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.

Oliver Cromwell's Ely by Katherine Clements

Writing historical fiction involves a lot of research and time spent in libraries, museums and archives. It’s part of the job that I love. But when I’m working on a book, creating a sense of place is an important part of the process. Readers often ask how I research locations, how I find out what real places would have been like at a specific point in history.

My first novel, The Crimson Ribbon, is set mostly in London and Abingdon, but it begins in Ely, in the home of one of the town’s most famous residents, Oliver Cromwell. It was during my first research trip there that I learned the importance of visiting real settings, wherever possible.

The book is set during the years of the English Civil Wars when Cromwell was a man of influence in the town. He moved there in 1636, became Governor in 1643 and relocated his family to London towards the end of 1646.

Oliver Cromwell's House

Luckily, the family house still stands and is now a museum. I’d spent a lot of time learning about the man himself and walking around the house was quite emotive. On a practical level, it allowed me to understand the layout of the rooms and the positioning of the house both geographically and socially. Some of the interiors still have their original paneling and the inclusion of seventeenth century furniture gives it atmosphere, despite this somewhat creepy addition of an Oliver waxwork!

As soon as I decided to open the book in Ely, I knew the cathedral would feature in some way. It’s a spectacular building, made more so by the surrounding landscape. Ely isn’t a built up town even today, so it’s easy to imagine how impressive the cathedral would have been when Ely was just a village, and what a presence it must have been in people’s lives.

By the seventeenth century, many of the old medieval cathedrals had fallen into disuse and were beginning to crumble to ruin. They were used as meeting places, or markets and in some cases, such as St Paul’s in London, became hotbeds of sedition and debauchery. But Ely remained partly in use throughout. The structure overshadows Cromwell’s house and St Mary’s church where the Cromwell family worshipped; as a strict Puritan, Cromwell would not have welcomed this ever-present symbol of the old faith and all its associations.

The reputation of Cromwell as an iconoclast is well known but there’s no evidence that he was personally responsible for any damage to Ely Cathedral. It’s been claimed that he oversaw the demolition of the fallen tower and transept but in fact, this fell in the fourteenth century and most of the damage we see today was a result of Reformation zeal a hundred years before. A later Parliamentary campaign to demolish such buildings, never came to fruition.

Climbing the cathedral tower is a memorable experience. The fenland landscape falls away and a huge cloud-filled sky stretches out above. It gives a real sense of scale, quite different from on the ground. I couldn’t help wonder about the atmosphere of awe and superstition that might have surrounded these buildings and what it would have meant to the ordinary people that lived in the cathedral’s shadow during those tumultuous years.

The landscape surrounding Ely would have been quite different then too. By the mid-seventeenth century the Fens were being drained but the Isle of Ely was still surrounded by floodwaters at certain times of year. These days, there’s virtually nothing of the old fenland landscape left, but a visit to Wicken Fen gave me a good idea of how it might have looked. This National Trust nature reserve is doing great conservation work and is very evocative.

And what of the town itself? I began by studying old maps and images, plotting seventeenth century streets onto modern plans, to get a sense of layout and distances. Google maps can be a great help here, but nothing beats an actual visit. Ely is packed with history and walking the streets it’s not difficult to trace the old town seen in this 1610 map.

John Speed's map of Ely, 1610

I’ve also found that local museums, visitor centres and tourist information offices can house a wealth of information. I’ve discovered pamphlets and books written by local historians that give the kind of detail you can’t find elsewhere and lend a bit of colour – great for things like local myths and legends (and, significantly, the names of seventeenth century taverns!).

Turns out Oliver Cromwell’s Ely can still be found, just beneath the modern veneer. All that’s missing is the stink and clamour of seventeenth century England, and for that, we have imagination.


For more about Ely and its history, see these posts by fellow History Girls Adele Geras and Karen Maitland.


Oliver Cromwell's House

Ely Cathedral

Toppings Bookshop (for local history books and much more)


www.katherineclements.co.uk

Historical Sources for Historical Fiction - Gillian Polack

Last month I made a rash promise. I promised I’d talk about sources. Now that my mind is on other things, I’ll still talk about sources, but not in the way I originally intended. I’m writing a book on the relationship that fiction writers enjoy with history, and that’s colouring everything I do. It definitely colours this post.

Compared with modern history, there are so few sources for the Middle Ages. ‘Compared with modern history’ are tricky words, however. There are a lot of sources. A vast number and range. They’re not always obvious, however, nor are they easy to interpret. And the reason we look at them shapes how we interpret them. Some of this I talked about last month.

Last month I focussed on cosmetics. 

Our main sources for cosmetics right now are a very small number of key manuscripts. These manuscripts talk about what cosmetics women used, they prescribe how women should behave, and they that give recipes for them. We’re not talking about that many documents, in total, and they cover the whole of Western Europe. This means that, from them, we don’t know what cosmetics a given woman would use. Big statements like “All women wore lead paint” are based on a tiny number of sources. A pale face in a picture doesn't mean the woman in the picture is depicted as wearing lead paint. I found you an example of this:

There are also some rather wonderful archaeological remains. Combs are my personal favourite, but they aren’t the only archaeological survival, by any means. One of the big lessons I learned when I worked on The Middle Ages Unlocked, was that on some subjects Katrin (my archaeologist co-writer) knew many things that I did not. My archaeology was a mere two years at university and was a very long time ago. The knowledge differential between me and someone who works in a particular field and knows their stuff is vast and full of chasms. 

Even the stuff Katrin only half-knows is more than what I know in her field. I hope that the same applies to mine and that she was sufficiently awed by my historical understanding for the world to be balanced, but that’s somewhat irrelevant here. What’s relevant is that archaeology is constantly growing and changing and dipping into a popular work won’t give you nearly as much information as learning how to interpret reports of digs or analyses of types of finds. Those finds won’t tell you how someone wore make-up, but they will give you more information about the devices used to make oneself beautiful, and that information helps us flesh out those rare mentions in manuscripts.

The trick is, then, not just knowing what kind of sources are out there, but gaining access to them and putting them in their wider cultural perspective.

One of my favourite websites for small archaeological finds is finds.org. It’s an online database of the small things found by various people in the UK. Each find has a description, but you’ll not get detailed analysis of how it fits in with other finds. Whether this brooch is typical or this tool is normal for a time and place isn’t something you’ll find out without checking what the experts have to say. Sources speak, but they speak much better when they’re interpreted by those with vast amounts of knowledge and experience.

What I do, when I’m researching for a novel is use a mixture of primary sources and the studies of them by those who know more than me. In the happy (but small) areas where I’ve done my own research and I am the researcher, I can bask in the sunshine of actually knowing what I’m doing, but most of the time I argue with myself and try to expand my understanding of the place and time I’m writing about, so that I can use studies critically and not misinterpret the sources too badly.

How does this relate to historical sources for fiction? Intimately. A source is as only as good as the person who looks at it. If you look at a beautiful manuscript and have no idea of the language it’s in or that it’s in a script that predates your period by five hundred years or that it was written by the exact person you want to star in your amazing tale, then it’s a huge waste. 

Sources are only as good as the person using them and are always biased at our (the user’s) end and at the original (writer’s) end. Interpretations are only as good as the brain and thought and understanding of the person using them. And that person needs to remember (I write notes to myself, for it’s a continual reminder, not a once-off) that people in the past were real and had private lives and were grumpy in the morning or tired at night and had to go and milk the cows when they’d rather be writing and… Sometimes we get annotations or comments in the manuscripts that tell us these things, and those notes are writing gold. Most of the time we have to look very carefully at a list or a letter and work out who the writer was from what they didn’t say as much as from what they do say.

That’s why I decided against giving a list of sources in this post. I thought it might be more useful to talk about the most important factor in someone’s research: how they think and discover and interpret.

So many writers want to cut research corners. They ask me for digests of what I know. “Summarise twenty years of your work in three minutes, please, for that’s all the time I can spare this subject.” This is not a wise approach for a writer. The trick with sources is not accessing them: it’s understanding them.

My research (for the ‘I’m-not-a-fiction-writer’ side of me) is generally text-based. Medievally speaking, for me, this mostly means literature. There are bunches of non-literary Medieval written sources, hidden away in archives, staring us in the face as the charters for towns and the underpinning of various family histories. I tend not to work with these for my academic side, for I am addicted to stories.

What I do as a novelist, is read general works on the subject until I understand where current research is going, how it interprets that place and time and what spin it gives to sources. I collect primary sources and then read them myself wherever I can. All of this recent experience comes from me working on a period so alien to me that I’ve had to start from first principles – I can’t trust my common sense, because my common sense will be trumped by my preconceived assumptions at every point, and preconceived assumptions tend to make a rather predictable work of fiction. Also a shallow one.

So, I’ve read a bunch of works by historians and archaeologists and have a fair general knowledge about the setting for this novel I’m working on. I’ve started reading primary sources and taking notes about particular tidbits that’d be handy for the novel. This is my actual beginning. From here I’m working on turning my new adventure into understanding of a deep enough sort that it can inform my novel.

It’s the difference between looking at a source and looking intoa source and understanding it. 

I keep using the word ‘understanding’ because that’s the way to get the sources to talk back, to reveal their information and to let them help you bring the novel to life. It’s the difference between giving a reader flat information about a place and a time and giving a reader a lively story where the time and place is integral to the story.

On History and Medieval Cosmetics - Gillian Polack

I asked my readers for suggestions for this month’s post, and I’m torn between telling you about Esther Abrahams and medieval cosmetics. Of the suggestions, those were the two that have the most interesting stories. 

I chose cosmetics. Not because I can give you chapter and verse on them (which I won’t today), but because in research terms, they’re fascinating. We don’t know much and we can’t know much and yet what we know opens so many doors for us and shows us how women lived. Next month I’ll talk about sources for cosmetics and for other aspects of medieval life: that’s when I’ll point to where to find out more. Today is all about us, and how we see history. Cosmetics are my excuse for talking about my favourite subject.

First, the stereotypes. 

I often feel that I can’t talk about the Middle Ages without breaking down a thousand walls of false assumptions. We all own the Middle Ages. It’s one of the most popular periods in Western history. Owning it doesn’t mean we understand it. Owning it doesn’t mean we know it.

How does this relate to cosmetics? 

We filter our interpretation of evidence about medieval cosmetics through several vectors. One is what we think historians have to say about them. 

Why do I say “What we think”? This question is because I’m full of rhetorical questions today. Obviously I got out of the rhetorical side of bed this morning: the rhetorical side of bed is the side that doesn’t face the wall, it’s the one that forces you to go in that direction. And my brain is a butterfly brain, and it would be helpful if I stayed on topic.

"What we think" refers to the fact that we all carry mental images of the work historians do. There is overlap between these mental images and the actual work historians do, but sometimes that overlap is less than we realise. Kelly Gardiner discusses this in her analysis of the debate from the Historical Novel Society’s Australasian conference recently. She quotes me as saying quite straightforward things because it was a debate and we were all full of soundbites, but the reality is more complicated and can't be summarised in soundbites. The baseline however, is that only a very few people can keep up fully with current debates on what history actually is to us and what cultural functions it serves. These people can often be found between the pages of journals such as History and Theory and Rethinking History, their ideas pressed flat to meet the pages halfway. Most people think history is something simpler and grander. Those who like stability in how they see history (for the theory is constantly changing) are likely to fall into following a particular path of historical thinking. One of those paths is a rather nineteenth century variety. I encounter this latter one a lot, which is why I used it as an example at the debate.

The reason I encounter it a lot is because it’s much easier to relate to historical fiction than the  new histories are. It produces narratives and story without too much angst. It’s straightforward and it has emotional appeal. 

It assumes a static past, where facts can be proven and where we know where we stand. We can argue “Richard III was innocent” or “He was guilty” much more easily using this model, for instance. It’s a popular one because of this. The values system implied by simply demanding that innocence or guilt be proven is part of this way of thinking about history. It’s much easier to interpret history when we can use our own judgement.

The trouble is that history is more complicated than this.

Surely cosmetics aren’t complicated? (I want a live audience so that I can ask someone to ask me this. Then it will be obvious when I’m asking rhetorical questions.) The trouble is that everything’s complicated. We’re reconstructing the past to make sense of it for ourselves. We’re using available evidence. And evidence can include value judgements and our interpretation of evidence can include value judgements.

The ‘fact’ I’ve seen quoted in various places that all medieval women used lead-based paint to make their cheeks white and beautiful, for instance, seems to come from just one source and that source is the same one that hates women for using urea and fish scales (which we still use in makeup:  urea softens things and fish scales make them glitter). The descriptions of cosmetics in his writing is part of a statement about what women ought to be doing and just how mucky things are. The (male) writer is trying to present negatives, and so of course he uses the less enticing methods of beautification. His view of the world colours how he described female beauty, and so does the underlying position he took in this particular piece of writing. Polemic shades the way we all see cosmetics when we read his work unless we recognise it and say “I know what he’s doing” and make allowances or find other sources, or both.

The same applies to statues and paintings. We’re seeing the artist’s interpretation of what they want to carve or paint. In the Middle Ages this was mostly ideal beauty, so we know more about the ideal than about the everyday. The ideal female beauty in portraits and carvings matches very closely to the way a fairy is described in twelfth century French literature, so this is how I teach it. We have Hollywood and advertising. They had Arthurian romances and knights discovering their dream woman: beautiful and rich and powerful and somewhat magic.

Then, elsewhere (in recipes and formulae for medicines) we get an inkling of some of the makeup people actually used. We have toothpaste recipes and we have eyeliner and… we don’t know who used these recipes, or how often or under what circumstances.

Elsewhere, we hear that prostitutes use too much rouge and too much powder and paint their eyes. The implication is that bad women are identifiable and that cosmetics are an important tool for such identification. I’ve wondered for a while whether the warning is to identify prostitutes because they’re providers of services, or because they should be avoided, or because they’re quite possibly a really solid source of local gossip. I think it depends on the viewer. I also think that there are more options than these three. Which one we choose as our own depends on how we read the source, or how we read the information taken from the source and places elsewhere (in a modern text). There are many medieval readings of medieval texts, and there are at least as many modern readings. 

Consensus can be forced. If we agree that only prostitutes wear makeup from that evidence then some late medieval paintings of noble women are of prostitutes. One source isn’t enough to understand a society.

The reality of understanding any object or practice in any period isn’t through one source. It’s not the fairy’s beauty or the “Thou shalt not decorate” of the conservative. It’s all of these and a whole heap more. Historians discuss continually. Interpretations are a moveable feast. It isn’t one interpretation. It’s a series of linked interpretations over time, some feeding into each other and supporting a strong common view and some standing bravely alone.

Fifty years ago we knew almost nothing about medieval cosmetics. Now we are gradually reaching the stage (though we’re not there yet) where we know enough to trace changes over time and place and maybe begin to form some kind of consensus. This is what those changes in the way we view history have given us. We can include archaeological work into our voyage of discovery, and understand how important medieval values are to interpreting evidence, and how important the values of earlier historians are to the way evidence has been interpreted and we can draw our own conclusions from bringing it all together.

This is where I bring things together myself and admit that I chose cosmetics because it’s a good excuse to talk about how wonderful historical study is and how complicated and how important it is to question our own stance at every point. We can’t interpret history unless we have a narrative for it and we can’t have a narrative for it until we understand the narratives we give ourselves. Unless we question the very ground we stand on, our narratives are always linked to consensus narratives. 

I have personal codes for reminding myself of these things. Mine for this is “Not all medieval women who wore makeup were damned.” This is because so many of our assumptions concerning the Middle Ages forget that religious condemnation of makeup wasn’t universal. The code reminds me that I don’t have answers yet, just many questions and a bit of data. That’s why I love history: one never stops learning.