The Word Cloud

A few days ago a Word Clouder, who's neck-deep in historical and literary research, got in touch with me to say that she was tempted to try her hand at historical fiction based on it, and did I have any advice? After all, I've written two (well, two published) novels with historical settings. One is sold as being about the Princes in the Tower, and it's true that historical fiction about real historical figures presents all the usual hist fic challenges in particularly acute form. Did the novels spring from general research, or did I research specifically for them? Should she dive straight in, or should she cut her teeth on non-historical fiction first? I found myself answering thus, and then thought that some other WordClouders might find it interesting:

The sales pitch that A Secret Alchemy is about the Princes in the Tower is actually not terribly accurate, though inevitable. It's really about Elizabeth and Anthony Woodville. I first got interested in their mother Elizabeth Woodville because I went to see the three Henry VI plays, and started wondering what it was like to be her - up till then I didn't know much more about the Princes in the Tower than everyone does from reading Tey's The Daughter of Time. Of course I then had to do a fair bit of research. But I think "What would it be like to be her/him?" is actually the key: the reason for writing such a novel, rather than narrative history based on the same material, is that you want to get at things (your characters' consciousness, for example, or what happened in the gaps in the historical record) which narrative history isn't allowed to: historical fiction takes off from the 'facts' (which in themselves are rarely facts, but interpretations), and goes somewhere else. If you're tempted to form something into a novel purely because it makes the history more palatable - history lite - than it would be as non-fiction, then I think it's the recipe for a bad, or at least dull, novel.

To be frank, to my mind the research is the least... not least interesting, but certainly least significant, part of the process of writing any novel, historical or otherwise. You need to do it, just as you would need to do it if you were setting a thriller in a nuclear installation. And things you find out - still more things you stumble across that you didn't know you were looking for - often inspire you (though sometimes they scupper your plot!). And of course some of it's fun, because if you didn't find history fun you wouldn't be doing it. But what it's not is the key to writing a good novel.

Discussion of historical fiction almost always starts, and too often finishes, with talk of 'facts' and the need for accuracy. But, oh, it's not as simple as that, and not only because any self-respecting historian would agree that the very notion of a historical fact is highly problematic; what is recorded as fact is actually the product of a certain person, in the past, choosing to regard it (and not other facts) as significant.

It's very easy to get bound down into just representing history, particularly but not only if you're basing your novel on real historical figures. And, to an extent, the better a historian you are, the harder it is to break free of the tethers of what previous historians have recorded, and move from the probable (which is all historians can really say of what they write) to the possible, which is the realm of fiction. But you must: you must dare to invent, to lie, to not do research if you think you might not like the results, to leave yourself space to imagine and dream, to 'leave the research behind' as Rose Tremain puts it. (She's famously relaxed about research, and invents freely. And the results are wonderful: have you read Music and Silence?)

Rather, the keys to writing a good historical novel are the same as for any novel: plot, characters, prose and ideas. If you want to write a novel then why not make it historical? Loving a place and time is a great motivator, and you obviously have all the research skills. But what's most important is that you need to have a story you're burning to tell and characters you want to spend a year or three getting to know.

If you remember that the essence of all fiction is character in action, (thank you, Aristotle) you can't go far wrong. What do they want? How do they try to get it? What gets in the way? What happens next? That is the basics of plot and character. Of course what they want, and what they do, and what obstacles they meet, will be historically inflected: the last thing you want to be writing is one of those awful historical novels which are basically modern romances or thrillers, with prettier frocks and swords instead of guns. Nor (I assume) do you want to be writing the other kind of awful historical novels which is just a biography with some invented conversations between carefully-dressed puppets. Researching how people thought and behaved and believed is just as important - more important, actually, though harder - as knowing about clothes and carriages and politics. But it's only the beginning...

But don't feel you can't 'graduate' to historical fiction until you've tried something easier. I'm a great believer in writing what you really want to write, because novels take too darned long to write to mess around with things you don't care tuppence for. And I certainly don't believe in 'write what you know'. What you do need to do is learn to write that ship-of-the-line, or that village market, or that gown or that dagger in the ribs AS IF you know it as well as you know your local library and your Sunday roast.

Modern hist fic can show you all sorts of ways of squaring the circle of writing modern fiction to create an authentic-seeming experience (with the accent on the 'seeming' - it's all really sleight of hand) which simultaneously evokes the past and speaks to modern readers. When it comes to voice, though, I think it's essential to read the fiction of the period - assuming it's a period which has fiction (i.e. 18th century or later). You need to have their cadence and vocabulary in your ear, and to integrate that with your own voice, rather than starting from another modern writer's voice (like watching Gordon Brown if you want to do your own Brown impression, rather than watching an impressionist doing him). But, again, you need to not get bogged down in slavishly accurate reproduction: you're writing for us, not Austen's contemporaries, and too conscientious pastiche/parody inevitably focusses the reader on how clever it's being, rather than the story and the characters.

For what it's worth, as well as Tremain (Music and Silence and Restoration), other historical writing I admire, which you might want to have a look at, includes Barry Unsworth, Peter Ackroyd, Hilary Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety, and now Wolf Hall, which I haven't yet read because I suspect it'll make me want to throw in the towel), Sarah Waters, A S Byatt's Possesion, Toni Morrison's Beloved, William Golding, Atwood's Alias Grace. I'm a lifelong Heyer fan as well: she's an object lesson in how to plot, and how to wear deep research incredibly lightly. I keep meaning to go back to Mary Renault, too. Tobias Hill's The Love of Stones is beautifully done, though like Possession and much of my own work (and Unsworth's, and Ackroyd's), has one foot in 'now'; Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost is a fascinating example of integrating many deeply researched aspects of an extraordinary moment in history.

Good luck!

This is a very interesting piece, EmmaD. As you point out, it's all sleight of hand, and in this respect I reckon what you say about mastering the speech and cadence (and I think by extension, the mindset) via reading the writers of a period is particularly crucial. It's a route to understanding the age, a way in. And if your character is authentic, then I suspect a lot of the exterior historical detail ceases to be quite so important.

It's also why I would read any historical fiction: to see how the writer gets inside the heads of his/her characters - their values, beliefs etc - and to be illuminated by it. I'm more interested in the character's attitude (towards say, what constitutes an appropriate punishment for a particular crime) than what he happens to be wearing.

And the modern writer (as opposed to a writer of the period) is in a unique position. She has the benefit of hindsight. She can show us how exactly our era differs from the one described in terms of the prevailing value-system. By doing so, she holds up a mirror to the reader. Maybe this is what it's all about in the first place?

As someone who is trying (unsuccessfully so far) to break free from the academic research based mould, I found this fantastically useful, thank you Emma! I think I will get a sticky note with "Leave the research behind" written on it in large letters, and put it on my laptop.
I'm also happy to see your endorsement of Georgette Heyer, an underrated author in today's climate.

Emma,
This is extremely sound and useful advice.
The historical novel can also trigger heated debate as we, here in Aus, found when Kate Grenville published The Secret River and The lieutenant. Maybe our Historians thought their territory was being poached as the novels were marketed as "accessible history".
As a would-be writer who is not academic at all, I am pursuing an even riskier project. The historical trigger for my novel is an event still in recent memory.

I agree with most or all on the names of hist fic writers that you need to read - but for my money, there's one glaring exception: Patrick O'Brian, arguably the best historical fiction writer since Walter Scott.

PO'B's writing of action sometimes goes wrong. His spy stories are rubbish. His writing of women is much less than convincing. But he's a wonderful comic writer and his recreation of period is peerless. You're not reading about the Georgian navy. You're in it. Historical fiction at its very, very best. If you're new to him, then the first in the Aubrey/Maturin series is one of the his best.

And on the ditch the research front, then he shows how it's done. Because he knew everything about his period, he didn't need to cram anything in - he just wrote the story. Because he didn't have to grope for the telling detail, those details he did use were almost always right for the context.

Harry, I did try a P O'Brian once, and found it too affectless to keep reading, though I love C S Forester. I supsect O'Brian is for blokes what Heyer is for women: peerless handling of research (so peerless you don't even notice it being handled), masterly plotting and very, very funny.

Emma

I'm a big Hornblower fan, and oddly enough, had C.S. Forester in mind when thinking of Historical Fiction I had read. He also proves that you don't need a complete grasp of a particular era, just a detailed understanding of the part of it inhabited by your character. He really gives you a sense of what it's like to be on a ship of the line. And of course Hornblower is a great character - not a tough, action man like Sharpe, but a man who uses his wits. A book that lauds intelligence over brawn in its hero will always get the thumbs up from me!

Alas, I've heard ambivalent reports of O'Brien's books, and a few mates of mine say that it isn't actually all that historically accurate.

a few mates of mine say that it isn't actually all that historically accurate.

Yes, I fell for Hornblower when I was about thirteen - and missed an awful lot, I know (that name, for a start...) . I rather think I kept wanting him to be a conventional romantic hero and of course he isn't - Forester's always undercutting it. And yet I still loved it - a taste I shared with my father. Haven't read it for years - must go and raid the bookshelves back home.

As to accuracy, you'll always get people who can only judge a novel's value by how like a history book it is - which as my original post suggest, misses the point by a mile. There are two reasons that accuracy matters: One, if it means that crucial plot just doesn't work because you can't travel from London to Edinburgh overnight, say, and Two, if enough readers know you're wrong, then it fatally undermines the trust that readers put in the writer 'to deal honestly and responsibly with them', as John Gardner puts it. And Three (yes, I know I said two reasons) I think that even if readers don't actually know you're wrong, they can be unconvinced at an instinctive level if the wrong things are where you've defaulted to contemporary habits (for instance, making romantic love be the usual basis for marriage in 16th century England). Or making your Anglo Saxons catch rabbits, or Richard II eat potatoes.

Emma

E - you're right about O'B being affectless. Thing is, in a weird way, that's a very eighteenth century thing to be. O'B writes partly like a C20th man writing about the early C19, but partly he writes like an actual contemporary. That's why his emotional writing (and his writing about anything wearing a skirt) is rubbish. I think O'B is a very flawed, very brilliant writer.

But I love Hornblower too. Much less sophisticated, but if I ever have a bit of flu, then I head for Hornblower and/or Conan Doyle. better than a hot bath. Even better with a hot bath. Aaaah!

"affectless. Thing is, in a weird way, that's a very eighteenth century thing to be."

Now that is true - I've been reading Tom Jones, and loving it because it's an absolute hoot, but it's like reading a strip-cartoon - no emotions beyond what's in the speeches and can be drawn in the most basic lines into the faces. It's also why, to my surprise, I found Malory unreadable after quite a short while too - another reason to thank my stars I didn't do an English degree.

My flu' reading is usually Chandler or Heyer, and recently chunks and chunks of Wodehouse...

I know Conan Doyle rated 'Sir Nigel' and 'The White Company' over his Sherlock Holmes stories. I remember enjoying them a lot as a teenager.

Chandler is a beautiful stylist. I sometimes wonder if being an alcaholic (writer) makes you more conscious of style, even as it dulls your awareness of plot - Chandler wrote so well, but his plotting is all over the place. A man gets his face cut off in 'The Big Sleep' and we never even find out why.

Gussy Finknottle's address at the school fete still makes tears of laughter roll down my cheeks.

It would almost be worth being an alcoholic, to be able to write like Chandler. Mind you, it amazes me that Hollywood had any use for him, given how much he couldn't plot. But I think it's a failure to tie up loose ends, rather than a fundamental failure of narrative drive: he can spring surprises on you with the best.

My preferred area of historical writing is pre-mechanisation, there are no gun calibres to remember, there are no ignition key use to be lost, punctures to be had, or mechanical breakdowns of any kind. The weaponry is, generally speaking, muskets, swords and bows and arrows and you don't really have to know how to use them. The mode of transport is horseback, now horses to break legs, take tumbles and otherwise get rid of their riders, which in most cases is not fatal, but is one way of getting rid of an unwanted character. The thing to remember is to keep the mode of speech and the style of writing within that era. You'd be surprised at how much your readers know.

"The thing to remember is to keep the mode of speech and the style of writing within that era."

There are words in use today that would never have been used in an historical conversation, but I have seen them in a story that was supposed to have been set in the Elizabethan era. I have just posted a piece in coffee break posts in that I think you will find that the writing style of the period.

Ah, I hoped that's what you meant. We have some debates here about certain words. The last one was "bugger".

The first use of the word I can find was embuggerance in 1745.

I think Woody may have had an earlier one. I will ask him.

Bugger is a splendid old English word, as I recall. And some things we think of as American and therefore modern, are actually English, but we've lost them and they've preserved them, so it would be authentic. And what do you do about words which have changed their meaning? You can use them 'authentically' for the time, and have your readers mis-take what's said, or you can use them so the reader understands, but be being 'inauthentic'. And contractions - don't and can't, for example - look modern because we associate formal with old fashioned, but if you're representing the speech of the past, they would have used them, just perhaps not written them down (indeed, Fielding does write them down in Tom Jones)

"The thing to remember is to keep the mode of speech and the style of writing within that era."

The thing is, though, you can't actually do this. If you did to a perfect pastiche of Tom Jones, say, it wouldn't be readable, or at least not worth reading. Of course you leave out obviously modern slang, and objects, and metaphors based on modern phenomena, but as Bakhtin says (sorry, you've caught me on PhD day) "For the prose artist the world is full of other people’s words, among which he must orient himself...He must introduce them into the plane of his own discourse, but in such a way that this plane is not destroyed."

In other words, the narrative voice of the novel is a synthesis between the words of the past, and the words of the present - because the book must be comprehensible to the reader, and preferably be comprehended in the way the writer wants - and the writer's own voice. And when it comes to anything pre-1719, of course, we don't even have any literature that aims to reproduce normal, conversational speech anyway, so it becomes even more a matter of sleight of hand.

You can always go down the Julian Barnes route, of course, and say that you're writing a modern novel which just happens to describe events in the past. I think that's missing one of the most exciting aspects of historical fiction - the interplay between 'then' and 'now' - mind you, but he's entitled to his opinion.

Emma

"When in doubt have two guys come through the door with guns."

I was amused by one of Diana Gabaldon's books where she uses some modern language in a past setting. Her main series of books is about time travel and places a woman from 1960's USA in the Scottish Highlands at the time of the Jacobite Rebellion (the one of 1745).

Hey Barb, the word "Bugger" traces it's origins back to "Sodomite" from the old testament. No idea when it took its English turn of phrase. But it is a word that I always associate with period gentry (and their public schools ;c).

Best I can do is this...

Literally 'one who commits buggery' (anal sex), 'bugger' derives from Bulgaria and the Bogomils. These were originally a heretic Christian sect who were stigmatised as sodomites. Section 12 of the UK 1956 sexual offences act refers to buggery. According to this, buggery is sexual intercourse between males or between male and female in an 'unnatural manner', or between male or female with an animal in any manner whatsoever. This word is often used affectionately, as in 'lucky bugger'; 'jammy bugger'; 'flash bugger'; 'old bugger' and so on, and is sometimes softened to 'beggar'.

The famous and probably apocryphal epitaph says, 'Under this sod, lies another'. Sod means turf, but here is an abbreviation for 'Sodomite'. Sodomy is, like 'bugger', anal sex, and the word 'Sodomite' refers to the population of the Old Testament city Sodom which was destroyed by God because of the sinful ways of its inhabitants. He destroyed its twin town Gomorrah at the same time, and it is tempting to wonder what the people of Gomorrah did to be ranked with the Sodomites.

I'm sure it goes deeper and longer than this (yes, I know). But cannot substantiate at present.

One of my favourite words.

AW

Some of you may be amused by this little titbit that popped up today on Wikipedia. Maybe this could be the subject of a new competition.

Gracious!! How descriptive. Very amusing, don't think I would dare use it in a novel.

Emma, all the above was very helpful and interesting, particularly when I am reading your novels at the same time.
Your words and advice are an indulgence a reader doesn't usually get from an author, unless one is fortunate enough to be able to go to a book fair - (the word escapes me for Cheltenham etc) so I am really grateful to you and to Wordcloud for this opportunity. It is like a breath of fresh air to someone who has spent long lonely hours and years writing while being stuck at home with illness and disability - (dreadful word).


I have written a historical novel based on fact. I became very involved in the research and almost had panic attacks as if I was being judged at school if I did not use the exact historical facts. One of the criticisms given to me by the editor was that he did not like the ending of my novel as it is too sad. But, the ending was the whole point of the novel. The two young sisters did lose their inheritance and they did die within months of each other.
Could anyone advise me whether I should change this ending.
My editors words were. ' The writing is good, I found it very engaging and involving, despite the episodic structure - until that final section. I can believe in one death but not two - I feel cheated.'
Friends have found it very moving. My editor was a man - I wonder if that is why he did not like the ending.
This thread is old and perhaps won't be revisited and I should post this elsewhere.
Thanks
Bren