Taking Note by Tracy Chevalier

Our March guest is Tracy Chevalier, who has been here before! We are delighted to welcome her back on the publication of her new novel, At the Edge of the Orchard.

Photo credit: Nina Sobin

Tracy Chevalier has written eight historical novels, including At the Edge of the Orchard and The Last Runaway, as well as the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring. She has also conceived of and edited the short story collection, Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre, and is a creative partner with the Brontë Parsonage, where she has curated the exhibition “Charlotte Great and Small”, in celebration of Charlotte Brontë’s bicentenary. A native of Washington, DC, in the 1980s she moved to London, where she lives with her husband and son. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Tracy is a Trustee of the British Library, President of the Royal Literary Fund, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

www.tchevalier.com


I have a love-hate relationship with my research notebooks.

Several months ago I sent a box of stuff to Oberlin College, my alma mater in Ohio, which I have donated my papers to. I had agreed to send them research materials, drafts and correspondence, starting with two novels, Girl with a Pearl Earring and Remarkable Creatures – an early book and a later one, to give the archivists a chance to see what sort of issues would arise in including them in their collection. This is an interesting topic, especially concerning the rise in the use of online sources and computers generally. But I still use pen and paper alongside a computer, I like to photocopy things, and I have a lot of boxes of physical materials in my attic.

There were extensive papers for Remarkable Creatures – I had learned to keep drafts by then, aware that they might be of interest. I write longhand, you see, then type it into the computer, print out the draft, and revise on the printed copy. Over and over. There are usually 5-6 drafts per book.

When I wrote Pearl Earring in 1998, however, I threw away drafts, and there were few emails. All there really was of substance was this:

 Girl with a Pearl Earring research notebook; I glued a copy of the painting inside the front cover so it wouldn’t get bashed, and no one would know what I was writing about!

It’s funny: even this notebook the size of my hand was only half full of notes. I wrote that novel in a state of grace, taking in my research and just knowing it, without writing much down. I wrote each day on scrap paper, typed it into the computer, and threw away the scrap.

Still, that notebook was special, and it pained me to let it go. The last few days before FedEx arrived to take it off to Oberlin I carried it with me constantly, touching it, flipping through it, rereading all the notes, and feeling awful. Only when my husband suggested scanning it did I cheer up. At least I could look at it digitally any time I liked. Not the same, I know, but it meant I handed over the box to the FedEx man without crying – though I was still uneasy until the archivist at Oberlin emailed to say it had safely arrived.

I love the notebooks I take notes in during research for my novels. I choose them carefully before I begin, matching the look with the subject: burgundy velvet for the medieval The Lady and the Unicorn, a marbled effect for the fossils in Remarkable Creatures, green notebooks for At the Edge of the Orchard, my new novel featuring trees in 19th-century America.

Green notebooks for research; red notebooks for writing.

In fact, the last time I wrote for The History Girls I even included this photo of the notebooks, artfully displayed:

I like to look at them sitting on a shelf in my office – though they will slowly head across the Atlantic to Oberlin, which will always make me a little sad, digital scans or not.

But I don’t actually like to look in them. Whenever I’m writing a novel and arrive at a point where I’m not sure about a detail and have to check it in the research notebook, I inwardly groan. It is so exhausting reading through the notes, and often takes hours of sifting to find what I’m looking for.

Recently when I was updating my website for At the Edge of the Orchard, I had to dig out information about Johnny Appleseed – an American folk hero known for planting apple trees in Ohio and Indiana, who plays a small but crucial role in the book.

I got so fed up picking through the copious notes I took while reading biographies of him that I actually went online for a moment to find the details there. (Then I came to my senses and went back to my notebook.)

Research notes are a distillation of what I read or look at and think is important. When I choose to write something down, it means it may be a crucial historical detail I will use later. Of course, often – usually – I don’t use it. I probably research 10 times as much as I use. But when I write it down, I’ve made a judgement call: Keep this, you will learn from it and you may need it.

Going back through the notes is like reading one epigram after another – all very rich. Too rich. Often as I look for that one simple answer to a question, I discover a barrage of juicy details I really ought to add into the manuscript. Of course, research isn’t like that. It sinks in, and you should only use the details that come naturally. You can’t shoehorn them in afterwards. I have done that once or twice, and it showed.

Often I think of Rose Tremain and Jim Crace when I’m trawling through a notebook. Rose said of historical research: Take notes, but when you start writing, set aside the notebook. Jim went a step further: Do the research but don’t write anything down.

I can see what Rose is getting at: with the best kind of research you are absorbing it naturally and it will stay inside you and emerge naturally too, finding its way into the story at the right point without you having to force it or look it up.

But Jim’s advice is a step too far for me. Writing it down is a process that makes information concrete so I can absorb it. And I have to write it with pen and paper; a keyboard and screen won’t do. (I am writing this blog by hand too.) I admit it: at the British Library I glance over at the people tapping way on their laptops and secretly feel superior. “Huh – call that note-taking?” I expect they (and there are many more of them than there are of me) look at me pityingly as some sort of antiquarian, or luddite, or both.

I don’t care. I sat in the British Library with two 19th-century books on tending fruit trees, and learned to graft apple trees from them, taking notes and making drawings:

It worked for me. Just don’t ask me to reread all those notes!

Notes on Notebooks by Imogen Robertson

To be clear, I don’t think I’d have a career as a writer at all if it weren’t for the invention of the word processor. I can’t spell, and I’m never going to be a ‘one perfect line at a time’ author. My novels grow by a process of accretion, and each one is a palimpsest.  

But try and take my notebooks away from me and… well let’s just say I spend a lot of my working life working out how to kill people.

I have seen pictures of writers’ studies where a particular sort of notebook is collected in neat ranks - the testament to a lifetime of devotion to a particular brand, size and paperstock which verges on the fetishistic. I’m too much of a magpie for that and there are too many different appealing textures of cover and paper for me to be so monogamous. That said though, I realise I’ve developed patterns and preferences and have in my own way become just as rigid as anyone else. I have categories.

First is the handbag notebook - the one that I carry everywhere. Sometimes there are a few of these on the go at once - they live in different bags - or as this category is the most varied, they get replaced with the next shiny gift. Paperblanks are the favourites - the midi format ones with jewelled covers that fold over themselves with a satisfying magnetic clunk. Into these go all the random thoughts, books recommendations, scraps of poetry or quotes from whatever I’m reading on the train, odd paragraphs of journal or conversations overheard on the bus, advertising slogans, classified ads, exchanges with my husband, dreams. Sometimes I write down words I’ve recently discovered and think might come in handy such as ‘accretion’ and ‘palimpsest’.

Often I never reread them, the good stuff I remember and the rest sort of sinks back into the subconscious somewhere for mining later. The act of writing these things down though does give them more of a chance to hang on, somewhere in the brain where they might be useful one day. My shiny notebooks will, of course, be used in evidence when my husband finally gives up and tries to get me committed.

For research I need something bigger, something that looks a bit more serious. It’s probably a way to deal with that impostor syndrome one often develops as a writer of historical fiction. The Proper Historian appears, sneering, and says ‘how dare you write about history? You know nothing! Where is your PhD?’ I fend them off with my Moleskine©  Ruled Cahier Journals - Kraft Brown - Large, saying ‘Ha! No! But I have a really good notebook and I’ve written in very neatly,’ adding, sotto voce, ‘often with a fountain pen.’

Then there are the ‘working things out in prose’ notebooks. I discovered a stack of perfect ones for this in a shop under my mother-in-law’s house in Porto. Ned tried to take one once - probably to write notes about cheese in - and we almost got divorced. They are cheap exercise books and full of attempts to get plots in order - so I end up with pages of fairly neat progressions then WHY? written huge and coloured in - or BLACKMAIL? (underline star star star). Ah, yes. In this picture it’s BLOOD. These might form exhibit two in my committal hearing.

And finally - and just visible in the first picture - there are the huge sheets of drawing paper which are the starting point for a book. They often get covered in doodles too, but mostly are spider diagrams, with one side of the page getting crowded with names and short hand for scenes, while other limbs dangle out lonely into space, waiting for the next thought to anchor them. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

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