Past Imperfect? Selling children's historical fiction to a modern audience
Roman Nine Muses frieze, Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons
This was the title of a very successful meeting at the Society of Authors in London on 16th March. It was organised by the SoA and Sue Reid of Histeria, a group of writers of historical fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults.
The panel of professionals, ably chaired by Kevin Crossley-Holland, consisted of Sarah Odedina (formerly Children's Publisher at Bloomsbury and Hot Key and now with Pushkin Children's Books); Ruth Logan (ex-Bloomsbury and now Rights Director at Hot Key) and Dawn Finch (Librarian and President of CILIP)
This is my account of the meeting. Sadly, Marketing was not represented, as the result of a last minute cancellation but the experience and skills of this panel were considerable. Kevin, currently the Honorary President of the School Library Association, is a poet, novelist, opera librettist and translator, who has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Book Award with historical fiction for children.
In his opening remarks on the importance of history and story, Kevin quoted Hilary Mantel: "To live in the present without engaging with the past is like being a dog or a cat, bobbing along on a sea of egotism and ignorance."
He also read us, complete with cold, W H Auden's Roman Wall Blues, which begins
"Over the heather the wet wind blows
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose"
to remind us of the importance of vesting story in individual people - a theme which was frequently returned to in the course of the evening.
He then asked each panellist for a short overview of whether historical fiction for children is in crisis.
Dawn Finch (DF) began by saying that it was a common belief that it went in and out of fashion in children's publishing but she believed that the kind of child who reads historical fiction is a wider reader anyway. She felt that the teaching of history in schools was focussed on differences whereas fiction took the opposite approach.
Sarah Odedina (SO) was reluctant to consider historical fiction as separate from any other form of great storytelling. She cited Celia Rees's Witch Child, which was successful primarily because of a compelling central character.
Ruth Logan (RL), who has to sell translation rights, frequently speaks to scouts and has found the popular periods to be the Holocaust, Ancient Greece and Rome, the Slave Trade, the two World Wars, maybe the French Revolution. "But nothing works without a wonderful story."
Kevin Crossley-Holland (K C-H) said we needed to "step into the heads and hearts" of our characters. He wanted to know if we were doing enough ruthlessly to expose children to today's realities. Or were just concentrating on SF and fantasy.
RL: Fantasy is "Future Historical."
DF thought that in times or Recession and Depression readers want SF and nostalgia.
SO believes that Historical Fiction can allow the author to present a mirror to the world and show political realities in an apparently safe and distant past. It has a role in mediating the present through the past.
RL thought it wasn't just a matter of period: there is a market for the mix of history with a magical or fantastic element.
Martin Reed of the Society of Authors asked a question on behalf of a member who could not attend, Ilona Aronovsky. This was about who are the heroes and villains of history, since history is contentious.
K C-H said that recent literature had taken a Marxist view of telling stories "from the bottom up." It began with Bows against the Barons by Geoffrey Trease.
SO thought there was still a problem with telling the stories of certain people and not others. What is "our point of view"?We could do with more experimentation in form.
RL thought it was an exciting time with all kinds of different voices but SO thought there was still a white male bias although it was being challenged. And SO thought the publishing industry was really trying.
DF thought that historians might fear we were diluting history by giving alternative versions but history is not a science. When she grew up everyone "knew" that Tutankhamun was murdered and that Shakespeare invented Richard the Third's curved spine.
RL says it must open the imagination of the child and SO said it must humanise history.
Rus Madon asked about which historical writing was more accessible for which age range of readers. But SO repeated that historical fiction was no more difficult than any other literature. It all came back to compelling stories.
DF referenced the National Curriculum and said that 7-11 year-olds were studying Greeks, Romans and Egyptians and wanted immediacy and glamour - big themes. By eleven they will have studied the 1930s. And RL talked about the importance of the book's jacket. DF agreed and said it was the whole package - after all "who goes into a restaurant without reading the menu first?"
K C-H asked how much publishing was curriculum driven and SO said she never thinks about that and didn't even know what was on the curriculum! This was widely welcomed.
DF asked the publishers if fiction set in the Victorian period sold well, mentioning that it hadn't been on the curriculum for many years. And RL said they would mention to Sales Reps if the subject was on the curriculum.
Candy Gourlay mentioned cultural appropriation and asked if it meant she should write only about Philipino characters and situations. SO could sympathise with the position when she received submissions where the author hadn't close experience of the group he was writing about.
RL said it was about opening doors.
This was the night that the Carnegie and Greenaway Medal shortlists were announced and K C-H asked when a historical novel was last shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal but was reminded that Tanya Landman's Buffalo Soldier wasx a recent winner.
Catherine Johnson, author of Princess Carabou, Sawbones etc. said the problem wasn't prizes but sales. It's harder to sell "alternative voices" overseas, where publishers often wanted a Downton Abbey or Quality Street view of British history.
Battle of the Somme, Downton Abbey Series 2
RL said we must look at books which transcend the period.Not having an Elizabethan on the cover is a good idea. SO agreed that sales were hard but ALL sales were hard. Far too much is published - fantasy, contemporary and dystopian fiction were all equally hard.
There was a question about when "history" begins - something we have discussed a lot on the History Girls. The usual definition is that historical fiction must be set at least a generation ago.
SO added that to a ten year old anything that happened twenty years ago is unimaginable.
Lydia Syson asked about the role of school librarians as the greatest champions of historical fiction. DF was the obvious panellist to talk about this and said that no-one read more than a school librarian. She had read forty books this year already. Parents were difficult to persuade to part with £7.99 for a book.
Linda Edwardes-Evans said that unfortunately many teachers did not read themselves and the books they were using with children were not recent. DF gave a shout out to Barrington Stoke's list with a lot of historical fiction in it. Their catalogue would reach teachers. She believed every school needed a "book expert" even if not a librarian.
There was a question about comedy in historical fiction and all the panel agreed we needed more funny books - full stop!
K C-H mentioned we hadn't touched on the influence of TV and series like A Game of Thrones. And RL added films like The Pirates of the Caribbean.
After a brief discussion about poetry, which might be adding another difficult dimension to presenting titles to the Sales teams, K C-H asked us all to nominate favourite recent historical novels.
This followed on from SO's rallying cry that you should publish only the books you felt passionate about.
My choice was Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. Someone chose Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve. Following Ophelia by Sophia Bennett was Catherine Johnson's choice and someone else called out Morris Gleitzman's books and Eve Ibbotson's Journey to the River Sea.
The panel's choices were Catherine Johnson's own Princess Carabou, Celia Rees's Witch Child and Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon.
Kevin talking to Margaret Pemberton before the panel
Thanks to Celia Rees for swapping posting days with me; Celia will post on 1st April
(Past Imperfect? was the brainchild of Histeria, a group of children’s and YA historical writers - and was a response to the difficulties many writers find getting their work published now.)
I recently wrote a post on another blog about an old set of encyclopaedias which I have been trying to throw away for some months. I took one out of the boot of the car for the purposes of writing the post - and soon became fascinated. Of course it was out of date - it was published at a time when there had only been one World War - and it's easy to laugh in a patronising way about a world where, for instance, calculating machines were 'wonderful little machines... for every need, from the tiny reckoner for the retail merchant who deals only with figures of five digits or less, to the amazing "duodecillion" machine, which will give results up to 40 digits'. But in fact the Book of Knowledge is like a pair of glasses that allows you to see the world in some measure as people then saw it - in particular, the new Europe which had been created after 1918, with new countries, like 'Jugo-slavia' - without, paradoxically, the knowledge of all that was to come.
But if it's difficult, without the aid of something like the Book of Knowledge, to put ourselves back into a time less than a hundred years ago, how much harder it is to imagine what life was like well over a thousand years ago - in the age of the Vikings, for instance. Neil Oliver has just started a series on television in which he explores recent developments that tell us more about these perpetually fascinating ancestors of ours, seeking to make a definitive move past the popular image of bloodthirsty invaders with horned helmets. (The horns are a myth, apparently, occasioned by the discovery of drinking horns in burials alongside helmets. So much for all those souvenirs in York/Jorvik...)
Oliver is far from being the first to take a fresh look at the Vikings, of course. I can strongly recommend a book by Magnus Magnusson, called, unsurprisingly, The Vikings, which presents a very rounded and detailed picture of the northmen as traders, explorers, storytellers and makers as well as pirates and invaders.
But, since the History Girls are all writers of historical fiction, it will surprise no-one if I suggest that the best way to immerse ourselves in another time is by reading fiction. There have been lots of novels set among the Vikings: our own Marie-Louise Jensen has written Daughter of Fire and Ice, and its sequel, Sigrun's Secret. There have been other recent offerings by Susan Price, Katherine Langrish and Pauline Chandler, and the Vikings played a guest role in my own book, Warrior King. Much less recently, Henry Treece wrote a trilogy which must have been one of the first and most popular fictions for children about the Vikings.
The most recent arrival is Bracelet of Bones, by master story-teller Kevin Crossley-Holland. It begins the story of Solveig, who wakes one morning to find that her beloved father, Halfdan, has stolen away in the night to follow his young lord, Harald Hardrada, to Miklagard (Constantinople). To her, Miklagard is the other side of an unknown world, yet she determines to follow him there, setting off in a tiny boat with no provisions except some water, with little on her side save her courage, her skill as a carver and her determination.
On her great journey across the Baltic and down the great rivers of what is now Eastern Europe, she meets a range of characters who help her (or sometimes hinder her): sailors, makers, an English slave, merchants... and as she does so, we get a sense of this world, of what it is like to live in it: what it looks like, what it smells like, what food you eat, what clothes you wear, how you keep warm, how you travel. Unless Doctor Who eventually shares with us the secret of time travel, we're never going to know if this is what it was really like. But it certainly seems like a convincing and richly-textured approximation - and Solveig is an appealing and resourceful heroine.
In honour of the very successful visit from Kevin Crossley-Holland we have five copies to give away (in the UK only) of his novel, A Bracelet of Bones.
Just provide an interesting answer to the following question:
Tell us about your favourite Norse deity or story from Norse mythology.
Because of Easter you have till 10th April to leave a comment here.
This is a big day here - our first ever "History Boy" posting for us! And it's Kevin Crossley-Holland, which is a bit like having a visit from, oh, I don't know, Odin perhaps. (Though his favourite is a different deity) We subjected him to quite a grilling and the results, below, speak for themselves.
This is quite a summery picture, suitable for the unexpectedly sunny spring we have been having.
And here's something about the man himself:
Kevin Crossley-Holland is a poet, a librettist and translator from Anglo-Saxon, a reteller of myth, legend and folk-tale as well as a novelist. He won the Carnegie Medal for Storm and his Beowulf with Charles Keeping is a contemporary classic. He is author of The Penguin Book of Norse Myths and of British Folk Tales. His 'Arthur' trilogy has been translated into 25 languages and the first volume, The Seeing Stone, won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, a Smarties Prize and the Tir na n-Og award as well as being shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year. He recently published his memoir of childhood The Hidden Roads.
Kevin is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and patron of the Society for Storytelling and Publishing House Me. Last year, Anglia Ruskin University awarded him an Honorary Doctorate. He has four children and now lives with his Minnesotan wife Linda on the north Norfolk coast.
Thank you so much, History Girls, for according me the honour of being your first ‘history boy’, and for your searching questions. Here goes!
Could you expand on why the story of 'The Green Children' has haunted you for so long?
Imagine an eager, anxious boy lying on the top half of a bunk bed. His sister, three years younger than he is, lies on the bottom. Their father sits beside the bunk, eyes closed, and sings-and-says folk tales, accompanying himself on his Welsh harp.
That’s when I first heard the story of the two green children who were found near the Suffolk village of Woolpit at the end of the 12th century – so says Ralph, abbot of the monastery at Coggeshall (where, traditionally, everyone is a fool!)
At once, I identified with this plangent tale of brother and sister who long to belong and, like all of us at one time or another in our lives, feel lost, feel like outsiders. In a way, they stand for all the refugees, all the homeless, all the people in camps, all the dispossessed, who walk across our Middle Earth.
Later, by co-incidence (in its proper sense), my family moved to a village close to Woolpit in Suffolk… Then Nicola Lefanu and I made a children’s opera (for King’s Lynn Festival with the ENO Baylis Programme) from the story, involving literally hundreds of children. Later yet, I rewrote the tale from the viewpoint of the green girl… And at the last, this most haunting of tales will still be with me.
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Several of you have invited me to describe how I research, plan and generally cogitate before writing, and about my writing process.
As I’ve described in my memoir of childhood, I wasn’t much of a reader as a boy, though I reread Our Island Story until it fell apart, but I absolutely loved my ‘museum’, and with the help of my father learned to investigate and catalogue the items in it (fossils, Roman coins, a lovely Anglo-Saxon burial urn, and my astounding Saracen shield – not to mention my hoard of bun pennies on which I wasted a great deal of time, forever trying to buff them up with Duraglit!)
Always neat and well organised, I wept copiously when I returned from our first holiday abroad (I was six) to find that the family to whom we’d lent our little cottage in the Chilterns had raided and ransacked my toy cupboard.
I bring the same method, I think, to writing historical fiction. What do I need to find out? How am I going to find out about it? What do I have to do to convince myself and thus my readers that we’re on reasonably safe ground?
Well, I guess my answers will be the same as yours. I read and read – original sources most certainly (albeit in translation), serious interpretations of the period in question, and provocative books (often by French scholars) that cast a wider net – Duby on Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, Le Goff on The Medieval Imagination, Eco on Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. And all the while my wonderful PA Twiggy turns up lots of rapid-fire information from the internet.
I look at medieval art, I listen to lots of medieval music, I trawl museums and, in so far as is possible, I spend time in places where my books are set.
Thus I regularly returned to the Marches while writing the first book in my Arthur trilogy, and travelled to Zadar (once Zara) in Croatia, the setting for most of the third book in the trilogy, where the Fourth Crusade Christians laid siege to and devastated a Christian city.
At the same time, I’m beginning to plan the book – its thrust – the ideas I want to explore, the tough issues, the conflicts that drive it along – the characters, possible scenes, details… Ah! You know how it is. I do some of this work on giant spread sheets, but most on handwritten A4 sheets that soon build into piles. So, for my last book: Viking Women, Boat-building, Names, Merchandise, Weaponsmiths, Jewellery, Ladoga, Harald Sigurdsson, Rus, Black Sea, and so forth. Before long, these piles become tottering edifices.
I write entirely by hand with my old Waterman pen in the most lovely cloth-bound dummies given to me by publisher friends (yes, academic books still sometimes begin with dummies!). My writing may look neat, even attractive, but it’s not easy to read, I gather. And when I’m signing books, children and parents sometimes hesitantly come back to ask me to decipher a word. Heigh-ho!
I work on the principle that a working day deteriorates and by and large aim to think, dream, write, revise from about 8.30 or 9.00 until 1.30 or 2.00. How on earth author wives and mothers who often have to fit in so much bitty-piecy work in and around the home, are able to write as well, fills me with astonishment and admiration. My powers of concentration are considerable, but for me it’s a matter of momentum, and I doubt whether I could write in a pick-it-up and put-it-down sort of way.
I begin most days by revising the previous day’s work. It’s almost like tuning an instrument and practising scales: ensuring that my ear is true and that I’m right on the ball. I read my text out loud, or under my breath, and always use a second colour to revise the previous day’s work (and a third when I revisit that) so that I can see at a glance how things are coming on.
Twiggy types my complete revised manuscript and I then put a novel through three or four more fierce revises – quite apart from structural alterations (which I hate), maybe eight or ten small changes per page – that’s to say several thousand small corrections each time round. At the same time, my wife Linda is also working on a draft, brandishing a blue pencil, asking questions and offering invaluable comments about the dynamic, pace, text – everything. In another incarnation, she would have been a wonderful editor. And of course the decline of the publishing editor is a grievous matter – one for another day.
As we know, there’s nothing magic about using language really well and children can learn to do so: that’s why many of us run writing workshops. I think it’s essential that those teachers involved with creative writing classes should also write themselves from time to time.
Last autumn, I was on the road too much, and overdid it (some forty talks, workshops, festival events and so on) but in round terms a new novel may take me about eighteen months. With my forthcoming Presidency of the School Library Association, though, I suspect the next one may take me rather longer.
I reckon that 40% of my writing time is given to research and planning, 25% to first draft, and 35% to revision. Like an hourglass, almost.
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How do I ‘approach deciding on the level of language’ I use in my children’s books?
True, I did write a couple of historical novels in my early twenties, but to all intents and purposes The Seeing Stone was my first novel. I was fifty-eight when I wrote it. And I really didn’t know how to write it, or whether what I was writing was any good. I showed it to my wonderful long term editor Judith Elliott after I’d written 80 pages, and then again when I written another 80… At the heart of my uncertainty were the crucial questions of viewpoint and voice, and pace, and yet I cannot truly claim that I spent hours agonising over them – Arthur’s voice just welled up, like so many of the book’s incidents, the voice of an eager, anxious, active, articulate, imaginative, impressionable young boy of 12 not at all unlike that of his author when he was a boy.
During the 90s, I’d written two libretti, and that discipline taught me several new skills: getting people on and off stage at speed, seeing a relationship or event from different viewpoints, employing nothing but dialogue and internal monologue; altering the texture of the language (intensified for an aria, more relaxed for the recitative that carries the action along). To some extent, I applied these techniques to The Seeing Stone. Thus, many of the very short chapters are akin to arias – written in somewhat poetic prose as Arthur delves into his own thoughts and feelings. More of them, and one might die of indigestion. But as things stand, they seem to work quite well.
As a poet, I’m aware that every syllable counts, and every silence too. The music of language is part of our meaning, and we must harness it, and have it help us to sing.
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This blog post(not that I’ve ever written one before) is surely getting too long. So I’ll turn to the Vikings and their myths and Bracelet of Bones – subject of many of your questions.
It was Wystan Auden who encouraged me to look north to the world of Icelandic sagas, eddaic poems, Germanic heroic legends, and to consider retelling the Norse myths.
Much the most complete and coherent contemporary versions of the myths were written by the 12-13th century Icelander, Snorri Sturluson, and when I read them, I was aware of the landscape between the lines, as it were – the world of ice and fire that Snorri’s original audience must have taken for granted. And it seemed to me essential that any writer thinking of retelling the myths should fully engage with it.
So that’s what I did. With all the zeal of the convert, and to much shaking of heads from family and friends, I threw up my job as editorial director of Victor Gollancz, and went camping in Iceland with my two young sons. I was 36.
Western art has been so much influenced by Mediterranean cultures, and by the Renaissance – and so relatively little by, let’s say, the bracing floes of the North Sea and the Baltic. William Morris and several of the pre-Raphaelites, yes. Wagner, yes. Tolkien, yes. T. H. White, I suppose. Auden himself. Who else – of the first water? Very soon one’s having to scrape around. And yet, we British are of the north-west European world. It’s in our bloodstream, our nervous system, our language, our laws, our landscape, our stories… And so, for obvious and subtle reasons, the myths, legends and sagas are likely to speak to us.
The Norse myths, racy and witty and ice-bright, with sharply differentiated characters, are by no means as subtle and developed as their Greek counterparts. And yet we find in them, and in their nine worlds under the great, suffering guardian tree, Yggdrasill, the full repertoire of human dream and experience. Here are all our own high hopes, ambitions, fears, loves, passions, jealousies, rivalries, conflicts (often with ourselves), sacrifices and self-sacrifices, our wit and lust and greed, and here too our longing for some deeper order and meaning. What more can one ask? Isn’t this precisely why the Norse myths are not only still popular but – as we say in East Anglia – coming again?
I suppose my favourite deity is Thor, the maintainer of law and order, because he’s a likeable blockhead, trustworthy, easily duped, quick tempered but also ready to laugh at himself. But Loki, son of two giants and yet companion to the gods, is the most interesting character in the myths because of his ambiguity, and his own decline and fall – from laughable trickster to murderous enemy of innocence and virtue. (No, I’ve never sent the Loki stone at Kirkby Stephen but will make a point of doing so.) Loki is the agent of change in the myths, and the one in which he and Thor travel with two human companions to the world of giants is vivid, entertaining and scary, but my favourite myth is ‘The Death of Balder’. The loyalty, ferocity, pathos and sheer gravity of this tale, embracing as it does all creation, makes it one of the greatest of all stories, anywhere.
After writing the Norse myths, more than 30 years ago, I thought that was that. But as I described in the foreword to Bracelet of Bones, my wife’s and my discovery of Viking runes in Hagia Sophia (in Istanbul) was the springboard for a novel in which a girl, Solveig, follows her father in 1035 from Norway through the Baltic, Russia, Ukraine and the Black Sea to the city the Vikings called Miklagard.
Solveig’s head is full of the myths she has grown up with, as well as the new Christian teaching that has recently reached Norway. She keeps returning to values embodied in each of them, as well as learning about Islam when she accompanies her father and Harald Sigurdsson to Sicily in the second of my Viking sagas, Scramasax. As in The King of the Middle March and Gatty’s Tale, I find myself drawn to crossing-places and their ferment: places between cultures, belief systems, between land and sea, between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, actuality and imagination.
As we know from contemporary sources and modern historians, the role of women in Viking society was wide-ranging and potent. I see that one of my A4 pages lists them as household managers (i.e. running largely self-reliant farmsteads), loyal to a fault, inciters of feuds to protect family honour and yet also arbiters in community disputes, scapegoats, praise-subjects, beloved, beautiful and dangerous, feared for their sexual and magical powers. What is missing, yes, is much talk of Viking women as mothers!
I decided that I wanted to find out how a Viking girl might fare on a great adventure without being disguised as a boy. In Scramasax, I’ve ventured further and planted poor Solveig in an army of men. One thousand men; one young woman. Solveig comes face to face with their actions, their values. Will she ever be able to reconcile them with her own?
In selecting a girl as my main character, I’m also accepting, I suppose, that on the whole I find girls more interesting than boys, women more interesting then men. And certainly during the last few years, when my daughters have fallen in love and the elder has married, I’ve been conscious of how the role of father changes. No longer is he the beloved! So you could argue that Bracelet of Bones and Scramasax are novels about a girl defining her changing relationship with her father (and to men) while her author was of necessity redefining his relationship to his daughters.
*
And so, to end with, a few little quick replies:
Is Gatty my ‘favourite imagined character?
Yes, actually. Though she began life as a boy: Sneezer. After writing 50 pages she had a sex-change in the mind of her author, and he went back to square one. I’m rather partial to my Annie, too, in Storm and Waterslain Angels.
*
If I could time travel and witness one historical event, what would it be?
Maybe the first recitation of (the first part of) Beowulf, whenever and wherever it took place – perhaps at the court of the Wuffings in Suffolk in the seventh century. Of course my eyes would be out on stalks, and all my senses in play, but I reckon I’d be able to understand much of the language too. Or else – well, what about the stunning pagan-Christian Sutton Hoo ship burial, and all the rituals enacted at it? A crossing-place, if ever there was one.
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What am I most proud of?
Wasting very little time. My powers of concentration. Trying to return the kindnesses done to me when I was beginning to write - by enthusing, and enabling others. For all its rivalries and spats, the world of writers (and more especially of children’s writers) is collegiate.
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Do I have rules/views that affect how I retell a story?
Certainly. I laid them in out in my talk ‘Different – but oh! how like’ published in the Society of Storytelling Oracle series.
*
And if you…. or you… look into the seeing stone, you’ll see all you can and so must write. Look back (as we historical novelists do). Look forward. Remember the parable of the talents. With all my head and heart, I wish you success in revealing the ‘then and now’ that makes the study of history so fascinating, and the deep and lasting satisfaction of a serious undertaking, well done.
The reflective writer
Thanks so much, Kevin, for all your wonderful answers, and your final gift to us and our readers. Can't wait to read Scramasax!
