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(This article is a reprint of a blog post on Mitchell James Kaplan’s blog by Suzy Witten, author of The Afflicted Girls)

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I have written one book: THE  AFFLICTED GIRLS A Novel of Salem, published  at the end of 2009, but a process begun in 1993 when I first picked the 1692 Salem witch hunt as the subject for a screenplay.

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My research in those hard-to-imagine pre-internet days consisted of reading every book on Salem available in the Los Angeles Public Library; although some were too old and decrepit to be forwarded to my branch. I also searched  through two university reference libraries. Of course, there were a handful of books I was able to take home for study.

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Sometime while taking notes, I got bitten by the ghostly bug still haunting Salem that hunts for blood and an audience. And sometimes I had to  implore the books  I  was  skimming   to  help me weed out dramatic irrelevancies. In the end I had collected more than a thousand disparate but novel facts, most of which were later incorporated into my novel. 126 single- spaced typewritten pages, indexed by character, subject, and strangeness, each item prompting its own unique scrutinization and speculation, because of my having learned at  film school  that  motivation is  key to  a well- constructed dramatic story.

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I asked: Why would an indentured nineteen-year-old girl in Salem Village accuse a minister of witchcraft, a man she hasn’t seen for years but once dwelt with in childhood after being orphaned on the Maine frontier? And what was the relationship between that minister and her Salem master? And why would the wife of her master  simultaneously  accuse an elderly neighbor of murdering her newborns? And not just one infant, but several? Read the rest of this entry »