User:Jocelynolivera/sandbox

Tanith Lee had thoughts of writing The Gods Are Thirsty, however she was discouraged because people around her thought it was a bad decision since it was too horrible of an event and decided to hold off writing it for a while. In the early 1970s, Tanith Lee was fascinated by a televised play, Danton’s Death, which covered Danton’s trial and death. She also read about a newspaperman who was intimately associated with both Danton and Robespierre, and who had a lovely love story. Inspired by Camille Desmoulins’ and Lucile Duplessis’ story, Tanith Lee began writing from Camille’s perspective, tying the romantic love story to the French Revolution and linking Danton and Robespierre .She began writing in 1982, and finished her first draft in late 1984 or early 1985. She began writing in the form of diary entries, portraying the characters as actors. Contrary to her normal writing process, she had to break away to do copious amounts of research in order to accurately portray the key people and events of the French Revolution. This was also the only book that she wrote multiple drafts for. However, Lee had no trouble with the flow of the book and loved breaking away to do research. One of Lee’s difficulties was that the characters were not fictional and the ending of her book had already been written by history, contrary to her usual strategy of knowing characters first and letting plots proceed from their interactions.