How to read as a writer, by Gillian Polack

There are so many articles these days – on the web and off- that give a guide to how life was lived or how something was experienced in times other than our own. We can fly through London in the seventeenth century, or boat down the Thames. We can hear about the theatre or read how someone cuddled up by the fire to a good book. What all these articles have in common is that they’re articles about something: they’re modern thoughts. 

For many writers, these articles are entertaining and fun, but not where we get the grit for our fiction. We delve into scholarly studies and we check primary sources. Primary sources are the best. Books, articles, pamphlets, ephemera, pictures, objets d’art, everyday items – any primary source. I use them so much that I keep forgetting to explain that the way I read them in order to write fiction isn’t at all the way I read them as a historian.

Today, then, I’m going to address two issues with the same example. I’m going to show you how I (as a writer) read a single primary source for my fiction. At the same time, I’m going to say honestly that this is not even close to the technique I use as a historian. 

History and fiction serve different functions. We research both, but the research can be quite different in style and always leads to different outcomes. This is one of the many reasons there is a difference between historically based fiction and scholarly monographs, after all. I look into this in detail in History and Fiction, but I don’t actually pull apart a primary source to use in a novel. If you want more of the theoretical stuff, and to know what other writers do, History and Fiction is the place to go. Here I’m going to take a source that I think might be of use for the novel I’m writing (slowly at the moment, for the universe keeps intervening) that’s set in the seventeenth century.

Samuel Pepys is very well known for his diary. He wrote it for himself, which makes it even more interesting, for he writes about his place and time in a very personal way. We’re often looking through his eyes when we see the Great Fire of London, for so many modern novels that tell of the Great Fire or that have it as an incident, use his accountas their basis. 

As a historian, I regard him as a tremendous primary source for his place and time. I also have to balance his very articulate views with those of others, because Pepys’ importance (both at the time and in our eyes) means that it’s all too easy to use him alone. To get an understanding of how people actually lived, therefore, Pepys only provides one small story.

Novels share that with Pepys. They, too, focus on one small story. It’s what we write. Accounts of places and of times that focus quite sharply on particular people or events. So many novels, therefore, rely heavily on Pepys. This is why he’s not one of my major sources for my novel, in fact. Pepys is the wrong gender for me, in an England where the life experiences of men and women were wildly different. I’ve read him through and taken the information I think I need from him, and then moved on to other sources that more closely meet the way my own characters would have seen their place and time.

When I read Pepys, I always remember that London was different before to after the fire. I took this picture in 2014 to remind me - this is definitely an 'after the fire' view.

This makes him a very good source to use as an example, for you can see how he’s useful and how he isn’t useful for my novel. 

Let’s start with what I’m looking for. I’m depicting the world of women. I’m looking, therefore, for experiences they might have had, for places they might have seen, for anything that’s shared between men and women, for hints of how my characters might see the streets of London when they visit. Unlike Pepys, they were not Londoners, so what he sees as an insider, my women would see as outsiders.

Let me use an online edition (although I used a print edition for the most part). I’ll paste it here and annotate it, with notes on how I would use it to help shape my novel. You might want to check the annotations of others, as well. They help show how modern readers look at Pepys and what they think need explaining for the wider public. You can find the diary entry and its reader-annotations here

 

Again, London in 2014. Even if the buildings change, the streets may be the same. Pepys may well have walked this.

Up, and to White Hall to the Committee of Tangier (1), but it did not meet. But here I do hear first that my Lady Paulina Montagu did die yesterday; at which I went to my Lord’s lodgings (2), but he is shut up with sorrow, and so not to be spoken with: and therefore I returned, and to Westminster Hall, where I have not been, I think, in some months. And here the Hall was very full, the King having, by Commission to some Lords this day, prorogued the Parliament till the 19th of October next (3): at which I am glad, hoping to have time to go over to France this year. But I was most of all surprised this morning by my Lord Bellassis, who, by appointment, met me at Auditor Wood’s, at the Temple, and tells me of a duell designed between the Duke of Buckingham and my Lord Halifax, or Sir W. Coventry; the challenge being carried by Harry Saville, but prevented by my Lord Arlington, and the King told of it; and this was all the discourse at Court this day (4). But I, meeting Sir W. Coventry in the Duke of York’s chamber, he would not own it to me, but told me that he was a man of too much peace to meddle with fighting, and so it rested: but the talk is full in the town of the business. Thence, having walked some turns with my cozen Pepys, and most people, by their discourse, believing that this Parliament will never sit more, I away to several places to look after things against to-morrow’s feast (5), and so home to dinner; and thence, after noon, my wife and I out by hackneycoach 6), and spent the afternoon in several places, doing several things at the ‘Change and elsewhere against to-morrow; and, among others, I did also bring home a piece of my face cast in plaister, for to make a vizard upon, for my eyes (7). And so home, where W. Batelier come, and sat with us; and there, after many doubts, did resolve to go on with our feast and dancing to- morrow; and so, after supper, left the maids to make clean the house, and to lay the cloth, and other things against to-morrow, and we to bed (8).

1. Places are handy. I can locate them on a map and decide if my characters need to pass them or visit them.

2. Individuals are less handy. Unless they’re likely to appear in the novel, their main use for me is to decide if my characters belong to their class or circle and how any reference will be made to them. In this case, I can’t see any reason for mentioning the death of Paulina Montagu, so I just keep on reading.

3. Pepys was a public servant and his life was ruled by Parliamentary sittings. My characters are anything but. I need to know when Parliament is sitting, however, for it will influence the visit to London. Also, it would be a great matter of interest to my characters. Politics in the late seventeenth century were an obsession and a matter of great import and terribly emotional. I will need a timeline of all the Great Events (including who betrayed whom and when) and I will need to know my characters’ views on these things. This mention by Pepys helps remind me that I need to do this. The wonderful thing about doing this as a novelist is that I’m allowed to be far more partisan than I can be as a historian. My characters will have Opinions. This means I develop quite a different timeline and overview to the one that I would develop as a historian, where I’d look more into causes and outcomes of events than into the feelings of women from a given region. To simplify, I can decide who someone would like to throw mud at and why.

4. Duels are terrific fodder. If there’s a duel in London when my characters visit and if there’s a reasonable likelihood that they’d hear about it, then it will be of interest. No more than that for me for this novel, however, for it’s not the stuff of my women’s lives. Pepys is much closer to the aristocracy and the doings of government than my women are. 

Place in society matters at least as much as place in time. The story Pepys tells would be a good one. A duel! How it happened! was stopped! But it can’t happen in that way in a novel with women from a country town as the main characters. The most they could do is gossip about it, or maybe know someone who knows someone. 

The drama has to come from something other than duelling, then, which is a shame, given how much we associate the seventeenth century with duels. I could force a duel in (as many authors do) but forcing the historically unlikely is not my style. In my notes I’ll probably write that I have to find something of equal interest, but that I can’t use a duel. It’s OK, though, for there’s at least one duel in a novel of mine that will be out next year – it’s entirely appropriate in that novel.

5. Food! I know what Pepys was likely to have eaten. Better, I know what my characters would enjoy. I’ve still got to test a bunch of recipes, but I have the tastes of the time and place all sorted. This means that Pepys isn’t giving me anything new, but he does remind me I still have to test recipes. This is one of the reasons the novel’s been put off for a bit – the one I’m writing currently has no recipes to test, so I can do it immediately.

6. Another thing I can check off. I have my transport to London sorted and my transport within London. I know how long it takes to get to a place and even how long it takes to get letters to and fro, in order to plan a trip. These were easy to research as there are books of timetables in the later seventeenth century. Some eras are much easier to research than others!

7. I do not want to know this. I really, really hate the thought of having a plaster cast of my face. It’s a suffocating scary squicky thought. I do know how it was done, however, should I ever need to write about it. 

Oddly, I was interested in this when I was a child and collected gypsum to make plaster of Paris. My mother forbade me to use the oven and my plaster of Paris remained unmade. This is the sort of information that helps with fiction. It’s much easier to check up the specifics of a technique than it is to find out about something of which one has no knowledge at all. I think this is why so many fiction writers are magpies in the way we collect an understanding of this or of that. Which reminds me that I’d make a note at this point about the ‘Change. This is something that will have to appear in my novel, in one way or another.

8. This sentence is the most important in the whole extract for my novel. It tells the normal order of life. This is something that men and women shared. It tells me the role of a maid (and that it’s a single maid and not three maids and a footman) and how she fits in with the house as a whole. I’ve done my homework on this – I know the shape of London households of this level of prosperity. This means I can safely use this sentence to help bring a household to life.

In Conversation with Alma Alexander, by Gillian Polack

Today I have a guest. Alma Alexander is a US fantasy writer. She has a deep and abiding love of history. I thought it might be interesting to have a conversation with her instead of the regular kind of post.

Alma Alexander, from her author page

Gillian: I've been working on how writers use history in their fiction recently. In your new novel, Empress, you use your historical knowledge in quite a particular way. Maybe we could start off our discussion with what you do and how you do it.

Alma: There is alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction. While the first two are obviously fantasy, you might argue that "straight" historical fiction, the kind that literally takes an event or an era that actually TRANSPIRED in our real-life timeline, is the "true" one out of that pack of otherwise gilded lies.

But is it?

Isn't history always told from the point of view of the victors, isn't it always remembered from what has been told, isn't there a dark and dusty back room where the untold stories go to molder into ashes in silence and solitude? And if you tell THOSE stories - even if you're telling an otherwise absolutely "straight" historical narrative...aren't you already wading into fantasy?

So let's split this into "living memory" and "ancient tales".

With things that might have happened in living memory, you're telling a story which will be remembered by people who were there. Or by their children to whom the stories were told. There are histories that people hide from outsiders simply because the pain is still – will ALWAYS be - too close, too real, too much to share. Should a story be banned, then?

What if it is too important to hide?

I hit a wall similar to this with Embers of Heaven, a novel that takes place some 400 years after its predecessor, Secrets of Jin-shei. That first book was based on an Imperial China, but Embers... took place during the equivalent what we knew as the Cultural Revolution. And one of the characters in my fantasy tale was at the heart of that 'real-world' revolution. I treated that book of living memory history gently. I took the characters whose story I was telling and I focused on them. Without coming out with things that rationalized or justified anything that was ever done by anyone during that time, I had to find a way to tell the story. Tell it straight. Find a way to simply be the messenger, and to let the recent history take care of itself.

And then there's a book like Empress, a story based on a glittering moment in the Byzantine Empire. There was a real love story to end all love stories out there - Emperor Justinian, and his love and soulmate, the Empress Theodora. I grew up with these stories, I cut my teeth on tales of Theodora.

But I didn't want the "historical" Theodora. I wanted the woman underneath the history. And I did not want to tell the straight "historical" story because Justinian was a bookish little clerk who wasn't romantic or manly, nothing like the emperor I called Maxentius. He was all mine. My creation. Someone I wrought so lovingly – flaws and all - that I fell a little in love with him myself. Heh.

My version of the Empress Callidora was likewise grown in the story oyster from the piece of grit that was the historical Theodora. Some of the things Theodora did my girl did too. Other things she did without much input by me. She always knew her own mind.

The world my Maxentius and my Callidora inhabit is NOT the historical Byzantium. It is a place called Visant, which shares some of the same historical touchstones. But my absolute joy in writing these fat historical fantasies is that I can take those touchstones and make them mean something else in my world. I can write the stories I want to write, even those dusty abandoned ones from the forgotten back rooms.

This is what historical fantasy does - it frees me to look at history from above, a high-flying goddess on golden wings, and create a world that is both utterly real and historically grounded, and something rich and strange that I alone had the weaving of.

Gillian: For me, as someone who looks into how writers use history, it seems that you're putting up three categories so that you can argue about inner truth. We can talk about the categories of alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction, however, they're not at the heart of what you're arguing. This is an excellent opening to the sort of fiction you write. Describing people in terms of their relationship to historical counterparts shows the depth of emotion you bring to your fiction and to the history behind it. For me, however, fiction can't actually show us the person behind the story. What it can do (brilliantly) is lead us into different stories from different approaches. It can expand our understanding about the world around us and give us more narratives about history. Most of the time, story is story, and the path you follow to create your characters was purely your path: history in fiction is always a construction by the writer, for the writer and the reader. It's always shaped by our narratives.

Stories are at the core of novels for me, not reality. However, I'm a historian (always and ever) and I always need a bridge from what I see and argue as a historian and the stories I tell as a fiction writer. This is why, in my fiction, I always have one character who sees the story. This is clearest in Langue[dot]doc 1305 and in Illuminations, where I have characters who argue the way historians argue. Artemisia and Rose are both concerned with what's happening in their lives (and, in Illuminations, in the manuscript Rose has found)  and their doubts mean that if there's a reader like me, who sees history as narratives we construct to understand our past and ourselves, that reader has something to hang onto. In my other novels, these characters are less obvious. I always give them a moment, however, and they look at what's happening and say "This can't be real" and often explain why. One of those moments for Ms Cellophane has been quoted by a few people: a character points out that they can't be in a horror novel, and gives reasons. Readers often ask me which character am I in my fiction. I'm none of them. That moment of clarity about narrative, however, that's me peeking in and saying "Boo!" to the reader.

Alma: I remember talking about the writing of battles with someone and what took shape is simply that you cannot WRITE A BATTLE if you've got a POV character in the middle of one. That's because the POV character in question is simply not in a position of knowing what the battle is doing. (S)he isn't IN the whole battle. The only concern of such a character is what is going on *right around them* in the heat of the moment. Their concern - their story - is their own survival. If a battle is won or lost - well, that is a larger question, and one that is decided cumulatively, and not by any single moment. But while a straightforward history might describe such a battle from the perspective of hindsight and of God, looking at it from a dizzy height and discerning tactics (if any) and the shape of the whole battle... if you're in the thick of it you don't see any of that. You're living the battle, not observing it. And it is so with a story, too.

A character can tell their own story - a story that might be nested inside a larger one, to be sure, as all personal stories in the end are because we all live in a shared larger world. But it is the individual story that we can see through the prism of any individual person's life, and it is through their eyes that the bigger story is seen, and shaped, and told.

I don't think enough is ever said about the very real fact that we are all, right now, LIVING IN HISTORY. It just hasn't become history yet, but with every passing moment it is closer to the past than it is to our present or to the future. Minute by minute our own stories drip off the ends of our lives and merge into that larger, shared, historical background that is the tapestry of human existence.

And writing a historical tale (they're all pretty much historical, except proudly futuristic science fiction) is essentially the distilled art of fiction. You're weaving a single golden thread in and out of a larger picture, and making that single thread meaningful within the context of a wider and more encompassing history...

Gillian: My inner historian argues that , using that approach, you can never write a battle. We see different things from the scrum to those we see from a nearby mountainside or from a chronicle written afterwards, but each of the things we see contains inherent bias. We bring ourselves to our writing and colour the scene with our thoughts. The difference between historical non-fiction and historical fiction include the boundaries (things like how far we may colour, what we may colour, which colours we have at our disposal) and whether or not the reader expects to be able to critically evaluate the text by retracing the research that went into it (scholarly apparatus).

As a reader, I expect to be drawn into the story if it's fiction and to be able to critically evaluate it if it's a historical study, but there is significant overlap and our humanity shows in every word we write.

Alma: You can write *A*battle, with any battle you choose to write. But could you write *THE*battle, something specific, something that pertains directly and in-tight-focus to a particular combatant within that battle? You correctly say that our humanity shows in every word we write - how could it be otherwise? We put so much of ourselves into everything we do, every story we tell, or at least we should, and it's the mark of the very best storytelling that the humanity of the writer has to shine through somehow (without being pedantic and preachy about anything, of course). And when fiction touches history it's so easy to slide into the accepted history pageant and forget (as always) the humanity of the under-history, the one never written, the one lived by the "losers" in any given conflict. And telling the untold story... isn't that what every writer dreams of doing...?

I try to do it, at least, with every tale that I tell. I like to think of fiction as a light, something that chases away the shadows from the dark places of the world, and I never forget the power and the privilege of being the hand that wields the torch...

Gillian: And on that note, I will leave Alma to her torch and me to my rather different light. I love it that there are so many choices for narratives and that we can all have valid views. It adds a richness to fiction, not knowing how far that we are going to agree or disagree as readers with the story that unrolls before us.

History belongs in all fiction (Canberra's history, part one) by Gillian Polack

This month I asked readers what they’d like me to write about. I was given half a dozen good suggestions, and a couple of silly ones. 

The suggestion that stuck with me was to write about the history of where I live, which is Canberra, Australia. When I was catching a bus last week I saw my local lake from the bus and realised that I’d seen that view in the Canberra Museum and Canberra. I’ve seen a nineteenth century painting of it (with sheep, for it was a sheep station at that moment in its long life) and a twentieth century painting (also with sheep) and any number of photographs (with cars and a highway replacing the sheep). I’ve not seen any pictures of it that show it before European settlement. 

Picture courtesy NLA

I’ve had this thought before: it’s the view that got me thinking about how we brought European culture to this region and laid it over an existing landscape, which was what I explored in The Time of the Ghosts. We replaced some of the kangaroos with sheep and pretended we were part of Europe. History slips into all novels, one way or another, and in the case of The Time of the Ghosts it did a lot more than slip in. 

The changes European settlers made to the landscape inspired me to think about the way we interpret landscape and live on the land. The psychic tensions in that novel reflect the very real unhappiness we’ve carried with us to this country. Fears have to be faced, not just carried like baggage. The sheep help explain that, too, for their sharp hooves are tough on the fragile local ecosystem.

St Andrews, Canberra 1934, picture courtesy St Andrews

I didn’t tell myself “I’m writing about the history of the city I live in” because I didn’t see it that way. Not even when I added the local story about the bushranger’s hoard. History is with us in our novels, however, whether we realise it or not. Historical fiction admits this directly. 

My fiction only sometimes says directly “This has history in it.” It always contains history, however. Every single piece of fiction I’ve ever written contains history in one way or another. 

History always informs our fiction, whether we want it to or not. Some novelists deny having pasts, but those pasts are always there. History informs mine more than most, because when I’m not a writer and analysing various things, I’m a historian. I can’t imagine the world without history. I can’t imagine stories without history. This means, of course, that I can’t imagine where I live without having many thoughts and views about its history.

My forthcoming novel (The Wizardry of Jewish Women) is the last of the series with such strong Canberra links and you can see recent history a little more clearly because of this and because it’s written from an outside vantage point, being set mostly in Sydney. It traces a year (or thereabouts) in the life of a family. I used real events for a great deal of it. Those events ranged from bushfires to meetings inside Parliament House. I was using real events with intent. History in this novel is a grounding factor. It’s the firm foundation from which the reader can enjoy the magic and the special powers that some of the characters possess. Because the bushfire actually occurred and really did burn down a whole region of our city, seeing just how far magical protection can help someone in the story gives the reader a sense of the limits of magic in this world that’s not quite ours.

Canberra bushfire, picture L Rose

So many writers find something that works as grounding for their fiction. For some people it’s the quirks of everyday life. For others it’s clothes and manners. For me, in my contemporary novels, it’s history. 

It’s so easy to remember those paintings and to envisage the difference between the nineteenth century station and the twentieth century fields with a burgeoning city in the background and then the city overtaking the sheep and transforming them into cars and houses. Because it’s easy to see, it’s easy to write about.

Two weeks ago I gave a workshop on world building for writers. I talked about discovering the geology that creates the landscape, because it’s exceptionally useful in grounding the story and in getting details right. The sheep were brought to Canberra because the farming land was mostly poor thin soil. The ancient rocks brought this poor thin soil into existence. But they also count for the shape of that slope I looked at from the bus: even when the sheep are gone, the land is there. It’s the foundation of the world of the story. 

Landscapes over time are terribly important to understand how people live in a place and interact with it. It’s the foundation of all our stories, whether we realise this or not. Once we know a place, we can tell its stories. And now that you know where I’m coming from, I can tell you stories of Canberra. Not every month, but now and again, when something strikes me as interesting.

I’ll leave you with a vignette, just to whet the appetite. 

The reason the Australian Labor Party has US spelling for its name is because one of its founders was American (or from Canada – it’s not entirely clear). King O’Malley was a famous teetotaller. One of my favourite pubs is named after him. I live in a city that has a pub named after a teetotaller politician from over a hundred years ago. This suggests that Canberra is not entirely the dull national capital it appears from outside. 

Our history helps dig beneath that surface and to the bedrock of the city. I look forward to introducing you to it.