Historical Fiction: Ways to keep your inner muse inspired

 by Deborah Swift

I have been writing for quite a number of years now and in that time the publishing landscape has changed enormously. I am now reliably informed by Google that there are 2,700 books published every single day, and against that tsunami of books, my sitting down at my desk every day to write another  can seem rather pointless. Why would anyone need even one more book?

When I first began writing, I was inspired by the whole craft of writing. I got myself a shelf full of books which told me about plot, structure, research, and other craft skills. Most of these books are now something I rarely look at as they offer the same old advice re-packaged. So where is a seasoned writer to find the inspiration to carry on writing?

Here are some online ideas I find really useful when I am particularly jaded. They are all free, and won't cost you a thing.

First up - there is always research. Research is my life blood and the interesting facts I discover whilst I'm doing it are not only what keeps me engaged, but also enables me to breathe a semblance of life into my books.

Visual Feasts - Go on a live tour.

There are online walking tours to just about everywhere now. How about one I've just enjoyed? It takes about 45 minutes and is an ideal visual orientation and overview of the subject I'm researching. You can tip the tour guide if you want but its not obligatory. Jewish History in Amsterdam

There are offerings on this site from every corner of the world -  London -Way of Death is about the execution sites and the Necropolis of Old London.

For a longer tour you could sample this from a different company, which has a different approach more like a lecture tour, and more in depth information - it lasts an hour and a half .

WWII and the Western Front.

Pin Back Your Ears - Listen to a podcast by another historical novelist

I love to hear other writers offer me their pearls of wisdom, and hearing someone else talk about their own difficulties helps me to feel I'm not alone in tackling my own big project.

Here are some good ones to get you started.

The Write Show - Writing Historical Fiction about a little known figure (Mary Magdalene) and how the writer handled contradictions in her sources.

Art in Fiction - Writers (most are historical novelists) talk about artists, writers and performers that feature in their books and how they brought them to life. 

Historical Fiction and the Perils of Family History - Emma Darwin unpacks how to fail writing about your famous family!

Historical Fiction Unpacked  - a regular selection of historical novelists talk about their process in creating their latest work.

Dig a bit Deeper - Fire up your brain 

The question most historical novelists are tired of answering gets a breath of fresh air in this 

 in-depth article in The Literary Hub by Caitlin Horrocks.

The anxiety of writing historical fiction  or this take on the old debate about accuracy from Hilary Mantel; Facts are not the Truth 

Or this one - Does Historical Fiction Distort the Truth?

Take a Tip from the Experts - You're never too old to learn

However expert you are, a novel is always a new journey. Of course there are many classes and courses that will take your money, but if you're just a bit jaded and need some free pep, then here at the National Centre for Writing, there are free soundbites, classes and courses including ones by Sarah Perry and Nicola Upson.  Want to write a convincing fight scene? Try these tips from the New York Editors Blog.

Mooch round a Museum - without leaving your chair

Tired of your view? How about visiting the Frick Collection in New York? Expect to see Old Masters, decorative arts, and European sculptures in this former residence turned art museum.

Or how about Blenheim Palace - wander three hundred years of history and the sumptuous gilded rooms with only a mouse. My personal favourite is the Rijksmuseum, home of Dutch Masters and a visually stunning website.

The Beauty of the Book - can't beat the real world

Of course one of the obvious and best ways to get inspired (and yes I deliberately left it until last) is to read. I love my local secondhand bookshop. In it I can browse openings of dozens of pre-read novels for a flavour of the writer.  Other writers' voices are not like mine, and I love to see what the differences are and how they construct their stories. There are also old books - the solid language of Victoriana, and the hip lingo of the 1970's.

As most of my life as a writer is conducted online or via the computer, it is great to get back to the real world of books. Weirdly, no matter how obscure my subject matter I can usually find something of interest in a second hand bookshop. It encourages the cross-fertilization of ideas because there are so many random books close to each other - many of which are not the bestsellers touted in every other bookshop. Nearly all my non-fiction research books are actual books rather than ebooks, and often second-hand. It is much easier to find stuff again in a real book, and I often read the book more than once and need to put post-its on them with my notes about why that extract is useful.

Struggling with a title? Your secondhand bookshop will provide lots of ideas. Need to think of a blurb? Again, the second-hand bookshop will give you back-cover ideas culled from the last fifty years at least.

Here's my local bookshop, Carnforth Books. I'm glad to give them a shout out with their thousands of second hand (and new) books,

Hope you found this post useful, and I'd be glad of any other ideas to keep my nose to the grindstone. And no, it's not procrastination, honest.

You can find my latest book, a biographical novel of Renaissance poisoner Giulia Tofana, here, and my website for more exploring here.

Chat with me on Twitter @swiftstory

Secrets of Historical Fiction: Part 1 - By Anna Mazzola

Don't tell anyone, but I'm starting a secret series on writing historical fiction. This follows on from a highly secret talk I gave at Waterstones Gower Street with the author Anna-Marie Crowhurst. Part 1 will cover how you decide what you’re writing, and how you find the right voice.

What is historical fiction? 

Firstly, what is historical fiction? How far back does a novel have to be set to make it 'historical'? A hundred years? Fifty years? Five? No one seems to agree about this. According to the Walter Scott Prize, events have to have taken place at least 60 years before the publication of the novel. According to the Historical Novel Society, it’s fifty years before publication. I’d in fact say it’s any book set in the past.

Within historical fiction there are many different genres: historical romances, adventure stories, historical crime, espionage thrillers, time slip novels, and the new brand of Gothic fiction which is set in the past but doesn’t specify when (The Silent Companions and The Binding, for example). Imogen Robertson, Chair of the Historical Writers’ Association says, ‘Historical fiction is a setting rather than a genre. It encompasses every different kind of storytelling you can imagine’. 

As Emma Darwin points out in her brilliant book, ‘The most important thing about historical fiction is that it is fiction: a story of events that never happened, told ‘as if’ they did happen.’

Why write historical fiction?

It’s sometimes said that, thanks to Hilary Mantel and the likes of SJ Paris, Jessie Burton and Sarah Perry, historical fiction is having a golden era. However, you never know how trends in the market will work. I assume that the historical novel will continue to flourish for some time yet, but there’s never any guarantee. And as those of you who are already writing historical fiction will know, it’s a pretty darned time-consuming and research-heavy process. Unless you happen to have a doctorate in the subject you’re proposing to write a novel about (and some people do), you’re going to have to spend a long time researching your era. I personally love the research bit, perhaps too much (as I’ll discuss here), but it’s worth bearing in mind that by writing historical fiction you are essentially making life difficult for yourself, so you have to really want to do it. 

It may be that the specific story you want to write is set in the past, which is what happened with me. Or it may be that you really want to write historical fiction, because that’s what you’re drawn to. 

Certainly settings drawn from history give a wonderfully rich background for novels. It’s also a way to give a voice to people who have been left out of the history books: the dispossessed, the suppressed. I think some of the best historical fiction speaks for the people who couldn’t or whose voices were rarely heard: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. My novel The Story Keeper is about the crofting community in the Highlands of Scotland just after the Clearances of the 19th century, people whose voice has been almost completely left out of the records, replaced with the voices of the rich landowners. Which of course makes it tricky to research, but that’s all part of the fun. Perhaps.

‘Where do you get your ideas from?’

Assuming that you’ve decided you’re writing historical fiction and you really want to spend your weekends working out what kind of sheep they kept in Scotland in 1857 or what vegetables were available in 1640 (the answer is turnips), where do you start? 

Step 1 is to read everything you can get your hands on – new fiction, old fiction, non-fiction, history, newspapers, court reports. Go to the theatre. Watch films, drama, listen in to people on the train. One of my ideas came partly from a play, another partly from the ballet. All of my ideas are partly from real crimes. Basically read a lot and go out and have a great time and you might get some ideas.

Also consider the market – which debuts have broken through recently? What might editors be looking for? Being aware of the market doesn’t necessarily mean following it, however. Ultimately you have to write the book you’d like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? 

Which rules are you working with? 

Once you have an idea of what you want to write, the next step is to agree with yourself what kind of novel you’re going to write and what kind of rules you’re going to work with. 

The reason I say that is that when you’re working with recorded facts and known history, you’re going to have to make lots of decisions about what you must keep, what you will change, and what you can invent. That’s far easier to do if you decide some kind of overall policy at the outset. Are you, for example:

- Creating a story based on general historical material;
- Taking real historical events and real people and using their biography as the backbone of the story (as Margaret Atwood did with Alias Grace);
- Using real historical events as the centre of the story, but embroidering around it (as Robert Harris did in An Officer and a Spy); 
–  Using some aspect of a real story as the basis for a largely fictional novel (In The Miniaturist, for example, Jessie Burton used a real doll’s house but made most of the rest up); 
- Or are you perhaps interweaving a historical narrative with stories set in a different times? 

Whatever it is, you need to get it clear in your mind fairly early on, and I say this as someone who wasted a lot of time because I hadn’t worked out what format I was using for my first novel, The Unseeing, and became hamstrung by the true events and slightly obsessed with the ‘real facts’. 

Finding the right voice

Once you know what you’re writing about, you’ll need to establish the voice in which you’re writing it. Are you going to use quite a modern voice, as Barnes did in Arthur  & George, are you going to use a more archaic voice as Anna-Marie Crowhurst does very successfully in her novel The Illumination of Ursula Flight, or are you going to do what I tend to do, which is use a fairly modern voice but with nods towards how they would have spoken in the relevant era? 

In order to find the right voice, I tend to read a lot of writing of the period and note down particular vocabulary, cadence, sentence structure that I can steal to give a sense of the era, but make the voice my own. Replicating the rhythms of speech and adding in bits of slang can be an effective way of not only defining an era, but also a class system. So in The Story Keeper I replicate some of the rhythms of Highland speech rather than having them all saying ‘Och Awa' an bile yer heid!’, and I’ve included some lovely phrases that I stole from witnesses to a government commission in the 19th century, including ‘a little pimple of a woman’, ‘a Skyeman to my backbone’ and ‘he’s not worth his porridge.’

Beth Underdown (who wrote The Witchfinder’s Sister) says that she spends ‘a few minutes every night, just before going to sleep, reading from the personal writings (the letters, diaries and so on) I’ve collected. Through this habit, I hope that something of the period’s cadence and sentence structure seeps into my characters’ speech, in a way that feels natural and not too laboured.’

If you’re going to use a fairly modern voice, you can intersperse it with letters or journal entries that have a stronger voice, more reminiscent of the era, as Susan Fletcher does brilliantly in Corrag, for example. 

Whichever voice you used, you’ll want to avoid:

a) Anachronisms:  words and phrases which jar, and
b) Ridiculous-sounding archaisms like ‘Zounds!’ and ‘Egad!’ 

The important thing is to give a sense of authenticity and avoid interrupting the flow of the story for the reader. Because of course it's the story that they're really reading it for, not your exact rendering of 15th century speech. 

Here ends part 1 of the Secrets of Historical Fiction. The next section will cover immersing yourself in an era and research. But keep it to yourself.

__________________________________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime and Gothic fiction. 

https://annamazzola.com    

https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

Down the Rabbit Hole: Researching for Historical Fiction - By Anna Mazzola

As I regard the enormous mound of books I’ve already read in preparation for my third novel, I find myself wondering: am I doing all this research in order to immerse myself in the world of my characters, or am I just putting off writing the darned book?

I think any writer of historical fiction would agree that research is important. You have to understand the period about which you’re writing, and it’s by evoking a realistic world that you draw the reader into your story. But how much research should you do? Should you research in depth before you begin, or only as you go along? Crucially, how do you avoid getting lost down a research hole?

Different approaches 

An entirely unscientific survey confirms that writers approach their research in completely different ways.

Catherine Hokin says, 'I research masses at the start and then it's ongoing as I realise what I don't know.' Laura Shepherd-Robinson starts by reading one or two books for inspiration while planning and plotting. 'Then I stop researching altogether when I write the first draft, only doing more if I need it for the plot.' Claire Fuller says, 'I never research before I start. Just little bits as I go along.' Meanwhile Ben Johncock advises researching ‘as much as you need, that is: as little as possible’, and Linda Stratmann says, 'I don't decide in advance. I go where it takes me and have fun along the way.'

Many have fallen down the research hole. Rowan Coleman admits to spending an entire day researching 17th century bee keeping for a single paragraph. SD Sykes spent two days investigating 14th century Venetian chimneys, or rather the lack of them. Where did the smoke go? She never found out. Nor did the point make it into her novels. William Sutton read a biography of Henri Dunant and two biographies of Disraeli for a novel that ultimately featured one conversation with Disraeli and nothing at all about Dunant. I myself spent months researching 19th century convict ships for my first novel, The Unseeing, only to throw out almost the entire section that was set on a convict ship.

Even the great Hilary Mantel acknowledges it can be difficult to let go of the facts and move on to the fiction. In her first BBC Reith Lecture she noted, 'I didn’t like making things up, which put me at a disadvantage. In the end I scrambled through to an interim position that satisfied me. I would make up a man’s inner torments, but not, for instance, the colour of his drawing room wallpaper.'

Research, plot, write, research

My own approach is to do quite a large amount of research at the outset in order to spark story ideas, to feel reasonably confident about the world I'm creating, and to be able to map out the broad plot. I want to be sure that my plot and my outline characters are plausible and don't lead to months of rewriting further down the line. (Although of course there are always months of rewriting further down the line).

Then, as I write the terrible first draft, I note down further questions that I need to answer. I try to avoid doing too much research during my writing time, as it's far easier to research than it is to write, and I find that my two hours' writing time has somehow morphed into two hours reading (and tweeting) about some obscure and ultimately irrelevant point.

How to drag yourself out of the research hole

Having fallen down into Wonderland, how do you climb back out? 

• Set a word count or a deadline

To prevent myself from remaining in the research warren I find it useful to set a weekly and daily word count. If I have to write actual words, the amount of time I can spend researching 18th century cooking is limited, albeit glorious. I also determine the cut-off date for my main research, marking the point I must plunge into the novel.

• Remember the purpose of research 

As Emma Darwin points out in her excellent Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction, it's important to remind yourself of the point of research, which is, she says, to ‘fill the larder of your imagination with food and fuel for your storytelling mind.’ The fact that the larder is full doesn’t mean you have to use everything in it. In fact, you won’t use most of it at all.

Tracy Chevalier says 'Think of it this way: the research is not really for your readers, it's for yourself, so that you understand the time and place and people you're writing about. All the reader really needs is to feel confident that you know what you're talking about; they don't need the specifics. So by all means do research and take notes and talk to experts and look at paintings and visit places. Absorb it all. Then set it aside and write the story.’

I think that’s key. It’s very easy to let research become procrastination – to convince yourself that you can’t possibly write your novel unless you know what kind of potato your main character would have been peeling in Part 1, or what kind of horse they were riding and whether they were in fact riding it side-saddle. I know someone whose work on a particular novel stalled entirely due to not being able to work out the laws of property inheritance in 1910. As far as I know, she's still stuck in 1910.

Shun shoehorning 

It's tempting, having spent months researching some particular subject, to find a way of shoehorning it into your novel. Don't. It’s obvious when writers do that and it takes the reader out of the story.

Val McDermid has a rather lovely tip, which is to ‘Only use historical detail when you would use that same detail in a contemporary novel.’ If you wouldn't describe the car someone is driving in a modern novel, why are you expending three paragraphs on the coach and horses in your Victorian mystery?

Trust the imagination of your reader. You don’t have to research for two days what kind of writing bureau your character uses, then spend a page describing it, in order for the reader to see it.

Ultimately, it's the story that they care about. It's for the characters and their journeys, rather than your descriptions of the cornicing, that they're reading the novel. So do the best you can with your research. Then leave it behind and write the darn book.

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her first novel, The Unseeing, was published in 2016. Her second, The Story Keeper, will be out in July. 

https://annamazzola.com/about/

The Blue-Eyed Roman Girl from Africa

by Caroline Lawrence

Sometimes it’s good for writers to have restrictions; it can make you more creative.

Yesterday I led a story-writing workshop in the Undercroft Gallery at the Guildhall Art Gallery, situated above London’s Roman amphitheatre. First I shared the simple seven-beat story-structure I use to map out every scene in my books and also for the overall arc of the story itself. I illustrated the seven plot beats via the first chapter of my first Roman Mystery, The Thieves of Ostia. 

Then I told the parents and children about an idea I’m working on now, the story of the 14-year-old girl who lived in Roman London in the 4th century AD. The so-called Lant Street Teenager, named after the modern part of London where her grave was found, was one of four skeletons sent to McMasters University in Canada for in-depth study of DNA, isotopes and pathogens. Rebecca Redfern of the Museum of London has written eloquently about this and the other three skeletons. 

Science has made astounding advances and we know the following things about the Lant Street Girl. 

- Her mother was from the eastern parts of the Roman Empire, perhaps Thrace or Dacia. 

- Initial tests showed the girl had blue eyes and blonde hair

- She spent the first ten years of her life in North Africa

- She came to Londinium when she was about ten

- She ate a diet of fish, grain and vegetables

- She died aged 14 of unknown causes

Pathogens in her bones tell us about her health.

- She had rickets, a childhood disease caused by lack of calcium or vitamin D in the diet.

- As a result of this disease she had bandy legs. 

- Like most Roman Londoners, she had periodontal disease and therefore probably bad breath. 

Her burial indicates that she was from a rich family. Grave goods found with the body include:

- Two glass bottles, possibly for perfume or unguent.

- A wooden box with ivory inlay including that of a goddess.

- An clasp knife with an iron blade and an ivory handle in the shape of a leopard. A small bronze key is attached to this knife by a bronze chain.  

There has been lots of talk about the ethnic diversity in Roman London and this girl is the perfect example. Her father might have been a dark-skinned African, an Egyptian, a Phoenician or even a Roman. We don’t know yet as we don’t have access to the father’s DNA. 

In my writing workshop yesterday we tried to come up with a story for the girl, whom I’ve provisionally called Dido as she might have come from Carthage in North Africa where other ivory-handled clasp-knifes have been found. (Dido was the beautiful Queen of Carthage who fell in love with the hero Aeneas in Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid.)

We brainstormed a possible story for the blue-eyed girl from Africa, based on the facts, and then used our informed imaginations to come up with possible ways she might have met her untimely end. 

Here are some ways a Roman girl could have died in Londinium:

1. Death by illness. 

2. Death by infection. 

3. Death by childbirth complications.

4. Death by fall.  

5. Death by drowning. 

6. Death by choking.

7. Death by murder, strangulation or poison for example. 

8. Death by starvation.

9. Death by runaway oxen 

10. Death by wild animal or feral dog.

11. Death by fire or smoke inhalation.

12. Death by curse or bad omen.

Over twenty children attended the workshop and I hope that some of them might write a story which they can enter in a competition like BBC’s 500 Words or Butser Ancient Farm’s Poetry competition. (Just put your story in blank verse for the Butser entry!)

I know that even if every child and adult who attended came up with a story, each would be different. That’s the joy of writing historical fiction!

I’ll be giving the talk again today (Wednesday 9 August 2017) at 2pm so if you live in London and love history, Romans or writing, come help me tell a story about the Blue-Eyed Roman Girl from Africa.

For more information about all the great events of the #Londinium Festival celebrating Roman London for three months in 2017, go HERE. 

CUNNING PRESTIDIGITATION: On Writing Historical Fiction – Elizabeth Fremantle

Some thorny issues encountered when writing historical fiction:

WEARING RESEARCH LIGHTLY

It is tempting, when your research has thrown something idiosyncratic about a particular period, to try and weave it into your narrative come what may. Take for example the fact that in the sixteenth century red crosses were painted in the corners of palace courtyards (their purpose was to prevent people from urinating, as they would be loathe to defile the holy sign) or that the Tudors only rarely ate with forks (they were a continental innovation and thought rather feminine). These kind of facts are interesting and can be used to build a sense of time and place but they also require the kind of explanation that might not easily fit into a narrative. They can be used to demonstrate character: a character witnessing someone urinating on a red cross might be shocked by the sacrilege, or a person dining with a fork might be seen as eccentric or well-travelled. However, the danger of overloading a narrative with these kind of details, which would have been commonplace in the period, risks pulling the reader out of the story. For me they usually end up on the cutting room floor.

THE PROBLEMS OF BACKSTORY

One of the greatest challenges when writing about characters set in history is conveying background information. Sometimes characters have very complex histories that are significant to the narrative but finding ways to fit this information into the story without affecting the flow can be difficult. Old Hollywood movies often used the technique of a rolling text, or voice-over to set the scene, and there's nothing preventing novelists from employing a written equivalent, but it does seem a little clunky and old-fashioned. Readers often don't want to wade through a history lesson before they get to the story and editors always advocate grabbing the reader from the off, which often means writers must drop background facts in later.

I struggled with this in my latest novel, Sisters of Treason which is about the younger sisters of Lady Jane Grey. It was important for readers to know the complex political path that led to Jane becoming Queen and why she was executed, but as she died in the opening scene this proved challenging. After many scored out paragraphs with marginal notes like 'too much information' I thought I should convey the history through a conversation between two characters. My problem was that all my characters would have had no reason to discuss such things; they would have known already why Jane had come to the throne and subsequently died. I finally opted to use my youngest protagonist, the only one who might not have been party to the full facts, nine-year-old Mary Grey who quizzes her mother as to the reasons behind her sister's fate. It's a tricky balancing act as any false note will distract the reader.

ANACHRONISMS

I'm lucky enough to have a very thorough copy editor, who always points out, with exceeding tact, my use of glaring anachronisms. Common traps are things that wouldn't have existed in the period. Everybody knows that there were no potatoes in England until the late sixteenth century but I for one didn't know that a marmoset was a species of monkey that originated in the Americas until it was pointed out to me. Fact checking and research will usually deal with such details and if something does slip through you can be sure a reader will take the time to write and inform you of your error. But there is a more insidious form of anachronism, the more subtle question of linguistic usage.

Language is inherently anachronistic and if writers of historical fiction only used language authentic to their period no one would read their books. However, there are certain terms and words that simply don't work, for example if your setting is Early Modern England and you describe a humiliating defeat as a 'fiasco' you risk sounding inauthentic. 'Fiasco' is nineteenth century and sounds it (it also always reminds me of Martin Amis's 'Ford Fiasco'). The medieval term 'calamity' would be more correct but doesn't have the connotations of humiliation (plus it carries the burden of 'Calamity Jane' which makes it seem American); the Elizabethan 'catastrophe' is, well, too catastrophic. 'Debacle' though its first recorded usage is 1795, for me, conveys the relevant atmosphere, without sticking out like a sore thumb, though not everyone might agree. That brings me to idioms: be absolutely sure to verify their origins too. Such things may seem insignificant but they make a difference to the reading experience.

SHOCKS AND SURPRISES

Beware events that may shock or surprise your readers but which your characters wouldn't give a second thought to. Obvious examples are the horrific punishments meted out in earlier times. The public nature of punishment was to act as a deterrent and to see someone convicted of treason going through the torture of being hung drawn and quartered is likely to have struck the fear of God into the spectators as well as being an entertainment of sorts (I think of it as an equivalent to watching a horror film).

We might see it differently; as inhumanly brutal and a terrible injustice perhaps, and certainly never entertaining, but it's unlikely a contemporary character would share our feelings. The death of a baby in a time when infant mortality was commonplace would have had a different effect than it would now that it is rare. domestic violence would have been unremarkable in a time when it was sanctioned by the state that husbands could beat their wives with a stick no thicker than his thumb but not to the extent that he caused her death. The examples are numerous and in my opinion it is always important to remember how a modern reader will interpret such events. A woman who is sad but not devastated by the loss of a baby would come across as hardhearted to readers now, and so a compromise needs to be struck between the past and the present.

For me all these issues are about balance and keeping the reader in the world of the story but that can, at times,  require some cunning prestidigitation.

You can find information on Elizabeth Fremantle's Tudor novels Queen's Gambit and Sisters of Treason on her website – ElizabethFremantle.com