Susanne Dunlap

Writing historical fiction is an act of both creation and re-creation. We do our research, we read accounts, we explore visual references.

But I sometimes forget, even though making the past come alive is one of my primary goals, that so much of history is based on memory, on what people remember about events that occurred in the past. History is almost never written in the present tense. The exception is in photographs, mute records of events that occurred during the time that photography was an option. And of course, now, video and film.

The idea of history as memory is particularly present to me. I’m here in Florida on my father’s 90th birthday. Yesterday I asked him about his earliest memory, and he came up with this: sitting between his parents on the front seat of their Model T Ford, in around 1925 or 1926, driving somewhere near Hertel Avenue in Buffalo.

The idea that his memory could be a tiny piece of history is what started me thinking. He’s lived through the depression, World War II, the Korean War. He was in the navy at the end of World War II, a radio operator, but stationed in the Philippines after all the fighting was over. His story is a very different one from the many heartrending, bloody accounts there are.

He’s seen many administrations change, technology gallop forward at an unbelievable rate (our conversation started with him looking at his new, 51-inch plasma TV and recalling the first TVs that he watched in the early 50s), and so many advances in medicine. He was an adult during WWII, when penicillin was being developed, and when the first atomic bombs were dropped. As a radiologist, he embraced new imaging technologies and the evolution of nuclear medicine.

In the hospital in Lewiston, NY, where he practiced, he once x-rayed O.J. Simpson when he was still on the Buffalo Bills football team. He used to ride his balloon-tire bicycle on hundred-mile jaunts with his friends.

It amazes me that my own father, who has all his faculties and still lives alone in his own house in Florida, is a source of information about history. His stories could easily form the basis of several great historical novels. But he’s just my dad, a constant who has been there for me at many rough points in my life. I’m very grateful that he’s still around to share his wisdom and love with all of us.

And I’ll enjoy getting all the living history I can from him.

This is a topic my writer friends and I come back to again and again. Now that the publishing industry has basically been turned upside down by the revolution in how people consume books, what is the job of the agent? I’ll start by outlining what it used to be.

1. Act as chief negotiator between author and publisher

An agent, in traditional terms, is the one who offers your manuscript to editors at publishing houses based on his/her knowledge of what different editors and imprints are looking for, and on the trust that has built up over the years between them. An agent is/was a gatekeeper for editors that would otherwise be deluged with submissions to plow through. Your manuscript has/had a much better chance of being contracted to a publisher if it goes through a reputable agent’s hands first.

2. Filter out manuscripts that are not ready for primetime, and foster those that almost are

A good agent (like mine!) not only says “no” to writers who aren’t there yet or who never will be, but identifies the spark of something in a rough effort that needs a little tough love to get it to the next phase. A good agent recognizes a unique voice, or a compelling story, warts and all, and can at least point a writer in the right direction to get a manuscript ready for submission. It’s up to the writer to accept the criticism and do the work after that. I honestly credit my agent, Adam Chromy, with teaching me what really makes a good novel, and forcing me to read and study resources that would hone my writing craft.

In my opinion, these two qualities are still vital in an agent. But there are more challenges now that make an agent’s work much harder, and push the boundaries of what an agent needs to do.

3. Help a writer strategize about the best path to market

This is definitely new. There used to be only one path to market: publishing by a major house to get bookstore distribution and advance reviews. Now—the doors are wide open. This is both exciting and terrifying, especially to the likes of us who have been through the traditional publishing mill before.

Here are some examples of the questions that need answering:

• Should a debut author self-publish for e-readers and develop a loyal readership first?
• Should a novel be published in one chunk, or should it be broken up into installments, like a TV series?
• Hardcover/paperback/ebook—what’s the right combination and the right order?
• Social media and marketing: more and more, a great strategy even before the novel is sold can make a huge difference. What publisher wouldn’t like to see a ready-made readership?

Now, I’m not an agent. I’m speaking from the point of view of someone fortunate enough to have one who is intelligent and creative about the challenges facing writers today. But I am speaking as someone who, having been published, is now virtually starting again. It’s virgin territory for me out there too.

My point is this. If you’re looking for an agent, of course make sure you’ve got the first two qualifications covered. But don’t be afraid to talk about the industry challenges, and press for ideas about the third qualification.

The ultimate goal for everyone is still the same: bring good books to market, for readers who are as eager as ever to consume them—just a little more varied in their methods.

Anne Easter Smith is the author of a series of books about the Wars of the Roses and the house of York. She is a staunch defender of Richard III, and a wonderful writer, whose evocative tales bring the period and the characters to vivid life.

Her new novel, Royal Mistress has just been released. She’ll be touring in the northeast, reading and signing books. Her tour schedule can be found on her website, and I encourage anyone who can to go and meet this terrific author and lovely human being. Here’s Anne!

When did your obsession with Richard III and his period begin?

In my early twenties–a long, long time ago–I read Josephine Tey’s “The Daughter of Time,” in which Tey’s usual detective protagonist spends the book in traction trying to solve the mystery of who killed the princes in the Tower from his hospital bed. Tey was convinced Richard was not the culprit and this flew in the face of everything I had been taught about Richard III, and I was hooked. Thirty years of researching him later, and with ten years of working as a features editor at a daily paper, I was itching to tell my version of the real Richard. I’ve always read historical fiction ever since I was a teen, so I knew what I liked to read so set out to write something I’d like to read.

Can you comment on the recent discovery of his bones in a car park?

Not without whooping I can’t! Since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, Richard’s bones were thought to have been lost. One rumor that persisted was that they had been thrown into the River Soar and the sarcophagus used as a horse trough. We know now, there was no sarcophagus. His body was just laid in a simple grave under the nave of the Grey Friars monastery church, and the small monument that Henry VII eventually paid to have placed in the church disappeared over the centuries. It was a bloody miracle that on the first day of the dig, paid for by the Richard III Society and carried out by the University of Leicester archeology department, they found the skeleton that would turn out to be Richard. The chair of the department is said to have sworn to eat his hat if they found Richard. I think someone baked him a chocolate one! What it has done that is important is to have renewed interest in this much maligned king. Perhaps now, his Tudor reputation will be redeemed, and he will be viewed in a more realistic light than the murdering monster Shakespeare depicted.

You’ve already written four wonderful, detailed novels about characters surrounding the period of the wars of the Roses. Do you think you’ll ever run out of stories?

Actually, it’s five! ROYAL MISTRESS is just out and tells the story of Edward IV’s final and favorite mistress, Jane Shore. Her tale is so compelling that it has generated plays, poems and ballads in our literature down the centuries. She was known as Edward’s “merriest” mistress, but we know, as well as having a clever wit, that she was passionate and very beautiful. What more could you want in a protagonist? By the way, Richard III is a major character in the book.

What’s your writing process: post-its, outline, pantser?

Pantser??? Am I missing something? I have had to write an outline for my editor as part of my contracts, but when I go back and look at them, I am astonished how they changed as I wrote the books! As I write about real people, the historical timeline ends up being my skeleton and I will not deviate from the history, but how my characters move from event to event is up to me. I have a large chart on my wall on which I enter everything I find out about a character as soon as my research digs up a date. It is a lifesaver when you want two of them to meet and you realize one is in France and that begetting a child at that moment in time wouldn’t have been possible.

What’s the funniest thing a fan has ever said to you?

I wish I could say I had a funny question asked like Philippa Gregory told an audience she did once: Where did you buy your shoes? But I did have an amusing encounter at a reading in a library in Albany NY. I was walking around greeting people as they came in and sat down–I feel less nervous about giving a reading when I have made a personal contact with a few people–and I saw a woman come in, dragging her son with her. I went up and introduced myself and admired her courage in bringing her 10-year-old to a talk about 15th century English history. “Oh, but you have it wrong,” she said. “He dragged me–he’s your biggest fan.” I was gobsmacked but then panicked. “You do know there is a lot of s-e-x in my books?” I mouthed over his head to her. Before she could answer, he shot back: “Oh, don’t worry Mom, I just skip over those parts.” What a lovely kid–totally hooked on English history. Hope he’s there when I return in May!

What is your biggest challenge in writing?

Pulling myself out of research–I can dig and dig deeper until I forget the time–and the other is knowing when to stop writing! My first book was more than 900 pages long when I finished it, and I needed three years and help from my daughter and a friend to get it down to 600! Even then, my agent thought she wouldn’t sell such a big book from a first-time author but she managed to hook Trish Todd at Touchstone who threatened to make me cut a lot, but in the end she made me edit one scene and that was it!

Name a few of your favorite books (I’d never ask for just one!)

Let me get the classics out of the way first. “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen and “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens. If I have even one iota of the brilliant character-study skill of those two giants, I’d be so happy. In my favorite genre–historical fiction, of course: “Katherine” by Anya Seton is my all-time favorite. Loved “London” by Edward Rutherfurd, “Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett, and the first historical novel I read about Richard III, “We Speak No Treason” by Rosemary Hawley Jarman. BTW, loved your YA book about Florence Nightingale!

[Thanks Anne!]

If you could be anyone in the time period you write about, who would it be?

I assume you would want me to keep my gender? Then I think I would choose to be a daughter of a wealthy merchant in London, like my newest protagonist Jane Shore, but unlike Jane, I’d like to be the apple of my father’s eye so he’d be sure to marry me off to someone I liked, again unlike Jane! Being in the same class at that time in Florence or Venice would have been even better.

Thanks so much for letting me waffle on here, Susanne!

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Thank you Anne! You can get Royal Mistress in the usual places, including Amazon. Rush out right now! And here’s a video of Anne talking about the book.

My guest today is novelist Deanna Rabourn, whose award-winning Lady Julia Gray series features the exploits of a genteel Victorian sleuth.

Her new book (out today!) is set in an entirely different time period, and spans the globe from 1920s London to East Africa. I asked her some questions about her book and her process as a writer. Enjoy!

Tell us a little about yourself: How did you get started writing historical fiction?

I actually don’t remember a time when I wasn’t making up stories—and in love with history! I knew I wanted to write historical fiction before I ever went to college, so I double majored in English and history. I wanted to have a thorough grounding in both before I tried my hand at writing a full novel.

I finally took the plunge when I was 23 and had just finished my first year of teaching. I re-read JANE EYRE and was moping around afterwards because I missed the characters, so I decided to create my own. I wrote 120,000 words in six weeks, but I had a novel. It now lives in a box in my attic, but it was a good start. I wrote another six or seven before I hit on SILENT IN THE GRAVE, thanks to some excellent advice from my agent. It took me fourteen years to get published, but within the first year, I was under contract for six books. I haven’t looked back since!

Your new novel, A Spear of Summer Grass, takes place during one of my favorite periods: the 1920s. Why did you choose this period, and how did you avoid the “roaring 20s” clichés?

My publisher wanted me to take a break from my Victorian series and the brief I got was, “Write anything you want. Literally.” So I started brainstorming based on the things I read about for pleasure. When I’m writing, I end up pretty submerged in my research, so I always make sure whatever I’m writing about is something I really enjoy reading about.

I’ve always been fascinated with the Happy Valley set in Kenya—a group of colonials who did some serious misbehaving. The set got started when it was still British East Africa and kept going until the 1940s. They got up to all sorts of mischief—drugs, adultery, murder. It made for fascinating reading and gave me a perfect starting point for creating my flapper heroine, Delilah Drummond. As far as clichés, I think they cease to be clichés when they are part of a fully realized character. If all Delilah did was bob her hair and do the Charleston, she wouldn’t be very interesting. But Delilah cuts her hair as a deliberate act of separating herself from her past when her husband is killed. Her flapper identity is part reinvention and part a natural progression for a willful woman who has decided to do exactly what she pleases and damn the consequences.

A wonderful twist is that your glamorous heroine ends up in Africa, in Kenya. What effect does this setting have on how you treat the period and on your heroine’s growth as a person?

It would have been impossible for Delilah to change materially if she were still making the rounds of the flesh-pots in Paris and London and Buenos Aires. She has to come face to face with something bigger than herself—in this case Africa—to finally confront all the baggage she’s been hauling around. It is the first time she’s able to stop running away from herself and figure out what really matters. There is nothing petty or silly about Africa; it’s raw and immediate and larger-than-life, just like Delilah, and something in her responds to the land in a way she hasn’t responded to anything or anyone in a very long time.

What’s your writing process: post-its, outline, pantser?

Both! I start with a synopsis that I write up for my publisher and which I subsequently ignore. I know the framework when I start—I know I’m starting at point A and will end up at Z, and I will know what D, L, and R look like, but the rest of it is a mystery. If I pantsed completely, the lack of organization would put me fetal under my desk with a cocktail, but plotting completely would make me equally mad. To me that takes all the spontaneous pleasure out of writing. So, a combination of the two works best for me.

What’s the funniest thing a fan has ever said to you?

I recently received a photo from a reader in Australia who got a tattoo of a line of code from SILENT IN THE GRAVE. Not exactly funny but certainly unexpected!

What is your biggest challenge in writing?

Knowing that I’m never going to have enough time to write all the books I want to write.

Name a few of your favorite books (I’d never ask for just one!)

Too difficult to narrow it down just to books—and I’m liable to change my mind by tomorrow!—so I’ll give you favorite writers instead: Jane Austen, Elizabeth Peters, Agatha Christie, E. M. Delafield, Daphne du Maurier, Monica Dickens, Baroness Orczy, Mary Stewart, Stella Gibbons, Dodie Smith.

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Thank you so much for your wonderful answers, Deanna! I can’t wait to read your new book !

Writing is an act of faith. I can think of no other way to describe it. You sit down, imagine a setting, things that happen, characters, complications, motivations, and you start putting words together that you have to believe will convey all that to a reader.

And if you have a combination of talent and craft, somehow it mostly does—albeit not always equally well.

The thing is that as a writer, you get better at the craft tricks and techniques that make a story blossom before a reader’s imagination. Talent is probably hard to improve on, and we all have our limitations. You can overcome a lot by really understanding craft, however.

With all that, there is something important to learn that has to do with neither craft nor talent: you don’t see everything. Period.

At least, I don’t see everything. Perhaps there are great writers out there who don’t occasionally overwrite, or make mistakes of tense or point of view, or use the same word or phrase three times in succession without realizing it, or introduce a flat character for convenience’s sake. I applaud them, if they exist.

For me, though, there is nothing quite like the scrutiny of an outside reader to make me see how far my writing is from perfect as I struggle to get that first draft down on virtual paper.

This is a little celebration of my wonderful writers’ group. Those six or seven pairs of astute eyes and ears make the things that I am blind to so obvious that I come away saying, “Of course!” That is truly the best kind of critique: the kind that you know all along in your heart, but are too blind to see staring at you on a page of your own carefully chosen words.

So my advice to all writers: find readers you trust, and see through their eyes. It will make your writing stronger.

I’m so pleased to welcome author Lauren Willig here today! Her new book, The Ashford Affair, hits bookstores this very day. You may know Lauren as the author of the Pink Carnation series, about spies in the Napoleonic era. I asked her some questions here:

Tell us a little about yourself: How did you get started writing historical fiction?

I blame it on E.L. Konigsberg.  When I was six years old, my parents gave me a copy of A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, her slightly tongue-in-cheek novel about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine.  I fell in love with both Eleanor and historical fiction.  My first work of historical fiction was a sequel to the novel, told from the point of view of Eleanor’s—entirely fictional—horse, Beau Noir.

That was the end of my experiments with equine narrators, but the historical fiction remained a constant.  When I was eight, I discovered Jean Plaidy and Norah Lofts; a year later, Victoria Holt and Margaret Mitchell.  Each spawned various manuscript attempts of my own.  (None of which, will ever see the light of day.)  I’ve been writing historical fiction ever since.

You tackle the challenge of two time periods in this novel—the present day and the early 20^th century. What were the tough parts?

Bizarrely, I found the modern harder to write than the historical.  I tend to think of writing historical fiction as a form of method acting.  I immerse myself in the sources available to me, particularly contemporary diaries, letters, memoirs and fiction, and use those to create a composite character, someone steeped in that culture and entirely different from myself.  I was fascinated by the impact of World War I on the people I studied, on the effects of shell shock and rapid societal change, and by the strange, expatriate world created a continent away in Kenya by displaced aristocrats, seeking to replicate an idealized feudal past—jazzed up with cocaine and gin.

Writing the present day portion posed a greater challenge, particularly when it came to accuracy.  I’d set my modern story in 1999, so it was simultaneously contemporary and not.  It was before the widespread adoption of the internet, before smart phones, before Facebook, before so much that we take for granted now.  I spent some time researching the odds that my heroine, as a senior associate at a law firm, would have an early model blackberry.  By the time I started at a firm as a summer associate in 2004, the blackberry was already taken for granted.  Keeping my 1999 world accurate was far harder than the 1920s.

Have you been to Kenya? If not, how did you do your research? Are there lots of references and photos available to help?

My travels to Kenya were effected purely via journals, letters, biographies, maps and memoirs.  I would have loved to have been able to go before writing the book, but, as I’ve written about at more length elsewhere, on location research for historical novels can be a mixed bag.  The world changes and moves on; what we see when we visit is often not what would have been there at the time.  I’ve been nearly mown over by mopeds in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, trying to figure out just where the Abbaye Prison would have been, and mourned over the blue plaque that’s all that’s left of Tyburn Hill near Marble Arch in London.  In many cases, even the climate has changed, so our own observations on the feel of the air or the quality of the light may not be what our characters would have felt.

Even when I’ve spent considerable time on location (as I did for my books set in England, France, and Ireland), walking the same streets my characters would have walked, visiting their homes or the homes of those akin to them, I’ve found that it’s often most reliable to work from writings of those who did experience what my characters would have experienced, to mine their letters and memoirs for the visual and sensory details that I need.

Of course, whenever possible, I take those research trips anyway!

Your Pink Carnation series (an impressive 10 novels!) has the common thread of British spies, with suspenseful plots. What made you decide to take a try at something different?

The Ashford Affair was one of those stories that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.  After spending a considerable amount of time playing with Napoleonic spies, I’d been toying for some time with the idea of trying my hand at something different, but I always assumed I’d go back in time, rather than forward: my undergrad degree is in Renaissance Studies, and my graduate area of expertise was sixteenth and seventeenth century England (with a particular focus on the English Civil War).  Since I’d handed in my ninth Pink manuscript early, earning myself some discretionary time, I intended to use some of my yellowing dissertation notes as the basis for a seventeenth-century set novel—and then a friend gave me a copy of Frances Osborne’s The Bolter.

I was deeply intrigued by her tale of the much-married Idina Sackville, who racketed back and forth between Jazz Age London and Kenya, acquiring and shedding husbands along the way.  I was even more intrigued by the intro, in which she commented that she hadn’t known that Idina was her own great-grandmother until her teens.  It got me thinking about how much we assume about our own families and how little we know.  Especially in a time of tumult, like the aftermath of the first World War, what sort of complications and secrets might ensue?

The next thing I knew, I had begun work on the novel that became The Ashford Affair… and found myself wallowing in descriptions of Edwardian great houses, World War I nursing, and 1920s Kenyan coffee plantations.

What’s your writing process: post-its, outline, pantser?

I’m a partial pantser.  My books tend to be very character driven, which means that I spend my first few chapters working by trial and error, getting to know them.  In my latest book, The Ashford Affair, I spent months playing around with different tones and styles before I felt that I’d found the right way into the book and the characters.  Once I’m launched, I try to outline four or five chapters ahead.  That way, I have a sense of trajectory, but I still leave room for my characters to take the plot in directions I might not have anticipated.  It’s not the most organized system, but I’ve learned that it’s the one that works best for me.  My few attempts at trying to outline everything in advance led to a lot of frustration and scrapped chapters!

What’s the funniest thing a fan has ever said to you?

I’m always amused when I get emails directed to “Lauren Willig’s assistant”.  I’m my own assistant, chief cook, and bottle washer.  I do have a web mistress who does the actual programming of my website (I’m too much of a Luddite to manage that on my own), but otherwise I’m a one stop shop: I answer my own emails, mail my own packages, and, despite a complete lack of any graphic design skills, painstakingly design my own bookmarks.  I do love the image of the glamorous novelist, lounging on her chaise longue, feather boa nonchalantly draped around her neck, with her secretary taking dictation and running packages down to the post office, but the reality couldn’t be more different.

What is your biggest challenge in writing?

Sitting down at my computer every day and forcing myself to wrestle the perfect story in my head into the imperfection of the written word.  I always know exactly how the story should go, complete in every way—until I try to translate it onto paper.  And then, suddenly, things get messy and nothing goes quite as I thought it would and the words are leaden and the characters are wooden and I discover a sudden, burning need to check my email or do my laundry or bake cookies or schedule a trip to Timbuktu.

I find that the solution is generally caffeine.  Lots of it.

Name a few of your favorite books (I’d never ask for just one!)

Oh, goodness, there are so many!  Gone With the Wind is a long time favorite, as is Karleen Koen’s Through a Glass Darkly (she brings the early eighteenth century so vividly to life), Judith Merkle Riley’s The Oracle Glass and The Master of All Desires (historical fiction with a humorous twist), M.M. Kaye’s sweeping epics, and any of the mystery novels, contemporary or historical, of Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels.   My keeper shelf has a fairly eclectic range of genres on it: from L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle to Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting to Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle to Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg….  I have a more complete list of my favorite books over on my website, www.laurenwillig.com.

If you’d like to learn more about my books or read an excerpt of The Ashford Affair, please stop on by my website (www.laurenwillig.com)!  I can also be found procrastinating on my Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/LaurenWillig

Thanks so much, Susanne, for having me over!

You’re most welcome, Lauren!

I think it’s fair to assume that every writer has the same goal: producing the best possible book/story/poem she can. The problem is, how? Worse, the “how” seems to change over time—at least for me.

As I ease my way back into the herculean task of writing a novel, I’m finding that what used to work for me no longer does. When I first started writing, the most natural thing for me was to fill pages and pages with words, to get it down, make things happen, get the story going. I would open the file and start typing after quickly reviewing what I wrote the day before.

Now, I’ve lost that fluidity. Maybe lost isn’t the right word. Maybe I’m just entering a new phase, and I shouldn’t look upon it as a loss, but as a deepening of the process. That’s what I have to tell myself in order to keep going, whether it turns out to be true or not.

But I think it probably is true, for a number of reasons. I have learned so much from my triumphs and my failures, from what life has dealt me (even though I started writing seriously only ten years ago after decades of dabbling), that when once I could stand with a basket and collect the words as they fell from my imagination, now spilling rounding them up to go into a waiting computer file feels like raking leaves in the wind, all chaos and unpredictability.

Even more frustrating, I feel less and less satisfied with that first draft than I used to. The holes, the shallow bits, the cliches, the repetitions—they leap off the page and laugh at me just when I’m feeling good about having written, say, 500 words.

My dissatisfaction goes deeper than that, though. I find myself struggling to infuse a scene with difficult truths—truths I might have avoided not long ago. I sincerely hope that this is a sign that I’ve grown as a writer, that I’m at last ready to delve into my own anxieties and insecurities to make my characters and my plots ring true to a reader. I hope, and I fear that it is.

Because that, for me, is the most difficult thing of all: Facing the demons of my past, both real and imagined, coming to terms with my shortcomings, the ways I have been cruel or thoughtless, the moments of anguish, the horrible suspicion that I caused something bad to happen inadvertently, or that I let down those who needed me most.

In fact, I used to believe that I wrote historical fiction in part because it’s so far removed from my personal reality. I once had to write an essay that touched on my own life experience. It nearly killed me (and thank you, Victoria Zackheim, for being such a patient editor on it!) I wanted to run screaming from the metaphorical room.

While I believe that there is a little of me in every heroine I’ve written, I confess to a dollop of wish fulfillment. Certainly placing them all on the threshold of life absolves me from having to face the cruel realities of being past one’s prime. And being in control of their fates in a way that one is never in control of one’s own is reassuring—and cathartic.

So I hope my readers will join me when my next book is ready to be launched into the world, and realize that I have pushed myself in ways I never thought I could, perhaps give me a little understanding because of it.

It’s difficult. It’s the hardest thing in the world for me. But I have to do it.

My guest today is the wonderful novelist, Beverly Swerling. Her new book, Bristol House, is available in bookstores and online as of today! It’s had great advance reviews, including from the almighty Kirkus, praising her novel: “An intricately woven plot with voices from the past give Swerling’s latest historical thriller an otherworldly aura.”

Here is her take on why she—and the rest of us who dare—take on the challenge of writing historical fiction.

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People sometimes ask me why I write historical fiction  I always feel the urge to say because people want to read it, but I can see where that could be interpreted as snippy.  Instead I say something about the fun – for writer and reader – of bringing to life such sights and settings.

That’s true, but writing about a dinner party that takes place in Downton Abbey with legions of footmen and an all-seeing butler, or in a legendary 19^th century New York restaurant like Delmonico’s, perhaps in a velvet-draped private room obviously intended for seduction as well as sustenance, is hard work.  Much harder than simply saying, as you can do in a contemporary novel, that after leaving the gym the heroine went into MacDonald’s and ordered a Big Mac with a side of fries.

In the contemporary example, you don’t need to explain the setting, or the food, or the clothes your character is likely to be wearing.  Moreover, you don’t have to research it.  Your reader instantly pictures the place, smells the smells, she even gets some notion of how this particular character feels about such things as health or the politics of fast food, and maybe a hint about her economic circumstances.   As the writer you can count on that automatic knowledge, and play on the thoughts and feelings such impressions create.  Best of all, you typed that sentence in under a minute.   You could easily spend a day or longer researching the minutia of dining at Downton or Delmonico’s.

I’m not saying writing any kind of fiction is easy.  It definitely is not.  But those of us who who find our inspiration among crinolines and corsets have definitely fashioned ourselves a higher bar.  Successful writers of novels set in the past pride themselves on historical accuracy, whether it’s about the politics of aparticular monarch’s court, the cut of a famous dictator’s coat, or the kind of fans women were fluttering in 17^th century Madrid.  Why do we do it when more often than not the plot we’ve imagined, the characters we’ve dreamed up, and the problem we’ve set them to deal with could just as easily fit in a modern time, or maybe even a future time, or some time other than the one we’ve decided to explore?

Consider for a moment Susanne Dunlap’s EMILIE’S VOICE. A young woman of modest circumstances is gifted with an exquisite voice. A powerful musician discovers her, begins to train her, and both are co-opted into a royal drama where everything – not just Emilie’s voice but her life – are threatened.  Susanne chose to set that novel in 17^th century Paris and the court of Versailles.  Delicious.  You shiver just thinking about that angelic voice soaring over the slate rooftops and cobbled alleys of the city in the gray-blue night…the transformation when it’s heard in the rose-flushed marble hallways of a palace, beneath glittering crystal chandeliers sparkling with the light of a thousand candles.  Then another woman, jealous of Emilie and with an agenda of her own, determines to bring her down… Fabulous stuff.  But you can easily see how that tale of talent and treachery could be set in 21^st century Washington D.C., or 20^th century Hollywood.

My new novel, BRISTOL HOUSE, is the story of a conspiracy that begins in the sixteenth century, and extends its tentacles into the twenty-first in ways that are potentially fatal for a number of people. The novel lingers in Tudor times as well as our own, and examines the nature of belief and despair, how both can be triggered by terror, and the bigotry that has often accompanied religion.

Annie, the heroine of the contemporary story, has options available to her that Rebecca, the woman at the heart of the Tudor story, could not even dream. But they are both desperate for love, yearn after their sons, and confront men who wish to use and discard them.

From the moment four years ago when I first conceived the story I knew about both those characters and the connection between them.  It never occurred to me to write the novel as if Rebecca did not exist, but Annie did.  For me, both women were alive and present.

So we come full circle:  Why do some of us feel the compulsion to set our stories in times gone by?  Why do others want to read such stories?  I have a theory.  I think we do this to rip apart the shadows, get behind them and see what’s really there.  We can sense them, these people who “lived before us.”  They lurk in our dreams and our imaginations, and sometimes we know that they’ve never truly disappeared and time is not really a straight line.

One view of such a slant on reality is based in scientific speculation.  Einstein theorized that time was like a river, with past, present, and future existing simultaneously, but out of sight of each other.  Another truth, my truth, and the one I think I’m always writing about, comes from poetry.  In Burnt Norton T.S. Eliot says, “Time present and time past are both perhaps contained in time future. And time future contained in time past.”

Exactly.

————

Thanks Beverly!

Like my writing, the garden here where I am living once again has been left to go wild for several years. Once I turned my back on it—or rather, once other factors in my life took over—I couldn’t give it the constant attention it not only deserved, but needed in order to thrive.

Along with getting back to writing, bringing this garden back to life is a major goal for me right now, and I started yesterday, now that the snow is all melted away and it’s safe to uncover the beds and see what’s still growing there. Fortunately, I’d done some of the cleanup in the fall, or the tasks ahead might have seemed so daunting that I would have run and hidden from them again.

Before I could really start, though, I had to do some housecleaning. I had to make sure my tools were in order and to hand, and that all the garbage that didn’t belong, or didn’t contribute to achieving my goal, had been disposed of.

Just as clearing the mental decks takes work and time, it took me the better part of yesterday simply to sort and organize, to clean and unearth. In the process, I found tools I thought I had lost for good.

There was a time when I thought I had lost the essential tools of writing, too, when I couldn’t unclutter my brain enough to focus on filling a page with words. Now that I have sifted through the conflicting demands of life, I am doing that again. I have been filling pages and watching my novel grow, day by day.

Once the garden cleanup is finished (there’s three times as much to do as I accomplished yesterday), then I will have the difficult task of cutting back and uprooting things that have grown out of control, or have become too big for the space they were originally meant for. It’s a slow process, and it can be painful. For instance, I can’t edit—sorry, cut back—the rhododendrons and azaleas until they finish blooming later in the spring, or all those gorgeous flowers will be lost.

And that beautiful, fragrant daphne is so enormous that I may have to dig it up and start with something new. It’s a character that has gotten too big for its part in the story of my garden.

For the moment, though, I’m simply marveling at the treasures that have sprung up here and there, seeded themselves, been blown by the wind or uprooted by a bird and landed in unlikely places. Right at the bottom of the stone steps to the lower part of the garden is a purple crocus. I know I didn’t plant anything in such an absurd spot where it could be trampled underfoot, but there it is.

That crocus is saying, “Look at me! I’m here! I survived!”

And it’s so precious to me that I will carefully step over it until it dies back in its own, natural way. It’s an idea that won’t last forever, but will inspire me to continue the hard work of nurturing growth and beauty.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate the holiday!

P.S. Follow the progress of my garden on my Pinterest board!

I’ve always been a reader. Books were one of my two ways to escape. The other was playing the piano. Both were equally effective.

I started playing the piano when I was five, and continued through school and college, and even into graduate school. Once I became a serious musician at about the age of 12, I listened to music differently. My ears were sensitive to things that non-musicians wouldn’t notice: nuances of expression, a daring choice of tempo, the way an inner voice was brought out.

I was listening not only with my ears, but with my intellect and my heart. This heightened sensitivity made me a little less easy to please, and so might have been said to decrease my pure enjoyment. But it really didn’t: instead, it took that enjoyment to another level, a deeper level, far more satisfying and rewarding.

It took me a bit longer to engage in creating written works. My first novel was published the year I turned 50. And something happened after I went through the intense, agonizing, learning process of writing a novel to the way I read now, just as it happened to the way I listened to music so long ago. I notice things. Not the analytical stuff I was taught to notice in literature courses in college so much. But technical, craft details. In some ways this diminishes my enjoyment, just as my increased awareness of the subtleties of a performance made a mediocre performance less enjoyable.

I began to read not just with my eyes, but with my ear, my intellect, and my heart.

But as you might guess, knowing what goes into writing a novel, the mastery of craft that is necessary to make a long literary work sustain interest and give the reader something—whether it’s pure entertainment or a deeper message—makes reading a really excellent book even more intensely satisfying.

If I read something and say to myself, “How did she manage that???” and it makes me want to understand my own craft a little more deeply, then I have gained immeasurably from that book.

If a book challenges my notions of what makes a novel work and still keeps me turning the pages, then I’ve grown as both a reader and a writer.

We all learn from each other. Reading may not be the only way to learn how to write, but it’s a vital ingredient that cannot be eliminated from the process.

So my advice to all aspiring writers is read deeply. Read with your eyes, your ears, your intellect, and your heart.