I always knew I wanted my novel Room to work on two levels: as a universal, almost fairy-tale story about love between mother and son, and as a totally realistic child’s-eye account of being raised in a locked room that measures 11 foot by 11. To get the second bit right, I didn’t just read up on experiences similar to the one in my story—the roughly half-dozen young women who have survived lengthy, secret confinement, mostly famously in Austria and the U.S. but also in Belgium, Japan and Russia. I followed my nose in many directions to understand, as deeply as I could, every aspect of what Ma and Jack might go through, both inside and outside their prison.

Appalling though much of the material I’d been researching was, it reminded me how much kids are at the mercy of those who look after them, and what a holy duty we have to give them both the love and freedom that they need.

For my previous historical novels, I’ve mostly worked in university libraries; this time, my library was the Internet. That made the research pretty visceral—videos of dungeons on YouTube—and also gave it a moment-by-moment, one-headline-followed-by-the-next quality: sad stories gathering a few more dreadful details every day, until they fade from the public view. Many of my sources were not ‘expert opinions’ but the raw reactions of people all over the world who rush onto message boards. Listening in gave me insight into what such cases mean to those who hear about them: how they trigger empathy as well as voyeurism, judgment as well as revulsion. And also what such unsought celebrity—being put on a pedestal, and knocked off it too—might do to a survivor like Ma.

The worst topic was something I really needed to figure out: exactly what children can and can’t survive. I found a site called Feral Children and forced myself to read through all its cases of children raised in confined or abusive settings. In the first week I kept bursting into tears, eyes locked in horror on my screen. The story of Jack and Ma is really not that bad compared with many I read; there are cases of children neglected, starved or tortured over long periods, often by their own parents or guardians, that I try not to think about anymore because they make me shake.

But I also came across much more heartening material about what psychologists call resilience: the power to get through things that might destroy someone else. I read academic papers on the kind of family model that could allow Ma and Jack to endure both their prison and its aftermath. I studied unassisted birth, women having babies in concentration camps and raising their kids in jails all over the world, what it’s like for children conceived through rape, and the long-term effects of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons.

I talked to a friend who breastfed her kid till the age of five. I looked up pop hits of the early 2000s to find out what songs would be lingering in Ma’s head. I checked out police slang, sexual-assault evidence-collection guidelines, the protocols of expensive psychiatric clinics, treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder.

I picked my brother-in-law’s brains on the matter of how Old Nick could have created a secure prison from a garden shed, and tracked down the most high-tech glass available for the skylight, the kind that looks transparent but is criss-crossed with unbreakable mesh. I designed Room on a home-decor website, figuring out how to fit all the furniture in.

Finally, the pleasantest research I did was playing with and listening to my children. My son Finn was five while I was writing the book. I analysed his quirky grammar, noted his obsessions, even asked for his help with ‘the book about Jack and the bad guy’: for one scene, he let me roll him up in a rug to see if he could wriggle out. Appalling though much of the material I’d been researching was, it did one good thing for me: it reminded me how much kids are at the mercy of those who look after them, and what a holy duty we have to give them both the love and freedom that they need.

Nashville Chrome is a fictional treatment of the lives of the Browns, a 1950s country music trio whose sudden success was as inexplicable and meteoric as their subsequent disappearance.

They were once the biggest thing in country music—the first group ever to have number one hits in both country and pop charts and the Beatles’ most admired American group. They were confidants of Johnny Cash and the closest friends and mentors to a young Elvis Presley. The key to the Browns’ success was a mysterious “tempered harmony” that could come only from shared bloodlines. The smoothness of their sound helped usher in the more commercial Nashville music industry.

As fascinating as their story is, I was struck most by the question of why the Browns, and not any other group or individual, emerged out of that time and place and almost singlehandedly altered the course of American music. So stark and dramatic was their success that it seemed their sound might as well have come from a venthole in the earth—as when the earth’s plates slide over rifts of volcanic activity—and that from that hotspot, new life and land was formed. Was their own genetic drift that random?

But that question proved unanswerable, and so I decided to focus on a new heart of inquiry, less scientific and less metaphysical: wondering not so much why fame had chosen the Browns, but rather, how they each dealt with it after it went away.

This book is far less an environmental parable than any I’ve ever undertaken, and yet in thinking about the parallels in this story—the creation, as if from a garden of innocence, of something amazing, and then the bittersweetness of the wonderful thing’s slow going away—there seems to be a larger metaphor for our times. The success of the Browns’ sound came in part from a taming of the old Appalachian nasal caterwaul—rough and raw as a cob—that rendered a new, smooth, chrome-like sound more accessible, and more marketable. I wonder if part of the book’s unspoken, haunting regret—like the Browns’ sound itself—comes from a subconscious awareness of some of the costs and losses involved in this trade.

As cultural spokespersons for the 1950s, the Browns hold intriguing clues to how we once were as a country: a product of our landscape and our fears and hungers, and of complicated circumstances that could no more hold steady than could a river stop in mid-flow. For a little while, the Browns changed the world—but just because they changed it did not mean they controlled it, or that the world was obliged to stop for them. Of the two sisters, one realized this, and retreated to anonymity with grace, while the other—Maxine, the oldest—burns, and waits still for that river to return. It’s a fascinating story, and I’m grateful to the Browns for living it.

RICK BASS is the award-winning writer of many works of nonfiction and fiction. His new novel, Nashville Chrome, considers the sudden rise and fall of the country music trio The Browns.

Raymond Carver once said: “You are not your characters, but your characters are you.” Sometimes readers will ask whether I have a favorite among the three protagonists of my novel, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai; they will tell me that they adored one of the characters, disliked another, and felt exasperated by the third (but different readers take different sides); and they will assume there’s one character who reflects my autobiography most accurately, to whom I’ve given most of my own experiences. “Nope,” I’ll shake my head, “I made them up.” But the truth is, that’s not entirely accurate.

My sister Beth, who is 11 months younger than I, has developmental disabilities. When she was born in 1960, it wasn’t uncommon for doctors to recommend that parents place children like my sister in institutions, but my parents were strongly opposed to doing that. So my sister grew up at home, and I knew little about institutions.

In my late 30s, I wrote a memoir about my relationship with Beth, Riding the Bus With My Sister, and when it came out, I started getting invited to speak at disability-related conferences around the country. At every event, I met people who’d lived in, worked at, or had relatives who’d been sent to institutions, and all of them were eager, sometimes tearfully so, to share their stories with me.

Over and over, I returned home reeling. The reality of institutions had obviously affected millions of people—yet no one outside of these conferences spoke about such things, or even seemed to know about them. And even I, a sibling who did know, had known very little.

I began thinking I should write a novel that dealt with the material, but the subject seemed so massive that I just put the idea to the side.

Then one day, after a talk in Illinois, I came across a book at a vendor’s table, God Knows His Name: The True Story of John Doe No. 24, by Dave Bakke. Immediately intrigued, I bought the book. In 1945, I learned, a deaf, African American teenager was found wandering the streets in Illinois. No one understood his sign language so no one knew who he was. A judge declared him “feebleminded” and put him in an institution. There he remained for 50 years until he died.

The tragedy of John Doe No. 24 haunted me—and all the more so because I’d come to understand that countless other people had endured similar fates.            

Yet I still couldn’t fathom how to present such an emotionally fraught topic.

A few years later, the college where I’d taught part-time for over a decade restructured my department and I was let go. Grieving the loss of a job I’d loved, I was sure of only one thing: I wanted to keep writing.

So in this vulnerable state, I sat down with a notebook, waiting to see what would emerge. And instantly, it came.

It is 1968. Night. A rainstorm. An elderly widow is in her farmhouse, reading a book. Who is she, I asked myself, and then I knew: she was a retired schoolteacher, in a state of grief. A knock comes to her door. Who is it, I asked myself. Again, I knew. Standing before her is someone with my sister’s disability—and someone like John Doe No. 24. They are the love of each other’s lives, and he calls her Beautiful Girl. They have just escaped from an institution—and Beautiful Girl has just borne a baby girl. Then the whole first chapter spilled out, and when I reached its ending, I was as shocked as my readers have been when she says to the widow: “Hide her.”

Then I just followed the story, and it flowed from me in a way that nothing had before.

I’m not sure I believe, as some readers have suggested, that John Doe No. 24 reached out from the beyond and told me about the life he’d wished he’d lived. I do know that I could not have written this book without being Beth’s sister—and without believing, deep down, what my parents taught me from the day Beth was born: that everyone deserves to love and be loved, and to live a life of dignity and freedom.

I slumped onto the couch and told my husband that the novel simply didn’t work. I was a year into A Good Hard Look, and it already felt like a lost year. Maybe I should throw it away and start over, I said.

I didn’t know what was broken, so I couldn’t fix it. The main character, Melvin Whiteson, was rudderless. The story was aimless. There was no spine, no uniting thread.

My husband was seated across from me; he leaned forward. He loves nothing more than to solve a problem, and he’s a writer himself, so he knows what he’s talking about. I’m stubborn though, and I wanted sympathy, not a solution. So instead of listening, I let my attention drift. I told myself I would be fine if I never published a second novel. I imagined possible alternative careers: therapist (too much education required), chef (terrible hours), personal assistant (I had done this for almost a decade; I was qualified, but not interested). I closed my eyes in an act of dramatic self-pity, and listened to my husband sigh in response.

When I opened my eyes I found myself looking at the bookshelf above his head. My eyes fell on a book I hadn’t picked up in nearly a decade. It was a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being. I studied the spine of the book as if it had something to tell me. And it did, in a way. The thought fell upon me slowly, with the weight of a heavy blanket: Flannery O’Connor should be in the novel.

This seems like a crazy idea, even now. Here are a few reasons why: (1) Flannery is a Southern icon, and I am from New Jersey; (2) I had read her stories in college, and been awed by them, but I’d also found them abrasive and upsetting; (3) I had never even aspired to write historical fiction. Incorporating a real, well-known person into my make-believe world seemed fraught with traps and complications. Could I possibly pull that off?

Despite my skepticism, the words continued to blink in my head. Flannery O’Connor should be in the novel. The idea was certainly intriguing, and what if this was an actual flash of inspiration? I was in no position to turn that away. I decided to approach the idea by reading everything I could get my hands on. I re-read Flannery’s stories (still shocking, still brilliant), her essays and two novels. I read the one existing biography on her, and several critical essays about her work. Then I re-read The Habit of Being, and to be honest, this is when my apprehension began to wane. Flannery’s letters are wonderful—in correspondence she is irreverent and sarcastic, kind and generous. Through the letters, I followed her path away from her Southern town and domineering mother to graduate school. She began her writing life in New York City, where she had dear friends and a life that satisfied her. When she felt her shoulders begin to tighten during a harsh Northern winter, she attributed the discomfort to arthritis. But by the time she arrived home to visit her mother, she was desperately ill. She was only 26 years old when she received the diagnosis that was also a death sentence. She had disseminated lupus—the same disease that had killed her father.

Flannery settled down on her mother’s farm, Andalusia, and poured herself into her work. The doctors gave her five years to live; she took 13. And during that time she produced some of the best fiction we have.

I flew to Atlanta, rented a car and drove to Andalusia. I walked across the speckled grass, and sat on Flannery’s white porch. A story began to grow in my head; pieces that seemed to have no business being in the same room came together. Melvin Whiteson met Flannery O’Connor at a Southern wedding; I held my breath, and followed the characters deeper into the narrative. Flannery, and the bravery with which she lived her life, soon became the spine of A Good Hard Look. Raymond Chandler famously said, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” My version of that was to have Flannery O’Connor show up, on crutches.

The novel took six additional years to write; I slumped on the couch in despair many more times, but I never again considered throwing the book away. The crazy idea had become a real, three-dimensional world. Flannery walked among her beloved peacocks, turning her sharp eyes on the world I was creating; my new struggle lay in making sure it met her approval.

A Good Hard Look is the second novel by Ann Napolitano, who received her M.F.A. from New York University and lives in New York City with her family.

Jodi Picoult thought she had created a unique character in her new novel, Lone Wolf—a man who studies wolves by living with them. Then she met Shaun Ellis, who spent a year living with wolves in the Rockies. During a visit to Ellis’ wildlife park, Picoult got up close and personal with these feared animals.

The first thing Shaun taught me was the rankings of a wolf pack. The first wolf you’ll encounter is not the alpha, but a beta—tough, comes rushing up to you, responsible for discipline in the pack. Betas are expendable; they are the thugs in the Mafia family. The alpha will hang back. Wary. The brains of the group, and too valuable to put him or herself in danger—he’s like the king not going into battle. The alpha is the one who tells everyone—including the big tough beta—what to do. An alpha can hear the change in the rhythm of your heart rate from six or seven feet away. An alpha female can terminate her own pregnancy if she feels that it’s not a good time for breeding in the pack. She can keep the other females from coming into season, so that she is the only one breeding. She can create a phantom pregnancy, which puts all the adult wolves on their best behavior, trying to be picked as nanny—and then when everyone’s acting on their best game, she reveals that she isn’t pregnant at all.

Next is the diffuser wolf—the low man on the totem pole, the one who eats last, the one who seemingly is picked on by the other wolves. There’s a tester wolf—the quality control dude. He’s a nervous wolf, always on edge, who makes sure that everyone is doing his job. Then come the numbers wolves, which fill in the pack with strength of size.

One of the things Shaun taught me to do was to howl, so that I could communicate with wolves. Howls are like wolf email. They use them to communicate with other packs, telling them how strong their pack is.

Shaun showed me that there are three types of howls: a rallying howl, which is a vocal beacon to bring back a missing member of the pack; a locating howl, which is like a voice message to give the placement of any pack that’s in the area; and finally, a defensive howl, which is used to protect your territory. With my son and my publicist in tow, Shaun taught us the melody that an alpha, a beta and a numbers wolf would use. I started as the alpha—a deep intermittent tone, howling for five or six seconds and then listening to make decisions based on what I hear. My son’s beta howl was three times longer than mine—it was all about strength, to let those listening know how tough he was. Finally, my publicist, as the numbers wolf, created the illusion that there were many of her, with a howl that circled and pitched between the tones my son and I were using. The most amazing thing happened: The packs all around us began to howl back. It was the coolest feeling to know that we had “sent” out our position, and were getting responses because we were speaking their language.

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Read a review of Lone Wolf.