What's in a Name ? by Judith Allnatt

What's in a name? Well, often quite a nod to history. Our own names often tell us something of the occupations off our ancestors, as in Potter, Shepherd, Smith (blacksmith) and Whitaker (white acre).  Some, of course, would be difficult to guess. Who would have known that the first name Gary means 'spear-carrier',  Kimberley 'a wood clearing' or  Everard 'strong boar'?

Some names have suffixes that suggest the nature of an occupation. 'Wright' means someone who makes something, as in Wheelwright or Wainwright, 'wain' being short for 'wagon'. Suffixes can also imply gender. The surname Webb was commonly used for a male weaver. The suffix 'ster' was often added for a female labourer, as in 'Webster'. Words on this pattern have even entered the language as nouns.  'Spinster' no doubt originated from an occupation commonly taken up by single women needing to support themselves. Prefixes can also be revealing. 'Fitz', from Old French,  means 'son of', as in Fitzpatrick or Fitzgerald, or in the case of Fitzroy the (illegitimate) son of the King (Roi).

When choosing names for characters, novelists generally think carefully about the nature of the character and the impression they want to create. Thomas Hardy, in Far from the Madding Crowd, introduces his character, Gabriel Oak, through his robust clothes and steady nature but his name also underpins this impression. A man named after an archangel and the sturdiest of English trees must surely be a moral benchmark and a reliable, all round solid chap.

Sometimes historical research can lead a writer to a name that chimes with their idea of a character.When I was writing The Silk Factory, set in the early 1800s, I drew on the history of John English, the overseer in the silk manufactory in my Northamptonshire village. He was described by the outraged schoolmaster of the time as 'an inhuman taskmaster'. Like Gabriel Oak, John English seemed far too traditional and forthright a name for a character who was to cruelly exploit and mistreat his workforce. I would have to rename him. In researching the industry, I read about weaving  workshops in Spitalfields in London and how nets would sometimes be set up on the rooftops  to catch songbirds to sell. A bird catcher was known then as a 'fowler' - the perfect name for the silk master overseeing a workforce trapped in a stuffy attic working sixteen-hour days.

John English also had a mysterious past. An advert in the Northampton Mercury offered a reward of ten guineas for his capture as he was accused of several felonies, including theft and cruelty. It said: 'He has many wounds upon his head and in different parts of his body, wears a wig and the general turn of his conversation is directed to Travelling, Voyages, Mechanics and discovering Mines and the North-West passage.' Because  of this, I wanted a first name that had elements of mystery and exoticism. I chose 'Septimus', the name used for a seventh son, a role imbued with mystery in fairy tales through the ages. 'Septimus  Fowler', I felt would be a character that the reader would recognise as villainous from the moment of his introduction.

We don't tend to think about the origins or meanings of names as we use them in everyday life. They've become commonplace over the generations through their frequent use. However, I think perhaps we sometimes have an unconscious awareness of their associations. When writing A Mile of River, which features a farmer obsessed with expanding his land and controlling his family, I drew a blank for his name. After a night sleeping on it, I came up with the name 'Henry Garton'. It seemed to click although I couldn't have said why. Looking up the meanings I found "Henry - head of the household" and "Garton - a fenced farm, a walker of boundaries". A salutary lesson on trusting one's writerly instincts!

No wonder many peoples have superstitions about telling a stranger their names. Perhaps they have a sense that to do so is to part with more information about themselves  than they would like to give. What's in a name? Quite a lot it would seem.

Culpeper and Writing, by Gillian Polack

I often ask people “What would you like me to write about in my articles?” They want me (mostly) to write about people. 

My fiction is about people, but my historian side isn’t that kind of historian. I’m an historiographer and ethnohistorian. I think about cultures and about books and about books in culture and about stories.

Today, when I thought “I want to write about Nicholas Culpeper” because I was thinking of my own past, not because I’m interested in the seventeenth century nor in his life. At high school we were allowed to choose our own books for the end-of-year prizes. My English prize was Culpeper’s herbal. It combined so many of my interests. I chose it because I wanted a copy of my own, so that I could learn to decode the entries and know how Culpeper thought of herbs and used herbs. My kind of history. I had it even when I was seventeen.

I’ve used my volume of Culpeper so often since I was seventeen, but it’s been a while since I sat down and questioned how I use it. These days I use it as a reference for my fiction, but also as an historian. I know a lot more about the historical context of the book, and theoretically whenever I look at a page, that automatically kicks in. This makes my fiction quite different to what I wrote when I was eighteen. Around then my first short story was published and it was a very precise description of working at a rubber glove factory. If I had included Culpeper, it would possibly have been the main character going home and reading the book herself, for my writing was often very literal and everyday back then.

I’m not certain that we talk enough about what fiction writers do when they read a book to use in their fiction. I have a new short story to write soon and Culpeper is a useful source, since the story is set in a strange and wonderful shop. If the shop assistant had an array of herbs for various uses and only a single reference volume to consult, what would she know, and how do I read an entry to interpret it in this environment? Is it as simple as my response would have been when I was a brand-new writer with little life experience and only the beginnings of an understanding of what history is and how to use sources?

I want to begin with the second question. In fact, I have to begin with the second question.

What my character would know depends wholly on how I would read an entry for the place and time that character lives in. There’s a big difference between how I read Culpeper as a seventeen year old to how I read Culpeper forty years later, so let’s start with that.

The entry I’ve chosen to play with is that on the cherry tree, mainly because it’s a short entry. You can find it here: http://www.complete-herbal.com/culpepper/cherrytree.htm

When I was seventeen I read it literally. When I read ‘sour cherries” I thought ‘Morello’ and I looked for where a tree could be grown and how it could be eaten. I tasted uncooked sour cherries and I tried drying them to match what the entry described.

The health side of the entry I noted, but pushed aside, for a couple of my relatives were health professionals (doctors and dentists) and had given me strict warnings on health issues and old herbals. I used more modern herbals to test some medicinal properties, but Culpeper was of a period that, I was told, had dangerous medicine.

Now, in this day and place, I read it for the physical qualities Culpeper describes, for it’s a medical herbal, not a culinary one and I know far too well how few medieval medicines have actually been tested. I would check to see if Morello cherries are the same type of sour cherry as Culpeper describes, and if the change in cherries over time has been documented by specialists. I’d check sites like Brogdale to see what they tell me about fruit in general and about cherries in particular. Then, and only then, I’d play with the fruit itself, knowing more about the relationship between a modern cherry tree and Culpeper’s.

The next thing I do is look for the qualities of a plant in relation to the structure of the universe. 

This sounds big. It isn’t. It’s quite simple. In the case of cherries, they are of Venus. Culpeper tells us so. He always tells us so. This informs me how the cherry might work in relation to other plants if I were a doctor and finding suitable medicine for an ailment. Medicine back then didn’t operate along the same lines as modern medicine (it had to balance the humours, for instance) and knowing a plants qualities meant that the heat, the cold, the wet and the dry could be deduced. That sentence “It is a tree of Venus.” is a coded explanation for the long paragraph that follows and that describes different types of cherries, how they work fresh and how they work dried. 

It’s not a complete list of ways cherries might be used in medicine: it’s a guide to how cherries fit into the world of remedy.

This leads to something important. The shop assistant in my story would not be able to prescribe using Culpeper alone. She would need other references, or medicinal products already packaged, or someone she could ask for help. She could sell the dried fruit as dried fruit and helpfully explain that Culpeper lists it as ‘being cooling in hot diseases, and welcome to the stomach’. She would find it harder to create  prescription for a particular illness: medieval medicine required a lot more training than access to a herbal, no matter how wonderful the herbal is.

My short story, however, is a fantasy short story with historical elements. Can’t I use Culpeper any way I want, then? The answer to that is, sadly, “Only if I want historians to find it comic or sad or simply badly done.” Taking historical sources from a given time and lifting out fun facts and putting them into a context where those fun facts are distorted lead to such reactions. The reason for that is one of the things I’m researching right now, because it’s seriously cool.

Every single novel has certain attributes that readers pick up on. They’re the reason we choose to read this novel over that other one. Historical fiction tends to keep historical material in stronger historical context than historical fantasy does. Within a given novel, a certain level of historical accuracy is more or less appropriate and this fits very closely in with the genre of the novel. (This is my older research – if you want to explore it, History and Fiction is the place to go.)

All novels have an invented world. Some invented worlds look very much like ours (historical fiction) and some go in interestingly wayward directions (historical fantasy) and some borrow from history but deviate in even more ways. Other world fantasy is a good illustration of this description, but it applies to a range of genres. My short story will be part of a series of stories that are ‘portal’ – the shop door can lead from the shopfloor into a range of places. This means that the historical accuracy of the Culpeper really doesn’t matter, in one way. There is nothing medieval about this shop except… 

When we (writers) build a world for a novel, it has to contain a certain level of credibility for the reader. The need for credibility in the story itself applies to almost all novels. It even applies to short stories, but because short stories contain so much less detail, credibility is easier to achieve. A few bits of detail that give the right feel and all is good. When someone writers a linked sequences of short stories (as I am, now) that sequence has about the same credibility requirements as a short novel.

How does Culpeper relate to credibility? I need a reason to have cherries on that medicinal shelf. I need a reason to have Culpeper on the reference shelf (the door leads to our word sometimes, perhaps). I need someone who can read the book (ie speaks English) and knows what cherries are. Then come the questions about how those dried cherries are used, why they are being bought, why the book is picked up at all…

My decisions on all these things might make or break the short story, even if they are merely two paragraphs in twenty pages.

Every single bit of historical information in historical fiction carries such weight. This brings me to my endgame: I am not writing about Culpeper today. I’m using Culpeper as an example to show you the weight of the research behind the work of the History Girls and other writers. Evaluating every single element of history in a novel is part of the novel-writing game. Making sure it fits the kind of novel we’re writing, the place, the time, and even the characters in the novel is not easy. It is, however, what brings history into fiction in a way that more readers can enjoy.

A Snapshot From the Writing Life by Katherine Webb

A somewhat more personal blog than normal from me this month as I find myself in that slightly bewildered, exhausted/exhilarated state that comes about when the second (and hopefully final) draft of a book has been handed in. Mostly, there's a tremendous sense of relief! And I know it's definitely done this time because I have stopped waking up in the middle of the night thinking of tiny, tiny changes to make to the script - literally swapping one word for another on page 342, for example. I'm free!

As somebody who cannot plan a story before starting it, writing a novel is always a leap of faith. Will I still be able to do I? Will ability kick in where faith is failing, and let me produce something worth reading? I know where I want the book to start and finish, and I know who my players are, but will I be able to steer them through a complex narrative? And, given that I can't plan, a book with a twisty plot - like my fourth novel, 'The Misbegotten', and like this one I have just finished - always cause me headaches. I knew when I handed this script in for the first time back in June that there was work to be done - and I was looking forward to getting my agent's and editor's eagle eyes on it. Often, I am far too close to the woods to see the trees by the time I reach the end of the story. It's all there in my head, but has it made it onto the page?

I am often asked by aspiring writers how I deal with the editorial process, and the general feeling is that it must be awfully hard. Well, it is - but not necessarily for the reasons people might think. I imagine that if you'd turned in what you thought was the perfect novel, hearing that your publisher would like changes made to it must be very hard. The key is never to assume it's perfect! I've done this enough times now to know that I have strengths and weaknesses, and every first draft I write will have strengths and weaknesses. Having a skilled editor to point out the weaknesses is a GOOD thing. I've also been asked whether a book still feels like my book once I've redrafted it. My goodness, YES. If it doesn't, something is very seriously wrong. An editor might point out a problem; it is up to the author to find the solution to that problem. Or to argue convincingly that there isn't a problem. Or to sidestep the problem by rewriting other parts of the novel in a certain way. It remains, absolutely, all my own work.

My entirely shambolic work book, which helps me keep tabs on what I've changed and what this is doing to other parts of the book, and what still needs to be added/removed/rewritten...

Another thing I also do at this stage of the writing process is to go back through all my research notes for little gems of historical detail I've missed, which I can drop in to add authenticity to my settings. This time around, that meant rural Wiltshire life in the 1920s, which has been a joy to learn about and to write. Equally, you have to leave some things behind, if they're not needed. However interesting I found the highly-skilled process of constructing a Wiltshire hoop-raved wagon...it brought nothing to the plot. I've weeded out every bit of too-modern sounding dialogue, written in unthinking full-flow, as I can find; I've checked which wild flowers would have been blooming in the months I've set my story, and I've agonised over whether a character would be 'fascinated with' or 'fascinated by' her lover's body. I have, in short, driven myself quite batty.

A Wiltshire hoop-raved wagon. Would often have been painted bright blue, with the wheels and details picked out in scarlet; and would have lasted donkey's years.

The sudden loss of this soul focus of my attention is a strange feeling. I've only been half in the room for the past six weeks, as I worked on the redraft. Time to call up some friends, and apologise for being glassy-eyed company of late... I feel relieved, as I said, and also a little bereft. I find myself wondering whether I should have found a way to work in the details of the hoop-raved wagon after all... But, once I've hit send I am strict about doing nothing else to the script until I hear back from my editor. And now, a few days on, real life is slowly returning to mind!

The book is due for publication in the UK next June. The script now goes off to a copy editor, who will fact-check it and pick out any glaring continuity errors (always a danger when some sections have been rewritten); after that it'll go to be type-set and then proof read, both by me and by a professional proof reader. And I must turn my attention to the next book... Normally, by this stage, I'll have had an idea about what I want to write next. This time, I haven't an inkling. This latest book has taken up a huge amount of my energy and brain-space for the past nine months - perhaps more than any of my other novels to date. I am - tentatively - extremely proud of it, and I think I need a few weeks to recover from it!

I'll leave you with a few fantastic facts about rural Wiltshire a century ago that I wasn't able to work into the narrative:

Wiltshire folk were superstitious about elder trees and wouldn't cut them down, as it was said that Judas hanged himself from an elder tree.

Vertical stones set on top of a wall around a well, and designed to keep children out, were called 'cock-ups'.

A treat for the children when the butcher's wagon came around was a lump of suet to gnaw on. Yuk!

Obby was short for Albert.

When it came to making wagon wheels, only heart of elm would do for the hubs; only ash for the shafts, and only oak for the spokes.

Folks would say that spring had come when you could step on nine daisies at once.

Fact and Fiction by Katherine Webb

Something interesting I'm often asked in interviews is how I balance fact and fiction in my novels. And it's a very important balancing act! I often tell the following anecdote: I used to belong to a writer's group in Berkshire, which ran a twice yearly short story competition, just within the group, and on a theme. One spring, the theme was the town where we were based, Newbury. The stories were judged and scored anonymously, and the one I rated the highest, and which went on to win, gave an overview of the history of Newbury itself via the rise and fall, the life and times of one Newbury family across the generations. It was well written and I was pleased to have learned something of the town's fascinating history. Except, I hadn't. When I approached the author of the story to congratulate him, he told me airily that he'd made it all up.

Newbury clock tower in the middle of the last century, from the Francis Frith Collection

I was outraged! I thought I'd learnt something. I thought he'd done research. I knew his characters were fictional, but I'd supposed their actions to be based in historical fact. At that time, I had just started to write my first novel with a historical setting, and the incident taught me a valuable lesson. I wanted readers to come away from one of my books entertained and moved, but also able to feel that they'd learned something. And if they'd learned something about a piece of history that was completely new to them, then so much the better. I think there has to be a bond of trust between historical fiction author and reader - trust that, however extraordinary the story, the author has done enough research to bring their story alive, and to portray society, place, manners and politics of that era as faithfully as possible.

Because if you can just 'make it all up', what's the point? You might as well write a fantasy novel (though this might be the trained historian in me speaking!). And it's often easy to spot when an author hasn't done enough research into their era, and can't furnish the story with real detail. But here's a big but: what if the demands of your story go beyond the established facts? In The English Girl, which is set during the Jebel War of 1958-59 in Oman, I needed a certain set of characters to meet. But, realistically, I knew from my research that they probably never would have. So, I tweaked history. I had officers of the SAS, newly deployed in the battle, find the time to have dinner at the British Residence in Muscat, so that my characters could get involved with each other. In The Night Falling, I wrote one of my fictional characters into a real life massacre of starving Italian farm workers by fascists landowners - though I was careful to give the names of those who really did die at the back of the book. In both cases, I stuck to the true course of events as closely as I could in all other respects.

Now framed and on my wall, the photo of a Puglian peasant wedding from 1920, found in a Devizes junk shop, that initially inspired The Night Falling.

I'm similarly nervous about using real-life characters in my novels. With a very few exceptions - the Sultan of Oman, for example - everybody with a speaking part in one of my novels is fictional. I don't even like the term 'based upon', because it still implies some filching of a famous person's actual life, career or personality - putting words into their mouths and deeds into their lives that they never in fact spoke or did, though there are a great many authors who are quite happy to do this, and make it work very well. I tend to go with the term 'inspired by'. To give a couple of examples, my character Maude Vickery, intrepid Victorian female explorer in The English Girl, was inspired by Gertrude Bell (as I talked about in an earlier blog). In A Half Forgotten Song, the character of Charles Aubrey was inspired by the charismatic, Welsh, post-impressionist artist, Augustus John.

Augustus John, photographed in 1914. Brooding charisma present and correct.

In both cases, I took themes from these characters' lives - what it was that made them extraordinary - and used that as the starting point for a character of my own - one who embodied what had fired my imagination about the original, but one in whom I could invest the personality, motivations, and titillations I needed for my story. I once heard Phillip Pulman say that writers are like magpies, and I think this is particularly true for historical writers. We can roam all of history, picking out the bright, exciting parts that catch our eye, and gathering them together. With Augustus John, for example, it was his beautiful drawings of women that caught my eye - I'd known them for years, having worked in a printing factory in my summer holidays from college, where we printed a book of his work. Like a magpie, I swooped in on the idea of a man of huge talent and irresistible magnetism, who loved women and saw no reason to limit himself to his wife, mistress or mistress's sister... But I had no wish to write a biography of the man. I wanted to take a man like him, and put him into extraordinary events of my own creation.

Augustus John's 1924 portrait of Alice Appleton Hay

But it's a tricky business. Obviously, no serious author of historical fiction would include glaring anachronisms, or deliberately set out to rewrite history to better suit their plot. But at some point, unless you are writing a serious, factual tome, this rewriting of history is bound to take place. So perhaps that is the bond of trust between reader and writer - that the author will only tweak in small ways - and in plausible ways - in a wider setting of historical accuracy; and that the reader will forgive them for it, and enjoy the story as much as the history!

Killing your darlings (then resurrecting one) by Imogen Robertson

Marie Bashkirtseff - In the Studio

The Paris Winter is out in paperback this week, so while I’m copy-editing my next book, part of me is also wandering the boulevards, peering in at the shop-windows and watching the young women climbing the stairs to their studio to continue their training as artists. It is one of the great pleasures of writing for a living that you get to swoop mentally across a city, checking the waters rising, being a ghost at Maxim's or Bal Taberin or examining diamonds in the jeweller’s shops on rue Royale. You start watching your characters and as they and the plot develop you start noticing something like a novel taking shape. It can be very exciting. There are also moments though, when rather than wafting around the world you’ve created, you find yourself slamming into a brick wall.

Writing a novel involves any number of highs and lows, and normally at least twice in the process I feel like throwing the laptop out of the window and finding something more sensible to do for a living. Then I remember I’m not trained for anything else, and being self-employed for this long has turned me too feral for office work so I have to sit back down and get on with it. There were some real highs writing Paris Winter, there were some brick wall moments too.

The helpful cat

When I first delivered the manuscript to Headline, and to my editor there, Flora Rees, it had a modern narrative running through it. There were bits of it I was very pleased with, but after getting my notes back from my Flora (and getting married - though I’m not sure that had anything to so with it), and re-reading the manuscript I had to admit that it just wasn’t working. I was on my extended honeymoon in Portugal at the time and I remember the sinking feeling in my stomach as I skyped Flora, my mother-in-law’s cat curled up next to the keyboard, to say I thought it all needed to come out. Flora had, I think, come to the same conclusion some time ago and was gently hinting me in that direction, so I suspect she wasn’t surprised. I also remember she seemed a lot less worried than I was about throwing away a third of the book. The next few days involved a real slaughter of the darlings, as scenes and characters melted away and left no trace behind them in the manuscript. Once that painful decision was made though, the novel blossomed. Suddenly there was room for the story to breathe and I’m afraid I began to forget all about my modern characters and their stories. Playing with the cat helped. Also having an understanding husband and a shop down the road that sold a decent white wine for one euro a bottle turned out to be very important. 

The understanding husband

I entirely rewrote the book in a month and it was incredibly satisfying. In the general slaughter though, I also killed one of Flora’s darlings. It was a scene towards the end of the novel, a key one, and I entirely rewrote it so it was seen from a different character’s perspective, and took place in a different part of the city. Flora, while of course understanding my reasoning, was sorry to see it go. Which brings me back to the paperback. As well as having a lovely quote on it from Manda Scott and a banner announcing it was short-listed for the CWA Historical Dagger, it also has a bonus track. We have put in that missing scene as an extra at the end of the novel. Has anyone else every done anything like that? And if you had the chance to resurrect a lost scene like this, adding to the end of the novel as an sort of ‘alternative reality’ for your readers, would you? And as readers, would you be interested is discovering bits of what might have been? 

The Paris Winter (with bonus track) is available from Thursday.

Radical Chic by Imogen Robertson

First of all, if anyone missed Louise's post yesterday please go and read it at once. It's great and it's important. I'll wait. 

Secondly, my apologies if you are interested more in the history part of this blog rather than the writing bit. This post is definitely about the latter. Ok? I'll get on with it now.

Until I was 16 I went to Hummersknott Comprehensive in Darlington, then for my A-Levels I went to my father’s old Public School, Cheltenham College. As a result the first question in my first interview at Cambridge was: ‘So, Miss Robertson, you gained some radical chic by attending a comprehensive, then switched to the public school system when it really mattered, hmmm?’ Though the question had remained seared in my memory for the last twenty years, I can’t remember what my answer was. I’m sure though that it began with a certain amount of throat clearing.

My career as a writer (I love starting sentences like that, although we all know the word career has invisible quotation marks around it), began when I started going to poetry workshops run by Roddy Lumsden. The workshops started that very important mental transition between ‘Writers are all beloved of the Gods; it’s about innate talent and if I can’t write perfectly straight away, it means I can’t write,’ and the rather more useful: ‘Holy Hell, if I actually work at this and read widely and critically I can get better at it.’ 

I remember going to my first class worried that the other attendees were going to be pensioners writing about cheerful robins in rhyming couplets. Apologies to pensioners and cheerful robins, and rhyming couplets for that matter - I’ve nothing against any of them - but I was thirty and a TV director at the time so inclined to be a bit of an arse occasionally. Anyway, when I arrived in the strip lit grey classroom of destiny I found that I was the oldest and by far the least cool student in the room. After that life was full of little popping noises as my assumptions and presumptions exploded one after another. I went to  Roddy’s workshops regularly for more than five years, so from the time I started writing seriously to the point where I’d published three novels, thereby jumping the money fence from poetry to crime fiction. I’ll go back to the workshops, which are now at The Poetry School, as soon as I can find a brain cell that isn’t fried by deadlines and historical research. During those years I met, worked with, drank with and admired some brilliant poets, many of whom now have collections out in the big, bad world. I do admit though that those words, 'radical chic' have come back to me at various times; during readings in bars and warehouses, standing in crowds of whooping beautiful people, and admiring the panache and performing skills of many of the poets reading. 

One of the ‘younger and cooler than me’ people in the room in those first weeks of workshops was Wayne Holloway Smith. Wayne is a superb writer and one of the best readers I’ve ever heard. He also knows how to throw a very chic party and at the beginning of this year he decided to hold a series of salons with banjo playing, readings, mini-lectures, amazing food and exquisite hand drawn maps to lead the audience to his flat in the backstreets near Kings Cross. I suspect that I was invited because Wayne knew I was likely to turn up with some really excellent cheese, but he covered well by asking me to write a short story. As it was February, I came up with a 'to be read round the glowing embers, M.R. James' type thing. 

Now Sidekick Books, creators of some of the chicest books out there, have published an anthology taken from the readings given at Wayne’s salons. My story is in there too. The collection is called ‘Follow the Trail of Moths’ and is beautifully illustrated by Sophie Gainsley. Please buy it at once. Again, I suspect I’m in there because Wayne knew I'd bring cheese to the launch at his new spacious flat in the back streets near Limehouse. I did. The flat was heaving with beautiful and interesting people, the readings started late and while the buses and DLR trains passed in the background, we passed a bottle of whisky round the audience, listened and whooped.

There is though something rather unpleasant hiding in that original question from my Cambridge interview, which is, I think, the invisible suggestion that radical chic is all a comprehensive education is good for. There are also always plenty of people around happy to suggest the poetry world is meaningless and pointless once the chic is removed. Both suggestions are rubbish. The poets I’ve met and heard in the classes and at readings are the frontline troops of language. They use English with more bravery, imagination and inventiveness than any other group of writers I know. Working with them taught me what slippery and subtle creatures words are, always telling more than you think possible, creating impossible worlds out of the everyday and music that can rise up out of a page as a single voice or with the force of a massed choir. So what I got from Hummersknott and from the London poetry scene was not a touch of radical chic, what I got was a hell of an education.    

Recovery Position - Imogen Robertson

There are several advantages in being married to an itinerant cheesemonger. One is that because my husband, Ned, has a portfolio career in cheese, he also does some cheese making and that’s how we ended up spending a week on a farm in Somerset just as the weather got good.

Not sure about you guys, but once the high-as-a-kite feeling of finishing a novel wears off, I normally get very tired and usually slightly ill. It’s a pain, but it’s also part of the process. If you spend several months pushing yourself hard to write a decent book there will be payback, mental and physical. I recommend recovering on a farm while your husband makes goat's cheese. There now follows some of the reasons why. 

Quiet. I live on a main road in London and while I was writing the book there were some buildings works going on nearby. This meant as well as the sirens there was a loud semi-continual beeping from cherry-picker cranes that was… well, let’s just say unhelpful. On the farm all I could hear was the sound of the wind in the trees, birdsong, twice a day the low thrum of the milking machines, goats bleating and the occasional pig. 

Looking but not needing to see. There are lots of things to look at on a farm, but no one is expecting you to comment on them, capture them in prose, work them into the fabric of your story so they have emotional and narrative significance as well as just being interesting in themselves, so you just get to look at stuff with your brain in neutral. There was something about the time of year that meant that at dawn we were woken by the light coming in through the neo-gothic windows, and it made an astonishing gold pattern on the wall opposite. 

People, but not parties. I could lie out on the lawn and read, but there was enough activity, Ned, his fellow cheese makers, the owner and the other farm workers coming and going to make coffee, make calls and so on, so that I could remember I was a member of the human race, but I didn't need to be very proactive about it. Then in the evenings there was a chance for conversation and staring at the sunset, watching the light fade in the garden and listening to other people’s stories - mostly of travel and food. 

Fresh reading. The farm is also full of interesting books I hadn’t read.  

New things. For instance, watching the cheese being made, the sound of the whey draining from the curd as it knits together in little moulds. Or really looking at goats. Or being really looked at by curious cows. 

So you relax and absorb it all, the light, the words the quiet and you let it settle in you. I also recommend having Radio 3 on in the background when you are doing the washing up.

I studied Russian at university, and lived there a year. I didn’t become a great Russian scholar but I picked up some new habits, such as the slightly flamboyant way I now write my capital ‘M’s and vodka, but the one I’m thinking of now is the superstition that before you leave your house to go on a journey, you should sit for a moment in silence. My Russian hosts explained to me this was so your heart/soul/spirit had a chance to catch up with you and come with you on your trip (it’s also quite a handy way to give yourself a chance to remember what else you’ve forgotten in the flurry). I thought of that again in Somerset - the importance of just taking time to be still for a minute. We need those periods of silence, setting your brain in a neutral gear, letting your rather weary heart/mind/spirit catch up with you again.

Just before we left Ned and I walked into the village and sat in the pub garden. I started talking to him a bit more about the next book I want to write, but in broken sentences, half-thoughts. Ned was tired and content just to listen and let it come at its own pace. Then he went back to the bar during a particularly long pause and when he came back with another cold pint of cider, I had a couple of pages of prose - a short monologue from one of my characters - in my note book and the feeling that some how I was catching up with myself again, coming back to myself in the sunlight and the breeze shifting the leaves above our heads.

Imogen’s latest book is The Paris Winter. It was short-listed for the CWA Historical Dagger 2013. Andrew Taylor won it, but that’s ok because his book is excellent and he’s very nice.

And here is some info on one of the cheeses Ned was making.

'Spooky' - Serendipity in Historical Fiction by A L Berridge

HEAT. It's bad enough for those of us indoors, but as I sit sweating unattractively over my keyboard I can't help thinking of the British soldiers who fought under a baking sun at the Battle of the Alma. Laden with full kit, these men were so desperate with thirst that they stopped to scoop water from the river right under the fire of the Russian cannon. Those who passed through the Bourliouk vineyard snatched handfuls of grapes as they ran, and many of the corpses collected afterwards were found to have grapes still in their mouths, the skin unpopped between their teeth.

It's two years now since I wrote about it, but it was just as easy to imagine back then. It was usually-chilly April when I went to the Crimea, but the sun seemed to know what I'd come for, and blazed over the Alma as viciously as it had in September 1854.

The Alma the day I saw it

It wasn't the only fortuitous bit of weather. Travelling down from Simferopol Airport we passed through a section of fog so dense it made me think of the Battle of Inkerman, but when we stopped to ask directions the sight of a hitherto invisible road sign made the back of my neck prickle. Інкерман, it read. Inkerman. The fog lay as thick as it had in November 1854, and I was there.

The battle of Inkerman

Luck, of course – but it’s the kind that seems to happen a lot with historical novelists. If you get five of us together with a bottle of wine then sooner or later the anecdotes will tumble out – lucky guesses with description, names and places we thought we’d made up and hadn’t, plot twists that turn out to have really happened. It seems at times more like serendipity – that moment where historical truth touches our own fiction, and the border between the two worlds melts away.

Woollarawarre Bennelong

Nor is the phenomenon limited to novelists. My own first glimpse of it came 22 years ago when I was researching for a television project on the life of Woollarawarre Bennelong, and trying to find out what he saw and did on his visit to Britain in 1793.  

Bennelong was an Aboriginal native of New South Wales, and the director was thrilled with the ‘culture-clash’ scenes of his hero visiting the theatre and being presented to King George, but we also wanted to touch something deeper – a trace of Britain’s own ancient heritage, and the way Bennelong might have responded to it.

The scene I kept picturing was Bennelong at Stonehenge. This dignified man of the Eora people, forced to dress in the ridiculous English fashions of the 18th century, suddenly put face to face with this: 

The director was of the Eora himself, and simply desperate to do the scene, but unfortunately I found Bennelong lodged successively at London, Eltham and Frognal, and was rather unlikely to have taken a little daytrip into Wiltshire. Then I paid one last visit to the Newspaper Library at Colindale and found a little paragraph about Bennelong’s arrival in the London Times. Unusually, his ship had landed him at Falmouth, and a look at old maps told me the rest. The route he would have taken had been the regular Falmouth-London carriage road for centuries, and the relevant section is what we now know by the unromantic name of the A303.

Here.

I’ll always remember the director’s response when I told him – perhaps because both his accent and word choice have since been immortalized by Dame Edna Everage. ‘Spooky,’ he said in a tone of awe. ‘That’s just… spooky.’

It wasn’t really. Lucky chances like that are massively outnumbered by the times our ideas don’t work out – which we conveniently choose to forget. When I was writing ‘Into the Valley of Death’, for instance, I was very excited by a scene between my hero and Fanny Duberly, the one officer’s wife in the Light Brigade – until I found out the wretched woman refused to stay in the camp and spent her days on a ship in Balaklava harbour instead. Honestly, some of these historical figures have no consideration.

Yet still the idea of this superstitious ‘luck’ persists. It’s understandable when it comes to a matter of plot – those times we ‘make something up’ then find out afterwards it’s something that actually happened – but there are still usually logical explanations. It might be a fortunate guess, or something we once read and have since forgotten, or it might just be that our idea is so obviously likely that the only surprise would be if it hadn’t happened. I once invented a plot to kill Cardinal Richelieu, for instance, but there was nothing remotely spooky in the discovery that the plot was real. The man had so many enemies that if he’d dropped dead at a dinner party there’d have been more suspects than in an Agatha Christie.

But what if we’ve invented something very unlikely? Something wildly off the regular historical track and which we couldn’t possibly have known about? What if we write it and then find out it’s true?

I had a weird one with my first novel ‘Honour and the Sword’, when I needed a really good excuse for a French army to come charging over the Picardy-Artois border to help with my hero’s liberation. It was true the French crossed in 1640 in order to besiege Arras – but the location of my hero’s village was fixed by the plot-essential Forest of Lucheux some twenty miles to the west, and it was hard to justify an army going so far out of its way. In the end I came up with the idea of a distraction – that this was a second French army advancing on the Spanish strongholds at Aire and Béthune in order to fool the Spanish into drawing troops from Arras to meet them. It was maybe a little devious and far-fetched, but it was possible and it did the trick.

And rather more. Weeks later I was browsing an amateur site with photographs of siege works, and stopped in disbelief when he made blithe mention of the French ‘distraction advance’ against Aire and Béthune. No sources were mentioned, no means of verification, and when I e-mailed the site owner he could only say regretfully that he thought he’d ‘heard it somewhere’. I turned to the experts and asked my distinguished colleagues on the academic H-France list-serv if they’d heard of such a plan, but not even they could help. Then at last Robin Briggs of All Souls said he’d come across a reference in an antiquated life of Richelieu, and the source seemed to be the memoirs of the Seigneur de Puységur. If I could only find those…

But there aren’t many 17th century French memoirs in British libraries, and this was easier said than done. At last I ran to earth a copy on the German site of AbeBooks, forked out an eye-watering sum of money, and bought the thing, because I simply had to know. I’m allowing myself the indulgence of posting a photo of the paragraph, because I can still remember the extraordinary sensation I felt when I first read it.

It was true, all of it. It really happened, and exactly for the reasons I thought I’d made up. Now that, as my Australian director would have said, is spooky.

But is it really? All I’d done was think myself into the mind of a French general in the situation in 1640, and if I was doing my job properly then it shouldn’t be surprising if I’d actually come to the correct conclusion. But it still feels like more than that. Writers are superstitious beasts, and the support of history can seem like a kind of ‘sign’ telling us we’re on the right track – that what we’re writing is in some way ‘meant’. That sounds bonkers, of course, but writing is an insecure business, brilliant ideas don’t come to order, and just as we personify inspiration into a mystical ‘Muse’ we can also look on historical affirmation as a kind of guardian angel guiding our steps to the truth.

Maybe literally. Lots of writers speak as if their stories and characters are real, and for historical writers it’s sometimes tempting to stray even further into belief. For ‘Into the Valley of Death’, for instance, I decided to make a plot character out of the mysterious ‘unknown officer’ who gave seriously dodgy orders at the Battle of the Alma, but when I set out to invent incidents to keep the story going I found he was already there. Balaklava, Inkerman, a strange cavalry patrol – the man had slipped under the historians’ radar for 150 years, but he was absolutely everywhere I looked. By the time I finished the book I was convinced the story I had written was more fact than fiction, and I’ve since been thrilled to find a couple of academic historians who agree.

It’s always wonderful when it works like that. Sometimes it feels as if we’re not ‘making things up’ at all, but merely blowing away the dust round a dinosaur skeleton to expose the story that was there all the time.

Maybe what my next book will look like...

But it’s not spooky. It’s deduction, that’s all, using the facts that exist to look for a pattern, and sometimes stumbling on one that’s real. If we start believing there’s more to it than that, then it’s time for the little men in white coats.

Maybe.

One last anecdote, one from my current book, and the one that decided me to write this post. Without giving away too much plot, this is how it works:

In my Crimean novel ‘Into the Valley of Death’ I established an English traitor and master villain with the innocent name of ‘Mr Shepherd’. For ‘Enemy at the Gates’ I’ve expanded his role to include the (genuine) network of local spies who did business round Balaklava, and needed the character of a young Crimean-Tatar wineseller to be one of those loyal spies. My knowledge of Crimean-Tatar is non-existent, so I googled to get a list of Tartar names and chose (randomly) the name 'Çobanzade’. 

Crimean Tatars 1862

As the book went on the plot expanded. I needed Shepherd to have had an affair with a Crimean-Tatar woman at least twenty years before the war, but for her to be still loyal to him now. It only took a minute to invent a reason for her continued loyalty – there was an illegitimate child and Shepherd is still supporting him. Better still, make the son the Tatar wineseller, link them all together and kill two narrative birds with one stone. Perfect.

Two days ago I needed another Tatar name and found a different website that even gave the names their Tatar meanings. Among those listed was ‘Çobanzade’, and I couldn’t believe it when I saw what it meant.

Son of shepherd.

Explain that one, Sherlock. When I gave Shepherd his name I had no idea he’d ever appear again in another book. When I gave Çobanzade his name I had no idea what it meant or that I’d ever want him to be more than ‘Tatar Wineseller #1’. The name could have meant 'big nose' or 'rose of spring', but it meant Son of Shepherd and it had been there all the time.

Coincidence, of course, and I do understand that. I’ll only say that it gave me that prickling feeling again, and I bet you’ll understand that.

Because it’s not just me, is it? We all have these stories, and I’ve heard far better than mine. So come on, ladies (and gentlemen, if you're out there) - own up and make me feel less weird by telling me yours.