Historical Fiction for Teens? You must be mad! - Celia Rees

... was the reaction I got when I first pitched my proposal for Witch Child. I had the idea in about 1996 when I was doing some research for a completely different kind of book: a contemporary, supernatural thriller called Soul Taker. I was looking for info on magicians, necromancers, bad guys who could do real magic, in the Oxford Book of the Supernatural by D.J. Enright.



I didn't really find what I was looking for, but I did find an account of Matthew Hopkins, self appointed Witch Finder General. I'd heard of Hopkins, seen the 1960's Hammer Horror movie, and knew that he was a nasty piece of work, responsible for the deaths of maybe 300 people (mostly women) in and around East Anglia at the time of the English Civil War. As I refreshed my memory, an idea began to nag at me and I immediately abandoned what I was supposed to be doing and looked him up in another book which showed this woodcut of him, complete with witches and familiars.

I was looking at this picture and thinking, speculating about what it meant to be a witch. I thought maybe it was part of a European shamanistic tradition that involved a knowledge of healing, a certain amount of clairvoyant ability and perhaps a little light shape shifting. In British folklore, witches were supposed to be able to turn themselves into hares. In the words of the Scottish witch, Isobel Gowdie:

I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sych and meickle care

I did not think that it had anything to do with worshipping the Devil. I thought that was likely to all be in the minds of the persecutors. Then I began to wonder, where else in the world had a tradition of shamanism at this time? Simultaneously, I was beginning to make up a story about a girl who is a witch, or is being brought up in this tradition by her grandmother. What if a Matthew Hopkins lookalike comes to their village, tries the grandmother and hangs her? What happens to the girl? Where can she go? Shift back now to the parallel thought - where in the world did shamanistic people live? America. Settlers going to America took orphans with them, I knew from my American Cookbook (information can come from the most unlikely sources) so she could go with a group Puritans. They did not just take orphan teens with them, they also took their fears and superstitions which would culminate in the last great outbreak of Western witch persecution in Salem, Massachusetts. I knew all this, but something else was intriguing me now. What if this girl met Native Americans? She would be caught between two groups of people: one who would revere her as a person of power, the other would want to hang her.

It was a strong idea and I knew I wanted to write it, even though part of me wanted to unthink it immediately. It would involve a lot of research and I'd never written a straight historical fiction before. Apart from that, I had to interest a modern teen audience. I decided to make the historical part into a diary, to bind the reader to the girl, and that immediately opened another realm of possibilities. I really wanted to do it now all I had to do was convince a publisher. That was the hard part. Historical for teenagers? Are you mad? Dead in the water. They just aren't interested. So I took that as a 'No'. Undaunted, I set off on another path. I wrote a long, detailed proposal and sent it in for an Arts Council Grant. Nothing doing here, either. So I put it in a drawer. Then, completely out of the blue, I got a phone call from my agent. Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury was looking for somebody to write a book about a girl who was a witch. Would I be interested?


The rest, as they say, is history. In 2000, Bloomsbury published the book beautifully; Candlewick Press did the same in America in the following year. The rights were sold in 28 other countries and the book is studied in schools here in the U.K. and abroad. Turns out teens have an appetite for historical fiction after all. I became a writer of mainly historical fiction and I like to think that I helped to break down the received prejudice against a genre that has the power to enthrall, entertain, inform the mind and excite the imagination all at the same time.

Website: www.celiarees.com

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Flights of Fancy by Penny Dolan

The Harry Potter stars have done their final publicity rounds and the film is now at a cinema near you. When the story ends, will the audience hurry out, ignoring the long lists of credits for all the production teams and various technicians?

I hope not. It is probably the only time those people will get their moment of honour. By the time the film hits the small screen, no matter how long they had worked on Harry’s fictional world, the names of these small makers will be shrunken ciphers,

Is this truly a History Girls post, you wonder? It is, it is!

Way before the movie industry existed there were  - as there still are – hosts of  “backstage” people working in the theatre, creating the atmosphere, the excitement, the entertainment and the very spectacle of the drama for the actors and their audiences and keeping shows running night after night, particularly during the years of the great Victorian actor managers.

I am a writer first and a historian by interest rather than by formal training, and so it happened that one day, jackdaw-wise, I seized on a bright trifle to decorate the nest of my writing. That shining object was the idea of “flying” in the theatre.

A production of Peter Pan in the vast, modern West Yorkshire Playhouse began my fascination, especially when the entire audience took in its breath as the young actors swooped overhead across the darkness with the lighting effects masking all supporting wires.

Just how, in practical terms, did they do it? And who were the “who” who made it happen? What must it feel like to soar into that space? The beginnings of a novel for older juniors were mumbling around in my mind, and that is when I wondered what child wouldn’t love to read about the experience of “flying”, to imagine they were high above the audience too?

In the theatre programme there was a listing for the Kirby Fliers.  This was, astonishingly, the same family company that worked on the original production of  “Peter Pan”, way back in 1904.

Earlier flying effects were largely created by simple ascending and descending ropes, or by some sort of trapeze, or by a pair of stagehands hauling cumbersome pulleys and devices that dragged the actor across the stage in a two-dimensional flight.

Enter George Kirby, a master stage carpenter, who revolutionised flying effects on stage. Kirby devised routines, supplied equipment and designed a pendulum system that added an extra dimension to the actor’s flight path and more realism to the scene.

Additionally, in 1889, he designed a new flying harness. It was a kind of corset that could have lines that attached and detached. It was neat enough to be concealed under a costume, could easily be unhooked once the flier had landed and needed far less backstage assistance. There is an example of such a harness in the V&A Theatre Collection.
 
George would swiftly have registered all his designs at the Patent Office, which may be why the Kirby name survives now.

The new harness was used in the first production of Peter Pan, staged on 27th December 1904  - two years after Victoria's death -   and it brought Kirby notable success.


His flying effect was so realistic there were rumours of children standing feet poised on nursery windowsills, trying to fly off to Neverland.  J.M. Barrie inserted extra lines into his script, informing children – and anxious nursemaids, aunts and parents - that nobody, even the Darling children, could fly without Tinkerbell’s sprinkling of magic fairy dust. 

George Kirby must have felt that he had been touched by fairy dust too, especially when soon after, there was a long craze for "flying ballets".  Even now, in theatres, concerts, arenas and stage shows, the artists fly on "Kirby wires".

My novel, A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E, written for older junior readers, is set well before Peter Pan was staged.  Two characters:: Vanya, the backstage mastermind of the Albion Theatre and Nick Tick, a modest genius of a clockmaker, get together. I imagined their brains and skills constructing a design for a new flying apparatus earlier than the real life inventor got his act together - sorry, Mr Kirby! -  and so they were able to bring fame to the Albion’s spectacular production of A Midsummer Nights Dream. My Mouse does fly.

I had however, to leave out my favourite Kirby Flier moment. Research is a long game, and way back when websites were scanned by pedal power, I read an anecdote about George Kirby testing out his new invention. He “flew” a boy - maybe a son? - out over the waters of, I believe, the pool at Bethnal Green Baths. What a scene to write for my boy called Mouse!

The idea was doomed. An editor told me it distracted from the main plot. The manuscript went into a drawer. By the time I got back to the tale, the Kirby website had been redesigned and the information had disappeared.

Even the Bethnal Green Baths building, over whose hygenic waters Kirby’s brave lad flew like a happier Icarus, has now been turned into several expensive apartments. Sometimes fiction gives the better endings.

Did Kirby’s anonymous child have as much fun as the actors "flying" their broomsticks above Hogwarts? I hope so.

A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E now out in paperback from Bloomsbury.

Shortlisted for the Young Quills Award.

www.pennydolan.com

Sue Purkiss: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ (LP Hartley: The Go-Between)

I’ll bet you recognise this quotation. I was firmly convinced I knew it by heart, and yet when I looked it up in Hartley’s novel I saw that I’d got it wrong. I'd thought it was ‘The past is another country’ (and to be honest, my version still sounds better to me!). Out of curiosity, I looked it up on Google, and found that many others have made the same mistake. I think perhaps it’s been conflated with another familiar quote, from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, which is something like: ‘… but that was in another country, and beside, the wench is dead.’

Whatever – it’s an example of the shivering sands of memory: we think we

know things, but we don’t. But I think perhaps the point I want to make is almost the opposite one: that we actually know more than we think we do about the way things were in the past. Let’s look at the assertion made in the second part of this quotation: ‘they do things differently there.’ Is it true? Did they do things differently in that other country which is the past?

In many ways the answer is outstandingly obvious: of course they did things differently there. They didn’t have mobile phones, for a start. But in terms of how people thought, what they cared about, how they related to each other, what they were afraid of, how they felt about life – in those terms, were they so very different from us?

My first historical novel was Warrior King, and it’s about Alfred the Great. When I go into schools and talk about it, this is the story I tell them about how I came to write it. I needed to check the story of how he burnt the cakes, I say, just for a detail in some other story I was writing (Finnegan’s Cake, since you ask, about a time-travelling dog. Still inexplicably unpublished, still available…) Obviously, the first thing I did was to turn to Google. Then I realised that the location of Alfred’s unfortunate early attempt at Masterchef was Athelney, which is only about forty minutes’ drive from where I live. I thought that Athelney would be to Alfred as Tintagel is to Arthur. At the very least there would be a bakery or a cafe called Alfred the Cake, and an array of books about the only monarch in British history to be called ‘the Great’ – so off I went.

But there were no itsy witsy shops with punning names, no explanatory pamphlets. Just a discreet plaque, an unimpressive Victorian monument – and an astonishingly evocative landscape of water and willows and glittering birds, which could hardly have changed in the eleven hundred odd years since Alfred fled to the Somerset marshes to take shelter from the Vikings.

It’s an extraordinary story. We know what happened – we know that he emerged to defeat the Danes, and then made a peace which lasted long enough for him to create a country which was stronger and safer for his people. But people then didn’t know that this was what was going to happen. He had only a few men with him – ‘a small troop’ as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it. The Vikings had conquered every other part of England apart from Wessex, and with Alfred out of the way they ‘over-rode and occupied the land of Wessex, and drove many of the people across the sea’. Surely no-one would have put money on Alfred’s chances of surviving, let alone managing to gather an army together and emerge from the marshes to defeat the Northmen.But he did. A number of things intrigued me about this. One was the drama of it: this was a real turning point – if Alfred hadn’t managed to pull it off, England would have been ruled entirely by the Danes, and today we’d be living in a different country and speaking a different language. Another was that here was an extraordinary leader – remarkable and unexpected in many ways which I haven’t space here to go into (read the book!) – and yet today, very few people know anything about him. And yet everyone’s heard of Arthur, who didn’t even exist!

But the other thing was – what was he like? What motivated him? (Apart, obviously, from the understandable wish to stay alive.) He was the youngest of five children, four of them boys. He was clever, sensitive and thoughtful. Would he ever have expected that he would become king? It seems unlikely, given his place in the family. Was he prepared for it? What went through his mind during those weeks when he was holed up in the marshes? How did he manage to persuade other people – and himself – that he could defeat Guthrum, despite all appearances? Where were his family, his wife and children, while all this was going on?

And then I wondered about the ordinary people. What effect did the endless series of battles have on them? Did they care about who ruled them, or were they too busy trying to survive to even think about it?

I wanted to explore what life was like for all these people in that other country which is the past.

They were faced with very different situations and dilemmas, but I don’t think they were so very different from us. I think it’s possible to imagine how they felt, what they thought.

But of course, I could be completely wrong. Now, how is it you can you never find a time-travelling dog when you need one…?

Sue Purkiss

History and Me by Marie-Louise Jensen

I'm another historical writer who isn't a historian. Not because I didn't love it. I did; even as a school subject. Not because I wasn't good at it. I was fine at it - it was maths I had problems with. It was simply because I loved fiction more and didn't want to pass up the chance to study English literature. And modern languages with more literature attached.

My route to history wasn't studying, or even reading historical fiction. Mainly, I just read old books. I read so many of them that the past started to feel real to me. I started with Dickens, and then went back to the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. I went further back to Jane Austen and then, fascinated by her references to The Mysteries of Udolpho, I read Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth and many other now less well-known, out-of-print books by women who thrilled audiences when the novel was in its infancy as a form. I was also enthralled by the Icelandic sagas which pre-date the European novel by quite a few centuries. Stories of such passion, violence and beauty that they take your breath away.

All these books and others are my main connection with the past - my sources and the reason for my fascination. They reveal so many of the details that history books tend to miss out as unimportant. Food, clothes, customs, how people felt and acted and fell in love. The bits that interest me more (to be honest) than Kings and Queens and wars. Yes, I'm one of those women VS Naipaul so despises for their narrow domesticity, and not ashamed of it.

I have one other big connection with the past - something I've had all my life. If I walk into an old building, be it house, castle, church or any other, I immediately start to imagine all the people who have lived and worked there through the ages and to see myself there among them. It's almost as though they are whispering to me of their hopes, dreams, heartbreaks, loves and daily lives down the years between us.

These things are my spur and inspiration to write historical fiction. The hours of careful research are what brings it all to life on the page. That is a job that didn't come easily to me at first as a non-historian. But I find I'm enjoying it more with each book. To refer back to a post earlier this week - there is so much more to recreating history than putting women into long dresses.

On Being Rubbish at History Catherine Johnson

Let’s start before it all went wrong, when I thought History was something I could do. RJ Unstead and his (is he a he?) brick sized history books complete with eyeball-shocking, gumdrop coloured illustrations. If you’re around my age 40 or 50 plus, you probably remember these books. We’ve still got one at home, the one in the picture that used to be my husbands’, Looking at History.

I had a different one, that I won at school, I loved it, mostly black and white, but 12 colour plates, and one of them I can still remember now, partly because of the colour, partly because of the woman’s name. Queen Philippa of Hainault. Which made it even better because that was, and is, a tube stop; a tangible reference point in my world, the eastern most outpost of the Central Line on the London Underground.

Queen Philippa was pictured riding a fantastic white horse with dangly plaits, wearing a knock ‘em dead twelfth century frock. I would have given my right arm to be her.

If this was history, my eight-year-old self said, give me more….

I lapped up history projects which involved making Neolithic axes out of lamb bones, and my projects reached their acme with a particularly fine rendering of Cortez vs. The Aztecs in gold on black sugar paper. Go on; ask me anything about Quetzalcoatl or Xipe totec….

I loved the Sunday afternoon serials, BBC costume dramas and films like The Amazing Mr Blunden. (Which I saved up and saw four times). I loved the outfits and most of all I loved the stories.

However I was not old enough then to realise that I was not good at history. I did not find this out until secondary school. History was no longer interesting. It wasn’t outfits that touched the ground, or horses, or high drama. It was Corn Laws. And more Corn Laws. And some more Corn Laws. It was writing essays that had no smudges and it was regurgitating the dates of various Victorian Prime Ministers.


Oh and did I mention Corn Laws?

History was not for me. They chucked me off the exam course because my results were embarrassingly poor, and that was that. And anyway, I was 14 and only interested in making my own history, so it didn’t sting.

I came back to history when I read a wonderful book, Staying Power, by Peter Fryer. I would recommend it to anyone, it’s a scholarly book, but easy to pick up and dip into, and full of the most amazing people. It’s a history of Black and Asian people in Britain from Roman times. Suddenly I had a valid an excuse to dress up in cloaks and ride horses in my stories.

The first person I read about (and thought I had discovered, of course) was John Ystumllyn. He lived in the west of Snowdonia near Dolgellau. I tried writing about him for years, There was even a TV programme in development, but I reckon they had the same problem as me, his life (after his kidnap and sale) was all too nice, too successful; he married a local girl, had lots of middle class, musician or shop owning children. There was not enough drama.

But it struck me, reading through the many little personal histories in this brick of a book, that here were the tools I needed to write people like me back into British history.

By the time I wrote my first historical novel I think I was old enough to have forgotten I was supposed to be rubbish at history and just remembered how much I enjoyed it.

P.S. I couldn't scan my picture of John Ystumllyn so I have included a still from Rough Crossings, a BBC2 programme by Simon Schama which I wrote the dramatic inserts for. Just in case any of my history teachers that are still alive...

Researching Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper

Years ago, when I first started writing, I asked an (unpublished) historical novelist if it was difficult finding out all she needed to know for a book set in, say, the 18th Century, and she answered airily that it wasn’t; she just “put the women in long dresses.”

Hmm. If I’d have done that with FALLEN GRACE (out this month in the UK in paperback) I wouldn’t have had half the fun, because the research unearthed (sorry!) hearsefuls of fascinating stuff about Victorian funeral practices that I could not only use, but which affected, shaped and developed the plot.

For me, research is absolutely the best part of writing a book. I think one of the reasons for this is because there are history-shaped gaps in my education and doing research for whatever book I happen to be writing helps to fill in those gaps. I kill two birds: find out stuff and get material for whatever I’m working on.

The idea for FALLEN GRACE first began with my perhaps slightly odd interest in catacombs, funerals, mausoleums and all the gothic paraphernalia associated with a Victorian death: the glass coffin carriages, the mutes, feathermen and horses with black plumes. I was also captivated by things like the giving of black gloves or jewellery to the chief mourners, the draping of aristocratic hedges and windows in black crepe, the sending of cards inviting one to “accompany the corpse” to its final resting place, and so on.

Mourning wear, too: widows were encouraged to mourn at the very height of fashion and it was regarded as an insult to a man’s memory if his grieving wife chose to have less than the absolute best (ie, most fashionably expensive) in the way of gowns and jewellery. At one time there were three mourning warehouses in Oxford Street ready and willing to despatch their dressmakers across the country and supply everything a grieving family could possibly want in the way of black garments.


Once I’d absorbed and been fascinated by all these bits of trivia, I had to decide what to do with them. A plot was needed, so I invented a Victorianesque one complete with a tragic heroine, two wicked scoundrels in top hats, a lost baby, a secret inheritance and a love that dared not speak its name (no, not in that sort of way, but between different classes). I also wanted a real person in my book, and who better than Charles Dickens, who had been known to abhor undertakers, saying they were “dealers in death”?

Dickens (after I had ensured that he was in London at the time I wanted him to be) was duly added to the mix, and it was then, when I was still researching and trying to tie everything together, that I discovered the Necropolis Railway, that rather marvellous steam train which ran from Waterloo to Brookwood, taking mourners and their coffins first, second or third class to be buried in leafy Surrey.

So, I began FALLEN GRACE with my main character getting on the steam train with a “precious bundle” under her arm and the book came to its climax 250 or so pages later in the coffin depository which used to be part of Waterloo station. The train was the final link that I needed to pull together all the different elements and was an essential and valuable part of the plot. I’d never have discovered it if I’d been content to “put the women into long dresses.”

Watch a trailer for the book here.

SITTING IN MY SOUP by H.M. Castor

How dare I? That was my first thought. And my second, and my third... Not just how dare I write a novel about Henry VIII? (and that seemed risky enough) but how dare I write it in the first person?

How could I be audacious (or presumptuous) enough to attempt to see through these eyes?

But I felt I had no choice. And the resulting book, VIII, (which will be published this coming October) is not just my forty-somethingth book (I have a hopeless and possibly superstitious inability to keep track of the numbers) but a life-changing event for me.

I would like to attempt to tell you why.

When I began work on VIII, I had already been reading about Henry (or skirting closely around him) for thirty years. My obsession with Tudor history began at primary school, continued through my teenage years, and took me on to a university degree in which I specialised, whenever given the choice, in the sixteenth century. Thereafter, my tottering pile of bedside reading has rarely been without something related to the subject.

Before VIII, I had dipped my toe into writing about the Tudors, but only in the form of non-fiction: I wrote biographies of Henry, as well as of other historical figures, for junior school readers. I had written fiction too but, though the idea attracted me, had never dared venture into historical fiction. Here formal training as a historian can, I think, prove a disincentive. You are taught that speculation must only go so far and no further. And, besides, I felt such reverence for the best academic historians (including, closest to home, my intimidatingly brilliant sister Helen Castor)... not to mention for the scholarly and thrilling historical novels already out there. The Lymond Chronicles, by the late and very great Dorothy Dunnett, have always loomed especially large on my mental horizon, since they shook me to the core (in the best possible way) when I read them as a teenager.

How dare I?

The truth was, I was at a crisis point in my writing life. Lucky enough to have had so many books published, and having written each one as skilfully and (I hope) entertainingly as I knew how, I was nevertheless achingly dissatisfied with myself as a writer. I hardly knew what was wrong, let alone how to remedy it, but what I did know was that the gut instinct that had driven me to write through all these years had, paradoxically, not been able to take part in the writing itself. It was like a hunger, and my writing seemed to be my attempts to feed it... I was eating and eating, but evidently not choosing the food it wanted, for I was only becoming hungrier still. What did it want to say, and how on earth could I make it speak?

It actually reached the point where I formed this rather melodramatic thought: I don't want to die never having found out what it - what I - want to express.

I had tried, believe me. Repeatedly I had, so to speak, gritted my teeth and clenched everything and tried to push this gut instinct into communicating with me. It hadn't worked, and what I can best describe as my 'thinking mind' came to two conclusions, neither of which were comforting:

1. It's an illusion; there is nothing there.
2. You're not trying hard enough!

...because hadn't I learnt, in pretty much every aspect of my life as a child, that above all one must try one's best? If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

And then the idea for VIII arrived. Big, bold, and so exciting that I could barely sit still. I believed I had something new to say about Henry VIII. Something historically valid, but something that could only be expressed through a novel - and a first-person narrative at that.

Now I knew categorically that the clenched teeth, grimacing trying would not succeed... neither could I think my way into Henry's psyche. I had to find another way to work. But what was it? And could I discover it in the nick of time for this novel - the most important (and ambitious) book I had ever written?

Yes. (Oh, the relief, the joy - even now, months later - of being able to give this answer.) And perhaps it was the enormity of the challenge that meant, at last, that I had to find it. I had no choice but to throw away, pretty much, everything I knew about trying to write.

Trying to write... As Marion Milner, the wonderful writer and psychoanalyst, discovered and detailed in her books (such as A Life of One's Own (1934) and the gloriously titled On Not Being Able To Paint (1950)) it was that very act of trying that was the problem. In An Experiment in Leisure (1937) she says: "the ideas I needed for my work would... come silently nosing into my mind after I had given up all attempt to look for them."

I found that I too needed to stand aside - alert, watchful, but wanting nothing, straining after nothing, simply noticing the quality of intense interest that led me in certain directions. I discovered it was vital not to rush to pummel these clues into shape or quiz them into extinction. The process seemed akin to building up a big splattish lump of clay prior to moulding it, or sitting in a soup of things that I knew were significant, but had as yet no idea why. My job was simply to sit there attentively, steeping myself in the rich mixture, waiting for something to emerge like a creature from the depths.

Of course my thinking mind, the one that tries, the administrative will, if you like, is immensely important, vital in all my research and in the nuts and bolts of finishing the book. But I have found that it must not occupy the driving seat the whole time. It cannot do the job on its own, much though it would like to - anxious though it is about handing the reins to anyone else.

There is a wonderful photograph of Alberto Giacometti by Herbert Matter, which I keep, in postcard form, on my desk. You can see it here. I used to assume - when I was wringing my hands over work - that it was a picture of exhaustion and perhaps despair. Now my view of it has changed entirely. It seems to me to be a portrait of intense internal focus: Giacometti has shut his eyes to concentrate on the whole vivid world that exists within.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about that. But - with apologies to Giacometti, if he is standing in the spirit at my elbow - it perhaps does not matter so much; I keep the picture on my desk because of what it symbolises for me. When I look at it, it reminds me to listen, to wait...

VIII is at the printers' now, being prepared for its October publication. I am sending it off into the world nervously, of course - eager and curious to know whether what struck such a reverberating chord with me will make sense to others too. I am anxious, but the aching dissatisfaction has gone.

I wonder if my long struggle to find what's right for me, creatively, is unusual? I tend to assume that many (perhaps even most) other writers tap into their instinctive side naturally... instinctively! But of course I don't know how it is for anyone else; I can only describe my own experience. I can only sit here in my soup. How joyous - and dangerous - and nerve-wracking (but thrilling!) - it is to be here at last.

VIII will be published by Templar on October 1st 2011.

LINKS

H.M. Castor's (embryonic, as yet) website

H.M. Castor also writes as Harriet Castor

View the trailer for VIII on YouTube or Vimeo