short recaps of what had gone before, so that the reader who was only reading Napoleon’s Mirage had enough context to understand the characters’ motivations and actions. But I also didn’t want to plunk down so much detail that I bored those who’d read Beyond the Ghetto Gates. I took inspiration from Gail Godwin’s single-paragraph explanation of what happened in Father Melancholy’s Daughter, which she followed with her sequel, Evensong – in which she was able to encapsulate everything the new reader would need to know.
Once I’d established those details, however, and the novel moved forward on an entirely new trajectory, writing became more familiar territory. Of course, there were some aspects – such as Mirelle’s disgrace in the eyes of her Jewish community – that would be referred to many times as a critical plot point.
What advice do you have for writers who want to write a sequel or a series?
First, reread your first novel as if you yourself were the reader and make sure you fully understand what details any new reader will need to know as well as what can be left out. As a thought exercise, consider writing a synopsis as if you’re telling a friend about the characters and plot.
Of course, you’ll want to leave some unresolved issues at the end of that first novel, while still making the ending a satisfying one. Then find the balance of just enough contextual details so your new reader isn’t lost and your previous reader isn’t bored. (It’s not easy!)
Finally, find a beta reader who has not read the first novel, so they can tell you where they became confused. When I did so, I was able to smooth out the issues she raised – and was gratified there were only a few.
Unlike your other novels, you were able to visit Israel (though not Egypt) while researching this book. How did that help your writing?
It helped tremendously – and I’m hoping to repeat the experience with all of my next books. Standing in Jaffa outside the blue door of the monastery where French soldiers infected with the plague were treated – or the Stella Maris monastery with its monument to the soldiers slaughtered after the war was over by Turkish troops, helped me conjure up these scenes in a way no online image could. Even more so was walking the claustrophobic, winding stone steps in Jaffa where the French troops fought Mameluke warriors hand-to-hand or standing on the promontory in Acre where cannons still stand, facing the sea.
While I’m sorry not to have visited Egypt, I was grateful for detailed photos taken by David J. Markham which he displayed on Facebook. These included the building where the French Institute of Cairo was located, helping me tremendously to describe that building.
There is a part of the novel that historians don’t agree upon. Can you tell us about that?
There is a possibility that Napoleon extended a Proclamation to the Jewish community in Israel, offering them a homeland in Jerusalem in exchange for their support against the Mameluke and Turkish forces that were ranged against him. Whether or not he truly issued this document is wildly contested by historians. Versions of the proclamation have shown up in Germany and Turkey, but nowhere else. Some historians claim these documents are forgeries. Yet the newspaper reports of the day seem to indicate – sometimes with less than accurate reportage – that Napoleon did propose a Jewish homeland. As a historical novelist, this became an important plot point in Napoleon’s Mirage.
I was part of a panel at the Napoleonic Historical Society featuring Napoleon in Fiction when, during the Q&A session, I was asked what I was writing next. My response – Napoleon’s Mirage, including the proclamation – prompted an immediate argument between two historians in the audience, each of whom hotly defended their theory whether Napoleon did or did not dispatch it. Not only was it amusing – if a little alarming – to witness, but the strong arguments against were wonderful information to ponder. Because of these arguments, I was able to find fictional reasons why so little evidence remains to this day.
You’re a teacher of creative writing as well as a novelist – and a director of The Writers Circle. How does that affect your writing, particularly your schedule?
As I’ve been composing this interview, I’ve been receiving chat notifications (ding!) from my business partner and an employee that have disrupted the flow of my writing. It’s even harder when I’m in novel-land to either ignore the demands of work or to interrupt what I’m doing, knowing – like Coleridge writing the poem “Kubla Khan” and being disturbed by that visitor from Porlock who dragged him from his inspired state – that the words won’t be the same when I return to them. Wearing two hats – one as a business woman and the other as an author – can often prove a challenge.
Luckily, much of the work I do for The Writers Circle actually feeds my writing life. I’m always enthused by what both my adult and tween/teen writing students bring to the table. Teaching writing is a wonderful way to remind myself of the basics, since I have to find ways to explain them. And I’m particularly fortunate that my business partner and I are both authors. I can tell her that I’m deep in writing and she’ll leave me alone. I do the same for her, of course. We even wrote into our partnership agreement that we are writers first and foremost – though of course the demands of running a business don’t always allow that.
What is it like bringing out two novels within the space of a year?
So much more exhausting than I thought it would be! I remember when Kate Quinn wrote how difficult this can be on Facebook, saying that she had to keep three books in mind at one time – the one she was presenting to readers, the one she was in the process of promoting, and the one she was currently writing.
I experienced that myself just this past week, when I spoke with a book group about Babylon while preparing promotional material for Napoleon’s Mirage and longing to get back to the current work in progress. I’ve never been able to juggle, but that’s what it feels like I’m doing right now – with these three balls in the air.
I always aspired to become a book-a-year author. Now that I’ve experienced what that’s like, I’m not sure I ever want to repeat the process. Like a mother with two children born close together and another on the way (yes, I’m mixing metaphors), I constantly feel like I’m shortchanging one for the other.
What’s next for you? Will you continue writing about the characters in Napoleon’s Mirage?
I’m absolutely infatuated with my current manuscript, which takes place in Elizabethan London. I’m harkening back to my early writing roots, when I wrote a verse novel about William Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre, called In the Shadow of the Globe.
Does that mean I won’t return to the characters in Napoleon’s Mirage? While I’m happy focusing on a different time and very different characters right now, I haven’t totally ruled it out. I might go back to that flawed first novel in my proposed trilogy and fix it as a prequel. Or I might take these characters forward in time. Especially if my readers ask me to do so.
But not right now.