Pete Hamill is a bestselling author and an award-winning journalist. He's written for the New York Post, the Daily News, New York Newsday and more.

FictionAddiction.NET's Sue Reichard recently talked with Hamill about his book, Forever.

What kind of historical research did you do for the book?

I’ve been reading aspects of New York history for many years, to help me understand the city as a journalist. But this novel required that I look for details and forgotten characters in the New York narrative and search for turning points.

So I read again the classics: Edith Wharton, Henry James, Louis Auchincloss (for social details); the Stokes Iconography of Manhattan Island, along with about three hundred other books, including Gotham by Ed Burrows and Mike Wallace, The Epic of New York City by Edward Robb Ellis, and The Encyclopedia of New York by Kenneth T. Jackson. I pored through the diaries of Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong. I also looked at documents, drawings, paintings, photographs, and old newspapers. And, like Cormac O’Connor, my protagonist, I walked the streets.

Cormac O’Connor is a newspaperman who also paints, has an affinity for languages and doesn’t drink. How much of yourself is in this character?

I suppose more than I should admit. If I could live forever, I’d know more languages, read all those books, paint many pictures. I wouldn’t drink (and haven’t had a drink now in thirty years), but only so I could savor every minute. Alas, I will have a much shorter life span than Cormac.

You finished the original draft of Forever on September 10, 2001. In the aftermath of September 11, you knew you had to rewrite at least part of the novel. What was that process like? How were you able to write fiction about an event that was more horrible than anything that could be imagined?

In the first nine days after September 11, I didn’t think much about the novel at all. I was too busy working for the Daily News. Then I realized that I’d have to do the novel all over again. I simply couldn’t write a novel that went from New York in 1740 to the present and leave out the single worst calamity in the city’s history.

But I also knew that I couldn’t add a mere journalistic addendum. The last act had to be the last act from Cormac O’Connor’s point of view, not from mine. I drew on much of what I saw during those appalling days, of course, but I moved my fictional character Cormac through the streets in search of the woman he loves. It’s his journey, his September 11, not mine. That kind of search was made by hundreds of others, of course, but Cormac brought with him the whole history of the city.

What surprised me was how many portents already existed in the original draft. Cormac lived on Duane Street, with a view of the Woolworth Building and the Twin Towers. Delfina Cintron, the woman he loves, worked in the North Tower.

In early parts of the story, Cormac lived on Cortlandt Street, which was shoved aside to build the WTC. The challenge was to weave everything together as if composing a symphony, with certain notes struck early that are expanded later. The process was hard work, very detailed and nuanced, but never tedious.