Page 16 - BusinessWest November 9, 2020

The Write Stuff
“That’s the final straw!” Kenneth Remain said angrily, as he sat down heavily at a table in Jim- my’s Lunch. The melting snow on the brim of his boater and the shoulders of his benny testified to the fact that a sockdologer of a storm had clob- bered Boston, an affront to the spring solstice of two days hence; though waning, the storm had not breathed its last.
Those are the first lines of The Remains of
the Corps, Volume I: Ivy & the Crossing, and they provide not only a glimpse of Hebert’s mostly self-taught writing style, but also the immense amount of research that goes into writing a book set more than a century ago.
“I work partly because I enjoy working — I thoroughly enjoy my position here. But also because it enables me to fund the things that I wanttodoinlife—oneofwhichis writing.”
Indeed, before he could pen a story set in 1917, Hebert said he needed to know the vocabulary
of 1917 — specifically the vocabulary used by people attending Harvard, hence words like ‘boat- er,’ a type of straw hat; ‘benny,’ a greatcoat; and ‘sockdologer,’ a synonym for any word connoting
‘whopper’ or ‘defining.’ “People talked
much more formally back then — they used the king’s English,”
he explained. “These gentlemen would have used a very large vocabulary, and I had to develop my vocabu- lary tremendously to have it fit for these two gentlemen.
“Any time my wife and I were out at book- stores and flea mar- kets, I would pick up books on vocabulary, idioms, and more,” he went on. “And as part of my training, I went through those books and selected words, phrases, thoughts,
and philosophies, and I would say, ‘I could use this in one of my books.’”
Tom Hebert says his second novel is almost fully researched and one-quarter written. He plans six volumes in all to tell the story of the Remains.
Several years of
research and work
learning how to write
fiction went into The Remains of the Corps, Vol- ume 1, said Herbert, noting, again, that his deci- sion to dive into what he expects will become a six-book set was inspired by the service of his own family and a firm desire to give something back to the Corps.
With that, we’ll do what fiction writers often do: we’ll flash back — first to 1945, when William Hebert was ending his lengthy tour of duty with the Marines. He enlisted just after Pearl Harbor and served throughout the war — and even after it ended, as part of the peacekeeping force in Japan. Upon returning home, he built a house in
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