PHOTO: Tim Turner, author, playwright, and photographer, at home in Los Angeles, where much of his creative work continues to unfold.
From Journalism To Historical Fiction And Musical Collaboration
Tim Turner reflects on his evolution from journalist to playwright and novelist, sharing how music, travel, and deep research shaped his historical novel The Reluctant Conductor.
Tim Turner’s voice carries the weight of a life fully lived—across continents, disciplines, and artistic forms. From a small town in Colorado to the theatrical circles of Los Angeles, he has pursued storytelling with tenacity and breadth, letting each creative path—journalism, playwriting, screenwriting, photography—inform the next. Whether capturing human truth through dialogue or through a camera lens, Turner has always sought resonance, depth, and honesty in his art.
His debut novel, The Reluctant Conductor, is not merely a foray into historical fiction—it is the culmination of years of collaboration, travel, and intense intellectual engagement. Shaped by a remarkable partnership with Moldovan composer Moisey Gorbaty, the novel brings to life the complex beauty and tragedy of Jewish experience in Eastern Europe, without ever losing sight of the individual heartbeat within the sweep of history.
Writing in first person, present tense, Turner channels the protagonist’s emotional reality with immediacy and intimacy. The narrative carries strains of music, memory and longing—threads drawn not only from Moisey’s extraordinary past, but from Turner’s deep understanding of structure, rhythm, and voice. He renders history not as a static backdrop but as a lived and breathing force.
There is something almost symphonic in the scope of Turner’s work—his dedication to precision, his ear for cadence, his capacity to build tension and resolve through time. The Reluctant Conductor is, in every sense, a work composed—patiently, passionately, and with profound respect for the life it seeks to honour.
What sort of research did you undertake to authentically portray Jewish life in the USSR during the Stalin and Hitler regimes?
First and foremost, it came out of Moisey telling his family’s stories. But then I had to flesh them out. To do that, along with learning to speak Russian, play the piano and traveling all over the world, starting in 2012 I did a massive amount of Googling and looking times and places up on Wikipedia.
I also bought every book I could find about the region and vigilantly studied the history, politics and geography of Russia and all the former Soviet Socialist Republics.
I’ve read Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Gogol in English and a lot of Pushkin in Russian. Pushkin translations don’t show the beauty of his conjugation, meter and command of the Russian language.
In the first draft of Part 1, I also told the life story of Moisey’s father, Isaac who attended Yeshiva in Kishinev. To write about that I studied the Torah and Talmud, having been to Israel, I increased my knowledge of eating kosher, how kitchens are designed to keep food kosher and many other Jewish customs.
Elazar’s story spans music, love, and survival—how did you balance these emotional threads across such a vast historical canvas?
All the things I’ve been talking about coalesced. By channeling Elazar in first person, present tense, I let the reader live through the times through Elazar’s eyes; That is through the eyes of a Jewish musician living in a Moldovan shtetl, seeking love and then fleeing Hitler on foot.
As someone who has written both short and long-form work, how does your creative process differ when writing a play versus a novel?
I work best on deadline; I focus myself on the task at hand and diligently apply myself to do whatever it takes to make the project turn out the best I can.
How did your collaboration with Moisey Gorbaty come about, and what did each of you bring to the storytelling?
We met at the gym. He had a really good story to tell. I had the skills, time and wherewithal to write it in English.
We signed a 50/50 collaboration agreement. He spit out the stories and then I did 90 percent of the work writing it and re-writing it about five times. That said, there is no way I could have made up all those stories, he and his family had to live through those times, though I did fictionalize them considerably for the sake of Aristotelian structure.
Can you share a particular moment or scene in The Reluctant Conductor that was especially personal or difficult for you to write?
The hardest part of the novel for me was to write the story with Elazar as the singular protagonist with a clear narrative arc.
It meant cutting more than 250 pages about Moisey’s paternal grandmother, his father and uncles.
Then I had to flesh out the first 100 pages of what it was like for Elazar, Moisey’s maternal grandfather, to live from 1922 to the beginning of World War II.
What advice would you offer to playwrights or screenwriters who are considering writing their first novel?
Don’t do it! In all seriousness, I wouldn’t wish life as a writer on anyone. That said, I can’t imagine spending my life doing anything else. You have it or you don’t. If you do, it will happen.
