Hawkins Bizarre

Shakespeare and me...

2011-03-20T22:08:00.002Z

It’s not often that I’m compared to Shakespeare. Well, OK, never. However, my son did remark, recently ‘very Shakespearean, Mum’ about my work. The reason is, I am writing a play. No, it’s not in iambic pentameter and it doesn’t have people wandering around accepting the frankly ludicrous premise that a beautiful young girl is actually a virile young lad (or any of the other frankly ludicrous premises in the comedies, or even tragedies - trial by hanky always struck me as ludicrously flimsy stuff - of Wm Shakespeare Esq). It’s actually a play about Dickens but we’ll come back to that in a minute. What prompted the filial Shakespearean reference is that fact that I’m trying to write a play that is going to appeal to all kinds and ages of people. Something for the Dickens enthusiast, something for people who know nothing about him apart from the fact that he wrote the odd book, something for kids who don’t care who he was, something for teenagers who know who he was thanks very much and don’t want to be here anyway…

Which brings me to the sort of play it is. You probably know that 2012 marks not only the year the Olympics come to London (insert hooray or boo here according to your preference) but the bi-centenary of Charles Dickens’ birth. I have been commissioned to write a play for performance in Rochester cathedral to commemorate this event.

Those of you who knew it was Dickens’ bicentenary next year will know why there is a Dickens festival every year in Rochester. Dickens spent most of his first ten years in and around Chatham (contiguous with Rochester) and, once he was famous, bought a house in Rochester that he had admired as a small boy.

The Dickens festival is a big annual deal for Rochester and the bicentenary festival is going to be a good deal bigger deal, as it were. So I’m very gratified to have been asked to write a play that is going to be the cathedral’s contribution to the porceedings.

Long-term readers of this blog will recall that I wrote and produced a play for the cathedral in 2010. That experience taught me a lot and it’s why I know that – with the likely crowds coming to the cathedral during the festival – I will have to appeal to all kinds and manner of people.

More on this, no doubt, anon; though I suspect that’s the end of the comparisons of my work with Shakespeare.

World Book Night

2011-03-09T09:16:00.002Z

How did you spend World Book Night? Were you a ‘giver’? Did you go to an event? I was kindly invited to take part in a WBN gig at Crawley library by fellow-writer Neil Ayres and duly went along to do a reading, listen to other writers reading and watch lots of people (well, the specified forty-eight, I suppose) get a free copy of Cloud Atlas, the book Neil had nominated to give away.

There has been a certain amount of controversy over the whole idea of Jamie Byng’s World Book Night. You can read some of the controversy here. And, whilst I was making my way (thank you Google maps) to and from Crawley library, I wondered what I would do if somebody asked me to come up with an alternative idea for WBN (which should, strictly speaking, more accurately be called National Book Night since nobody outside Britain seems to have caught the vision).

I think that giving away books is a grand gesture, in more senses than one, but when the books are chosen centrally, we are missing the opportunity for people to rave about books they personally care about. Maybe your favourite book appeared on the list but none of mine favourite did.

I quite like Nicola Morgan’s suggestion but instead of just buying a book and giving it to a friend, I’d combine it with the kind of event I was part of on Saturday, plus some other stuff.

It would go something like this. There’d be a barn dance (or quiz, karaoke or any other kind of activity that brings people together. Since WBN is supposed to be about getting people reading, you need to encourage people who don’t read much to come – they need something they know they’re going to enjoy) and something to eat and, at some point in the evening, the book giving would commence. Anyone who’d like to speak about the book they’re giving to a friend would be able to do so. (A surprisingly small number of people are prepared to speak publicly, even when actually asked.) Any writers giving a book away might, in passing, mention their own work. The band would provide live entertainment during the eating part of the evening and they could sell their CDs. Everybody would be a winner.

So that’s my World Book Night. What would yours look like?

Socrates and the Kindle

2011-02-25T09:56:00.001Z

Like all writers, I’m frequently asked, these days, for my opinion on e-readers, Google books and the whole digital revolution as it relates to fiction. I think people are rather surprised at my reaction; because, on the whole, I’m pretty much in favour of books appearing electronically.

‘Ah’ they say ‘but you can’t reproduce the smell of a book, the feel of a book in your hands.’ And no, of course, you can’t. But, for me at least, that’s not what a book is about. I frequenly shock bookish types when I say that, on the whole, I dislike second hand bookshops – precisely because of the smell and the feel. I like new books, books coming off the presses now, books full of possibilities for a new cohort of readers. And I think that the e-reading devices, whether it’s the iPad, the Kindle, the Sony e-reader (or any of the other devices that are, as the litigation-conscious BBC gets its presenters to say, available) are going to provide a new cohort of readers. Because some people like the concept and the feel (possibly even of the smell) of an expensive piece of electronic gizzmology in their hands.

The Other Half and I now own a Kindle. We hadn’t actually meant to – for reasons of cost alone – but had, in cahoots with the OH’s sister – bought one for my mother-in-law’s 80^th birthday. (She would have been delighted. Though she missed her 80^th by 9 days, she owned and used a computer, a mobile phone and an iPod. As she lived in France, getting English language books took a while, even on Amazon, so the Kindle was designed to get her reading matter to her more quickly.) It’s currently on loan to a colleague of the OH’s who’s wondering whether to buy one, but we’ve already got a few books that we’re waiting to download. It may save our house from becoming book-bound as we have more bookshelves than a house of its size can really cope with, plus cupboards whose shelves are stacked 3-deep with books we just can’t bear to part with.

I’m not – yet – a huge fan of the Kindle. (We use one at work for reluctant readers who like technology.) I don’t like the grape-pip-sized letters on the keyboard and I don’t find the device enormously intuitive. I’d be better off with an iPad. (Yes. My name’s Alis and I’m a mac geek.) But the iPad is far more expensive and doesn’t use electronic paper like the e-readers so I couldn’t really see myself reading whole books on it. Short stories, maybe, but not Wolf Hall.

But, my tastes aside, it’s worth taking a historical perspective on all of this ‘real book vs. ebook’ controversy. For instance, did you know that Socrates was dead against the introduction of that new fad, literacy? In his mind, teaching a system of recording and accessing information to the young would rot their brains, make their memories atrophy like vestigial limbs and introduce all kinds of perverse and undesirable things to their developing minds. He declared that they would read things and think themselves knowledgeable instead of debating them and truly becoming so. (He may have been right on that one…)

I’m guessing that most readers would agree - pretty much by virtue of being readers - that his reaction was a tad over-heated.

The way I see it, if Socrates, one of the great minds of all time, couldn’t see the manifold advantages to humanity of being able to write things down rather than have to commit everything to memory and of being able to access the thoughts of other minds without having to make face-to-face contact with their owners, then it’s likely that the doom-mongers of our own generation aren’t seeing all the possibilities of the digital revolution.

But it’s changing the way our brains work the doom-mongers say. Well? So did reading (if you don’t believe me, read this book) and I don’t hear the nay-sayers jumping up and down and protesting that we were better off learning things by heart.

It looks to me as if we’re at the beginning of a paradigm shift in terms of the way we read and interact with books. Since books are clearly still going to be there – albeit in a range of different formats – isn’t that good for writers? We just need to hold our nerve and keep up with what we need to do to ride this wave.

Alis is away...

2011-01-30T20:42:00.003Z

I am lucky. Both my parents are alive and well and living in Wales. All my grandparents either died when I was too young to be really cognisant of it or when they were in their late 90s and a good life had been well lived. I have not known the grief of losing somebody close to me.

My other half is not so lucky. Her father died prematurely ten years ago. Now, my mother in law has just died suddenly. We knew she had a life-threatening condition but had not expected things to take quite such an abrupt turn.

So, we are in France, dealing with the fallout not only of parental death but of dying intestate in a country whose language we , and her other heirs, speak imperfectly (and whose legal language we speak not at all). Thank God for wonderful neighbours.

I shall be here awhile, so do not expect writing updates any time soon...

Is your novel hard to get into?

2011-01-23T17:39:00.003Z

How many times have you said of a book ‘It wasn’t easy to get into, but I really enjoyed it once I did’? I know I’ve said something like that on numerous occasions, though I must admit, if a book takes more than 60 pages to let me in, I’m liable to abandon it.

So what does ‘difficult to get into’ actually mean?

That the characters and/or their motivation aren’t easy to understand?

That it’s not clear where the plot is going?

That it’s too ‘literary’ (whatever that means)?

That you’re given insufficient information to understand what’s actually happening?

OK, I have to admit that I’ve got more than a passing interest in the answers to these questions. I find the openings of novels the most difficult thing of the whole project to crack. As we speak (OK, as I type and you read) I am rewriting the beginning of The Black and The White for at least the sixth time, in my quest for an agent. (Agent No 1, by the way, hasn’t declined to represent me, he’s just too busy to read anything new at this point so I have asked if he minds me submitting it elsewhere.)

I think the problem with beginnings lies in making sure that your characters’ motivation is clear (so as to avoid the first gripe above). Readers need to know what has possessed characters to do what they see them doing and, to do that, the writer needs to show their readers how their characters have got to this point. But of course, the business of getting to the point of crisis isn’t half as interesting as the point of crisis itself and the actions it sets in train. So, you don’t want to delay getting there too much. On the other hand, if you just present people with your central character falling off his metaphorical cliff and say ‘watch what happens now’ without giving them any kind of context for what is going to happen they’re likely to flounder around and abandon your book for at least two of the three reasons above, if not all of them.

I’ve never been particularly happy with the opening of TB&TW, which is why it’s been re-written so many times. But now, after a lay-off of three months whilst waiting for a decision from Agent No 1, I’m able to read the book with the necessary degree of detachment to see what works and what doesn’t. And I think I’m finally getting to somewhere like the ideal beginning for the book. I’ve hacked and stripped and cut until I think we’re just left with what’s necessary to get the reader into the book without throwing them into the deep end.

So, the first 10 000 words or so will now go out to an agent this week and the process of waiting will begin again.

Watch this space.

Latvian book give-away

2011-01-17T17:58:00.003Z

I have had a name change. I am now Elisa Hokinsa. At least in Latvia. To my great surprise I got a parcel from Panmac on Saturday which turned out to be my three copies of the Latvian edition of Testament, or Testaments as it’s rendered in Latvian. I'd forgotten that there was an edition coming out...

As you can see below it’s a very handsome book – hardback with a laminated cover and no irritating dustjacket. Personally, I think this is how all hardback editions should be produced.

Now, I don’t speak Latvian, neither do I know anybody who does so if you have any Latvian friends who do, I have two copies to give away to good homes. Leave a message in the comments trail if you're interested and I'll get back to you. Otherwise it’ll be ebay...

For other language geeks amonst you Latvian, it turns out (thanks, Wikipedia!) is a proto-Indo-European language and is very closelyrelated (in the way that French and Spanish are) to Lithuanian. The other Baltic country, Estonia, has a language which is not related to either of its neighbours and is not even Indo-European, belonging instead to that odd little linguistic group Finno-Ugric which includes Finnish and Hungarian.

There, thought you’d be interested.

The moral world of Toy Story and post-modern subversion of genre

2011-01-12T11:03:00.003Z

Aliya Whitely, doyenne of quirk-fiction (I’m inventing a new genre for her as she’s having trouble fitting into one at the moment) has just put up an interesting post about Toy Story which got me thinking about the whole art/life (or fiction/reality if you want to sound less pretentious) thing.

I’m easily pleased by kids’ films and, lazily, i hadn’t bothered to look at the underlying nuts and bolts of Toy Story but Aliya’s right – the TS franchise takes the central premise that toys are alive and have feelings and runs with it to some disturbing conclusions. Disturbing because it follows that, if you don’t buy into the premise (and neither Andy, owner of Woody, Buzz et al nor Sid, the toy-torturer does) then you’re going to end up being, at best, thoughtless and, at worst, cruelly destructive towards your playthings.

Of course, without this premise, there’d be no film; the toys have to have human emotions rather than just being automata or we would feel no sympathy for them. But that’s the point of Aliya’s post, I suppose; should we be having sympathy for toys, for things that, in the real world, are inanimate?

It’s OK for us adults, we know it’s all fantasy, a fairy-story which we’re supposed to apply to our normal, everyday lives where how we treat people really matters. But do kids get this? Proponents of one side of the whole ‘effects of TV on their little minds’ debate constantly tell us that children know the difference between fact and fantasy, that they are – in fact – very sophisticated when it comes to telling the difference. I think that’s true but it doesn’t stop the fantasy having an effect on them.

Take my own offpsring. They were pretty sophisticated with this sort of stuff – they had stories pretty much force-fed to them from birth, they had to be – but that still didn’t stop my older son having nightmares about some things that the British Board of Film Control thought were innoccuous enough to be given a U rating. ‘I know it’s not real’ he’d say to me and his Dad after waking from yet another bad dream ‘but I can’t stop thinking about it.’ Somehow, the reality of the film had insinuated itself into his mind and however much he told himself that it wasn’t real, the images had come to have a reality of their own and they frightened him.

So what about adult fiction?

As readers, are we affected, in unhelpful ways, by things we know not to be true?

As writers, are there genre conventions that make it difficult to represent life as it really is? For instance, there seems to be a feeling that ‘cosy crime’ is making a comeback at the moment because real life has become so morally ambiguous and the world such a threatening place that we need our fiction to shore up the feeling that the good guys do win in the end, that all is, truly, right with the world.

Are there conventions governing your own genre that you’re not happy with or are we all contentedly subverting such things in a thoroughly post-modern manner?

PS. Sorry, couldn't resist the PhD thesis-type title of this post!!

Happy 2011!!

2011-01-05T20:48:00.003Z

So, the festive season having duly been survived, life can go back to normal. I must confess to enjoying normal, particularly because it means large portions of the day spent in solitary acts of reading, musing and writing.

Catching up with blogs whilst trying to think what to write for my own first offering of the new year I came upon this by AL Kennedy, my favourite of the regular Guardian book-bloggers. It expresses much of what I currently feel far more elegantly and amusingly than I ever could. Pity the last paragraph doesn't apply to me. (I suppose, in the interests of optimism, I should add, 'yet').

But, as AL would say herself - Onwards! Here's to a successful, happy, prosperous 2011.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-21T10:53:00.001Z

Sorry this is a slightly premature greeting but I'm going away for a couple of weeks and won't have internet access apart from internet cafes.

So Merry Christmas to all readers of Hawkins Bizarre - thanks for all your comments and support this year and here's to a great festive season!

See you in the New Year.

The Future of Literary Hist Fic

2010-12-19T15:01:00.001Z

I was in Cambridge last week and, of course, I made the obligatory visit to Heffers where, amongst other things (including a happy hour spent in the medieval history section – yes, a whole section, not just a shelf!!) I found Testament in an alcove designated ‘Historical Crime’. As Waterstones seem to have stopped stocking Testament I was delighted to find it in Heffers but, whilst not at all dismayed to find it in a section which is likely to sell more copies than ‘general fiction’, I am slightly bemused to see it described as ‘crime’. Things happen in it which are, undoubtely, criminal but I wouldn’t say that they are the central thrust of the book. Perhaps Heffers is adopting the US publishing/bookselling genre of ‘crime/mystery’. Testament definitely fits into that as the whole thing pivots on the mystery of the wall painting.

The inclusion of my work in ‘historical crime’ made me think, though. The Black and The White would fit much more comfortably into that genre, though it’s not a conventional ‘murder mystery’ format. The book I’m currently researching and planning sits even more squarely in the crime genre. So, am I becoming a historical crime novelist?

Probably.

Why?

Why not? Crime has always been a favourite genre of mine and, when done well and/or innovatively (Barbara Vine, Sophie Hannah, Kate Atkinson, M.R.Hall, to name but a few) it’s hard to beat. And I’m not on my own. There’s a huge market out there for well-written crime.

So am I cravenly going down a route I believe to be more marketable? Well, if I was doing it simply because it would be marketable, that would be craven but I’m not. My preoccupation with history and my love of crime plots were always going to come together eventually. (As it happens, the first novel I ever wrote was a split-time crime novel with a policeman as the main contemporary protagonist.)

But, whether or not I’m turning into a historical crime novelist, all this reflection has made me wonder: with the increasing genrification of fiction driven by publishers’ marketing departments, is there space, any more, for literary historical fiction of the kind represented by Rose Tremain’s Restoration, Maria McCann’s As Meat Loves Salt or - my own favourite - Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders?

I know that at least one of the MNW hist-fic crew had to resist suggestions that her work was basically a historical romance and fight for it to be a straightforward work of literature.

So, writers and readers of hist-fic, how do you like your history. Is it desirable (by which I don’t just mean ‘more marketable) for books to be ‘history plus’ - history plus romance, history plus crime, history which is basically famous people doing what they did in a fictionalised way? Or is there room for hist lit fic?

And, if so, what’s your favourite? (So I can ask for last minute Christmas books…)

Why the Coalition Government has lost my support

2010-12-13T15:23:00.002Z

I don’t generally make political remarks on this blog. Normally, I confine myself to matters related to reading, writing and, occasionally, my life as both reader and writer. But, occasionally, politics impacts on those things, breaking through my general cynicism about the populace’s ability to change anything and provoking genuine outrage. The whole tuition fees debate is just such an issue.

It’s not an issue for me simply because it will impact on my family, though it will; hundreds of thousands of families will be impacted on in exactly the same way, some more so. At least only one of my sons will have to pay the new exorbitant fees.

It’s not an issue for me simply because of the hypocrisy and power-hungry spinelessness of the Liberal Democrats – a party I have voted for consistently ever since I reached the age at which I was able to vote because I thought Liberal meant liberal.

It’s not an issue for me simply because of the utterly outrageous burden that the young people of our country are being asked to take on in this supposedly collective belt-tightening, a burden so far in excess of the other cut-and-tax measures as to be ridiculous.

The coalition’s stated aim was to cut by 80% and tax by 20%. Well they’re certainly cutting the universities’ tutorial grant by 80% - a far greater cut than any other public service is being asked to bear - but instead of raising the students’ burden by 20% they’re raising it by 200%. How is that fair? How is that proportionate and equitable?

The government thinks it can get away with that kind of increase because the young are in such a minority that even if they every single person under 25 voted to oust the current government, they couldn’t. There aren’t enough of them.

It’s not even an issue for me because of fatuous comments like the one I heard made during Radio 4’s coverage of the vote on tuition fees last Thursday. Some MP, asked for his opinion before the vote, opined that there were people in his constituency who had no hope of ever going to university and that they should not, therefore, be asked to pay for the education of those who are capable of benefitting from it.

Just how fatuous a remark that is can be seen if you replace ‘those who have no hope over ever going to university’ with ‘those who’ve never had occasion to go into hospital’ and ‘pay for the eduation of those who are capable of benefitting from it’ with ‘pay for the care of people who, sadly, are sick but no responsibility of mine.’

If you want to live in a country where those values are played out, help yourself. Start swimming off the West Coast of Ireland. The outrage over President Obama’s healthcare reforms shows exactly the same ‘it’s nothing to do with me so why should I pay?’ attitude.

The actual issue that is causing me such outrage is the underlying attitude towards education which this whole fiasco reveals. And that attitude is that education must pay its way in a very simplistic money-out-of-individual’s-pocket-as fees, money-back-into-individual’s-pocket-as-increased-income/tax-potential equation.

Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s philistinistic government of the late 70s and early 80s there seems to have been a growing acceptance amongst our ruling classes that education must be useful in a direct and obvious way. The increasing marginalisation of history, art, music and other ‘non-core’ subjects in schools betrays a mindset which says ‘if it ain’t useful to the common good, they can do it in their own time.’ Well what the hell is the common good if it’s not an agglommeration of all the individual goods?

When I was at university there was a ha-ha line going around that scientists ask ‘what’ and artists ‘why?’

This government needs to ask itself why it thinks having an educated, informed population of enquiring minds is not worth paying for. Particularly when it so clearly thinks that propping up a corrupt and reckless banking system is.

Here endeth the political rant.

The Real Book 5!

2010-11-30T10:56:00.004Z

[Wikipedia cartoon from xkcd cartoon site]

The last book on my list of the five that have contributed most towards my research for The Black and The White is a bit of a cheat because it’s not a book at all. It’s Wikipedia.

In all the current debate – and doesn’t it rage? – over online versus print sources of information there seems to be a prevailing assumption that people engaged in some kind of serious endeavour will always prefer print over web-based information. I think that’s misguided, or at least simplistic. After all, haven’t we all read books that were ill-informed, badly written and just didn’t provide the kind of user-friendly information we actually wanted? Maybe they skated over the details we were after or told us stuff we’d already read a dozen times elsewhere.

I’m not saying that the internet is fool-proof. Far from it. As far as Wikipedia specifically, is concerned, I know there have been gaffes aplenty, but I don’t take uncritically the unreferenced things it says, any more than I’d take those things uncritically from print media. But where the articles are carefully footnoted, I’m prone to take it reasonably seriously.

Where it’s not footnoted or where it has one of those ‘citation needed here’ notes, obviously, I try and check the facts and see if I can find them quoted elsewhere. But you can come a little bit unstuck here. On dozens of occasions, I’ve been checking out a second source of information on another website, only to have the feeling of déjà vu. When I flick back to the wikipedia entry, I see that what I’ve been reading on the other site is quoted, word for word, on the wiki entry. Either the same person is responsible for the information on both sites or the article from one site has simply been lifted and pasted into the other. So you do need to keep your wits about you when verifying facts and not simply think ‘OK, good, this says the same things as Wikipedia’. Helps to have a good audio-visual memory, of course.

That all sounds as if I’m writing a cautionary post instead of a celebratory one, but I think it’s important to recognise any source’s shortcomings as well as its advantages.

So, why do I like Wikipedia so much that I’m citing it as one of my top 5 sources for my book?

Well, what other single source could give you information about things as diverse as these:

The exact form of words used in the prayers said for the dead in the fourteenth century.
Ditto the ‘hail Mary’ – different prior to some Vatican pronouncement which I’ve now forgotten in the late fifteenth century as it lacked the ‘Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death’ element.
The history and geology of tiny villages nobody’s ever heard of if they live more than ten miles away. (Don’t forget, my main character was travelling on foot from the west country to the eastern edge of England.)
Particular battles that took place in the Hundred Years War.
How charcoal is made
The difference between ‘bloomer’ smelting of iron and the later blast furnace technique (I ended up not needing to know this but found it fascinating)
The history of the Pilgrims’ Way.

I could go on and on.

Of course, a lot of those things were on numerous other websites as well but the beauty of Wikipedia is that it gives you references and links so that you can read up elsewhere about the subject. It’s a great jumping off point and often gives you and overview of a subject so that once you hop on to another site, you’ve already grasped the basics of the subject and are ready for more information.

Have I got shares? I wish….

Book 5 - What the Things You Eat say about The Medieval You

2010-11-24T11:20:00.003Z

They say you are what you eat. And it’s certainly true that you can tell a lot about people by what they consume, both nutritionally and in a broader sense, as I have discovered in the fourth of the five books that have been most influential to me in writing The Black and The White.

The subtitle of Christopher Dyer’s book Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (actually Social change in England c. 1200 – 1520) could, quite plausibly, have been ‘Seeing the Population as Consumers’.

Consumers: it’s a word with a modern feel, isn’t it? Smacks of the retail prices index and the FTSI 100 and market research. But, once we stopped being nomadic hunter-gatherers and got the hang of staying in one place and growing things we’ve had the leisure to make stuff. And, once you make stuff, you’ll soon find you make more than you can use. And the market is born.

OK, so that’s a bit reductionist. But the same could not be said of Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages. By looking at very dry sources – invoices, account rolls, court records of fines, wills, bills of distraint etc – he paints for the reader a fascinating account of what life was actually like, on a day-to-day level, for the people of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. What did they eat? What did they wear? What kind of houses did they live in? And, above all, why? Why that diet, why those clothes, why that style of house?

I don’t know whether any of you followed the recent series A History of the World in 100 Objects on Radio 4 (also available on iTunes as podcast) but I was an addict and, in one of the earlier episodes the point was made that writing didn’t develop as a literary tool – far from it, it was around for centuries before anybody thought to write down orally-transmitted stories – but for the purposes of administration. Once you begin trading you need to record what you’ve got, what has moved from whom, to whom, and in response to exactly what transaction. Otherwise you won’t know how much you should have and how much money there should be in your coffers as a replacement for the stuff you don’t have any more.

It’s that kind of record that Dyer is drawing on. The vast majority of the written material which survives from the medieval period is not literature but legal and administrative records – manorial rolls, court rolls, parliamentary rolls and, strangely enough, individual records – wills and contracts and leases and so forth, all kept with the manorial records. And all of these deal with stuff. Stuff that people possessed, stuff that they were entitled to, stuff they ate, stuff they wore.

I love nitty gritty details of people’s daily lives and, in Dyer’s book they are very exact. Unlike most general reference books which say infuriatingly generic things like ‘most people ate pottage’ without any attempt at stratifying ‘people’ or explaining the many and varied meanings of ‘pottage’, Dyer’s books is absolutely precise because he’s working from written sources from actual places, often referring to named individuals. A widow from Essex, for example, was known to have had a good amount of vegetables in her diet because the record of a maintenance agreement with a family member says that she was allowed ‘half of the garden for her own use’. (Nobody below the level of aristocrat sat about in a flower-garden in those days – her ‘use’ was growing food.)

Stereotypical views of the medieval world – promulgated by many a Robin Hood film and others of the same ilk – are regularly punctured. For instance, many tenants at Alrewas, Shropshire, were allowed, by customs written down in 1342, to catch fish from the Trent for their own use on the meatless days (Fridays and many, many other ‘fast’ days). So much for the stock medieval picture of the rapacious lord cutting off peasants’ hands for the smallest attempt to feed themselves from what he might consider to be his property.

And, being an economic historian, Dyer is keen to show trends over time. There’s a wonderful graph (OK, wonderful to me, the major medieval geek) showing how the diet fed to harvest workers on a particular estate changed over almost two centuries from 1250 to 1430. And there it is – the sudden rise in meat after the Black Death. In the decade following the calamity, when labour was scarce and therefore valuable, almost twice as much meat is being fed to workers as in the previous decade (or any of the decades before that excepting the boom years of the 1280s). Meat – good thick slices – was being used as an inducement. ‘Come and work for me, I’ll pay you well and feed you better’. I had read in other sources that, after the Black Death, villeins were refusing to do their customary service – work they were obliged to do for their lord – preferring to work for money elsewhere and pay the fine that would result from their defiance of manor law. And there it is, in Dyer’s book, in stark accountings, proof that workers were having to be treated better, proof that their standards of living were rising.

Though I’ve read the book at least twice and dipped in countless times for a detail here, a fact there, I’m going to read Chapter 7 - Urban Standards of Living - again, today. Because A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing is set, not in the countryside like The Black and The White, but in Salster, the city I invented for Testament.

I know that the Black Death changed things profoundly in the countryside – or at least that it speeded up change that had been slowly making itself felt for half a century or so – but it had just as big an effect on the towns. That’ll be another post, no doubt!

I'm not here really...

2010-11-17T13:22:00.002Z

...there's a long post from me over on the Macmillan New Writers' blog on the subject of fourteenth century fiction.

Do pop over - here - and have a look!

Yet another diversion...

2010-11-13T16:06:00.003Z

...but a worthy one, I hope.

My fellow Macmillan New Writer and all-round Good Egg, Len (LC) Tyler, is offering his services in an auction to raise money for autism research.

Len will be offering to critique ten pages and a synopsis of an unpublished work (brave man) so go on, you know you want to - bid for it!!

More details here and here.

Another diversion

2010-11-08T22:23:00.005Z

I just had to break in to the sequence (again) to ask you all - have you read the Guernseay Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society? If not, you really must. I've just read it for one of the book groups I belong to (I only belong to two, don't imagine me out discussing literature every night of the week - when would I watch Spooks or Grand Designs or Downton Abbey?) and i ABSOLUTELY LOVED it.

You know those books that they tell you will make you laugh and cry? Well, unlike the rest, this one actually does. I laughed out loud at the sheer unexpectedness of some of the lines and I cried at the poignancy of the characters experiences.

I'll try and get a proper review up soon but I just had to tell you that, if you haven't read this lovely book, you should do so as a matter of urgency.

Book Three, The English Year

2010-11-03T15:59:00.003Z

The past, as has been noted, is another country. Or, if it's not, it might as well be for all the resemblance it bears to modern life. The third book on my list makes this abundantly clear as it details all sorts of customs and traditional observances that most twenty-first cntury people have never heard of, much less taken part in.

In reading The English Year, A month-by-month guide to The Nation's Customs and Festivals, From May Day to Mischief Night – or rather in flicking through it and consulting it, it's not the kind of book you can sit down and read cover to cover (even the cover takes long enough to read) – you realise how much has changed since the time when The Black and The White is set [ie the mid-fourteenth century].

For instance, did you know that during the fourteenth century (and for centuries before that) the new year was on a different day? Not a little bit different, not a day or two for some weird adjustment of the calendar – months different. The church, in its wisdom, had decided that the December31st/January 1^st-style new year was altogether too pagan and had decreed that the beginning of the year must be pegged to the Christian character. So they decided that if Christmas was the pivotal moment of the calendar – the moment at which God arrived on earth and everything in history changed - then the moment at which Christ was conceived must be the beginning of the change. So they decided that the Feast of the Annunciation, aka, the conception of Christ on the 25^th of March, would be the beginning of the Christian New Year.

Of course, what with people having been wassailing and hanging out the holly and ivy for some considerable time before the Church got here, things became a bit confused. It seems that, from at least the thirteenth century, January the 1^st was accepted by everybody as the official start of the year but the habit of letting the church dictate was hard to shake. Even as late as the 17^th century Samuel Pepys refers to New Year's day at the beginning of January, but never changes the year in his diary until March 25^th!

Which goes some way to explaining the oddity of financial and tax years coming at the end of March/beginning of April.

This is a dramatic example of what The English Year can tell you but there are lots of less dramatic but more picturesque examples. Kit-dressing at Baslow (Derbyshire) on the 4^th of August. (Get your garlanded milkmaid's pail [kit] here!). Church clipping in Painswick (Gloucestershire) on the 19^th of September. [Basically a saint's name day from the old word ycleped 'called'.) Hungerford (Berkshire) Hocktide court on the Monday or Tuesday after Easter. (Nobody knows...)

[Both Painswick and Hungerford appear in TBTW, though I don't mention either of the festivals in the book. But, somehow, just knowing they took place gave the feel of the places more depth in my mind.]

One of the things that I found fascinating was how often pagan supersititions were welded to apparently Christian festivals – usually saints' days.

For instance, the 24^th of April, St Mark's Eve is, apparently, one of the key nights on which to divine the future. As Steve Roud, author of The English Year, points out 'Certainly, there seems to be nothing in the life or writings of the evangelist St Mark that would deserve this reputation, but the idea was extremely widespread.'

Widespread and wide-ranging, from the sane and familiar dreaming-of-your-future-lover motif to the startling notion that the wraith of your future lover would be summoned to your side; and not just summoned, but called to your side by a 'cake' baked of equal parts of flour, salt and the urine of all those taking part in the ritual!

Then there's St Vincent's day. Nobody knows why St Vincent of Saragossa was so popular across Europe in the middle ages – he doesn't seem to have been martyred in any particularly spectacular or horrifying manner (though ravens did guard his martyred corpse until it could be buried) – but popular he was. And his day was, like St Mark's, allied to divination. In this case it wasn't lover-divination but weather-foretelling of a sub-St Swithin kind. It seems to have been agreed that if the weather was nice on his feast day – January 22^nd – then it was likely to be a pleasant year. Not amazing. Just pleasant. Clement. Nice.

He may have been from Saragossa but we English obviously took St Vincent and his weather to our hearts.

Of course it's not all saints and divination and calendar weirdness – though any one of those, ignored, could derail your novel. (Woe betide the historical novelist who doesn't know when the major festivals of the church year were because that's how people way-marked the year and dated their letters. It was 'the Tuesday after Ascension day' or 'the Wednesday before the feast of St John the Baptist' and all that. ) No, there are some plain silly customs in The English Year too. Some we've heard of like the cheese rolling Gloucestershire villagers (Painswick features again – I think it's the hill, Painswick beacon, which does get a mention in TBTW) and some are less well-known like the Shropshire practice of men and women lifting each other bodily off the ground on Easter Monday and Tuesday respectively. A Manchester correspondent of the Gentleman's Magazine of 1784 described it:

'The men lift the women on Easter Monday, and the women the men on Tuesday. One or more take hold of each leg, and one or more of each arm, near the body, and lift the person up, in a horizontal position, three times. It is a rude, indecent, and dangerous diversion, practised chiefly by the lower class of people.'

Hmm. Methinks maybe he protested too much and might quite like to have been 'liften horizontally' by multiple ladies of the lower class himself.

So. The English Year. Customs large and small, sedate and mad, lost to history and still practiced. (You have to check out the website for the Mad Maldon Mud Race, described in The English Year as belonging to a category of custom which will be known to future historians as 'started with a discussion in the pub'. Discussion, or in this case, dare.) Customs based on religion – both Christian and pagan – and agricultural practices and beliefs and traditions that have vanished in the mists of time. But all fascinating. And all part and parcel of our world – even as half-recalled folk memories - as well as the world of the fourteenth century.

I'd have made lots of mistakes without The English Year. And I'd have missed out on lots of laughs and 'well I never' moments, too.

A new book begins...

2010-11-01T23:10:00.002Z

Just a quick diversion from the 5 books theme to tell you that, today, I've started work on my next book – the second in the putative trilogy, provisionally entitled A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. I'm very excited about it, especially as I'm going to be using Scrivener – the research and drafting tool for the Mac – for the first time.

Today I have been reading up about hwo the Black Death changed the English wool trade and mulling over the major plotlines of the book to see whether they gel. More mulling will take place as I read. I'm also trying to work out where the book starts. We've moved on almost twenty years from the events described in The Black and The White and I need to find exactly the right moment to reintroduce the reader to our characters. Which means finding the right POV for the book's opening. Unlike TBTW, which is first person throughout, AWISC is going to be multi-viewpoint.

I love researching and planning a book. Anything seems possible. And it'll keep my mind off the wait to hear the first professional verdict on The Black and The White.

Book No 2

2010-10-24T20:04:00.004+01:00

As you might have guessed from the first of my 5 books, there is a vogue at the moment for narrative history rather than what you might call expository history (or some might call dry, factual history). I wonder whether it's the printed word responding to the dynamic way television has started bringing history to life?

Years ago, for my own pleasure - if that's the right word - I read Philip Ziegler's The Black Death – pretty much the standard popular work on the progress of the plague in the thirteen forties – and I was looking forward to reading it again as preparation for TB&TW when, in Foyle's of Cambridge, I came across John Hatcher's The Black Death: An Intimate History. The hardback (it was newly published) has a pretty forbidding skeletal grim reaper on the front and its title isn't as explanatory as the paperback which is sub-subtitled The Intimate Story of a Village in Crisis 1345-50.

To almost-quote a well-known advert – it does what it says on the cover.

Hatcher takes us to Walsham-le-Willows in Suffolk, one of the almost unbelievably well-documented Suffolk villages that medieval social and economic historians love so much. In those days it was just Walsham, the 'le Willows' being applied in a later century, and if you were expecting a cluster of hovels with underfed scraggy people wandering disconsolately about muttering about how they were done down by their lords (which some recent novels set in the medieval period might have led you to expect) then think again. Walsham, which was home to the people of two manors – Walsham itself and the smaller manor of High Hall - was home to over a thousand people and some of them were pretty well off. The families at the head of the village pecking order held more than twenty acres which made them hugely more than the kind of subsistence farmers most people imagine medieval peasants to have been (and which – to be fair – the village was actually full of).

[I actually bought a book on the villages of medieval Suffolk (not one of my five, not because it's not excellent but because it turned out to be less than ultra relevant to TB&TW) thinking that what was true of Suffolk must be true of most of the country (the current BBC series, The Story of England is taking exactly this line with its in-depth look at the archaeology and records of the Leicester village of Kibworth) but I soon found out that I was wrong. The system of inheritance in Suffolk, was different from the more familiar system of primogeniture practised in most other places – in Suffolk, as in modern France, land was divided between all the heirs which led to all sorts of social difficulties that I don't need to go into here as they don't form the substance of the book. As my main protagonist comes from Gloucester, this kind of thing would have been outlandish to him. Just another example of not knowing what you don't know until you start reasearching your book...]

Anyway, back to An Intimate History. John Hatcher is (I gather) an economic historian but he has the instincts of a novelist. Before he even starts on the main body of his work, he outlines the whole social fabric of Walsham briefly, succinctly and evocatively, in his introduction. Before you're introduced to a single individual in this 'intimate history', you already know what kind of place they live in and which stratum of society they're going to fit into. And a medieval village had as many strata as any town today, believe me. If I hadn't already learned that from Ian Mortimer's book (see previous post) I'd soon have worked it out from this one.

And it's the people – rather than the economic life of the village - who are the mainstay of the book, as the jacket copy leaves you in no doubt:

Agnes sat up with John all night, intermittently mumbling prayers and falling into fitful and troubled short naps. And when she did doze off she was confronted by a crowd of grinning demons striving with their infernal claws to snatch away her husband's soul.

John did not regain hs senses, and soon after sunrise he stopped breathing.

Agnes arose and looked vainly around the bare room. She lit the candle that the priest had sold her and recited the Placebo as best she could. But the words of the prayer which she had known well since she was twelve kept slipping from her mind. As she washed John's body she was shocked to see that much of his skin was now blotched and blackened, and that there were a number of swellings as well as a carbuncle in his groin. She folded him into a clean sheet. Then she fetched some sticks of wood that she washed and dried, and placed them at the edge of the embers in the hearth and waited till the ends blackened and burned to ash. Taking them up she allowed them to cool, and then carefully traced a cross on the shroud, and smoothed and shaped it with her fingers.

We see quite a lot of Agnes in the book, along with many other village characters, all of whom Hatcher has drawn from the astonishingly detailed Walsham manor court rolls.

We follow the progress of summer 1349 when, as Hatcher says, the population of the village was 'scythed in half'. Life, which had consisted of the same ambitions, fears, petty rivalries and major disagreements for as long as anybody could remember, was utterly turned upside down in a way that the villagers could neither comprehend nor, initially, cope with. And, through it all, they are supported by Master John, the iconic 'good parson' of the middle ages; he is the first character we are introduced to and he is with us, almost, to the last. And it is partly through his contacts outside the village that we are introduced to the England beyond Walsham, from the new religious guilds that were springing up in the mid-fourteenth century to the state of medical knowledge shared with Master John by his friend the infirmarer at St Edmondsbury.

This marrying of the intimate history of the village with events in the wider world – and indeed with expository writing on the progress of the plague – is managed by a brief foreword at the beginning of each chapter that places its subject-matter in a wider context. From the inexorable spread of the pestilence to the church's reaction to it; from the role of the monastic infirmarer to contemporary descriptions of the plague (not for the faint hearted) we are given an overview of the progress and effects of the Black Death on Great Britain as well as the more up-close-and-personal account that is the meat of the book.

And it is up-close. We watch people die. We watch family members trying, desperately, to ensure that their nearest and dearest don't die. We watch a village struggling to remain afloat as family after family after family is torn apart. It soon becomes obvious that nothing will ever be the same again.

And one of the things I liked most about the book was the way in which it gave us a small taste of life in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death. We see Walsham's surviving inhabitants understanding that the balance of power has shifted from their lords to themselves, that the balance preserved by too many people fighting for too little land has been upended by the need of that same land to be farmed by a very diminished population. While land is in demand, the power is with those who hold the land; once labour is in demand, well, guess who holds the power now?

I truly admired this book. It read like a novel and I kept forgetting to make notes as I went along. In the end I gave up and just raced to the end. But this turned out to be a mistake as the one failure of An Intimate History, in my view, is its lack of an index. If you can't remember where you read a particular detail, you just have to trawl through the whole book until you find it again.

But that's a small gripe. In general, I can do no better than agree with the reviewer from the Sunday Business Post:

'A compelling tale of ordinary people faced with a horror beyond imagining'

Quite.

Five Books of Note

2010-10-18T22:02:00.002+01:00

There was a great post on Juxtabook the other day about the Five Books blog on which, as its strapline explains, 'every day an eminent writer, thinker, commentator, politician, academic chooses five books on their specialist subject'.

It's the kind of site I could stay on all day but that's another story.

Now, I am not eminent but I thought it might be a wheeze to share with you the five books that have most informed my view of early fourteenth-century England and, therefore, the writing of The Black and The White.

So, today, Number One in the list.

I've mentioned Ian Mortimer's The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England before; subtitled 'A handbook for visitors to the Fourteenth Century' Ian's book tells you everything you'll need to know if, unaccountably but thrillingly, you find yourself somewhere in England between 1300 and 1399.

He says in his introduction:

'As with a historical biography, a travel book about a past age allows us to see its inhabitants in a sympathetic way: not as a series of graphs showing fluctuations in grain yields or household income but as an investigation into the sensations of being alive in a different time.'

His chapter titles show that he is serious. There isn't a whiff of socio-politics or economics about them:

The landscape

The people

The medieval character

Basic essentials

What to wear

Travelling

Where to stay

What to eat and drink

Health and hygiene

The law

What to do.

It could be any travel book about going to Malaysia or Ecuador or Chad. Except that all the people he tells us about in chapter 2 have been dead for about six hundred years, the landscape he describes has been changed beyond pretty much all recognition by modern agriculture, the growth of towns and mass transport and the advice on health and hygiene is – thank goodness – rendered obsolete by antibiotics and santitation.

But chapter 3 – the medieval character – is revealing. Whilst I agree totally with what he says in his introduction:

'...the very best evidence for what it was like to be alive in the fourteenth century is an awareness of what it is to be alive in any age, and that includes today...'

he is very good on how they were different.

Consider this thought:

'The word which best sums up the medieval attitude to the Devil, miracles, and everything in between, is superstition. People do not understand the laws of physics, or the nature of matter, or even how the human body functions. Hence they do not see limitations on how their world operates. Their sense of normality is thus somewhat precarious. Anything can happen.'

Well, all I can say is, thank goodness for that, because without that mindset, I wouldn't have a novel. Things which we wouldn't believe for a second in the rational, post-modern, cynical, twenty-first century are entirely plausible in the fourteenth – and one of my main characters relies on his fellow-countrymen's consequent gullibility.

But it's not just what people believed that was different – it was the makeup of the society that believed it. We're used to thinking of a society which is heavily weighted towards the older end of the age-spectrum which is why there is such a mistrust and suspicion of young people – they're a misunderstood minority.

Not in the fourteenth century.

Listen to how it was then. (Or is now in the voice of the book. Ian Mortimer uses the present tense for his narrative as if it really were a travel book for somewhere we could visit):

'between thirty-five and forty per cent of those you will meet are under fifteen... just five per cent of fourteenth century people are aged over sixty-five... Half the entire population is aged twenty-one or less.'

Just that, in itself, would make everywhere look and feel very different. Just imagine your street, your town, your village if that was the demographic spread. Our society wouldn't work – you can't have almost half the population in full-time education – there would be insufficient workers to create the wealth and make things happen.

But their society wasn't like ours. Precisely because of the weighting towards youth, young people grew up faster and were given responsibilities much more quickly:

'in some towns citizens as young as twelve can serve on juries'

'medieval boys.... can marry at the age of fourteen and are liable to serve in the army from the age of fifteen.'

'At the battle of Crecy (1346) the command of the vanguard – the foremost battalion of the army – is given to Prince Edward [known to us as the Black Prince], then just sixteen years of age.'

These are not just random facts I'm quoting at you here. The early fourteenth century demographic is entirely germane to The Black and The White because my two protagonists are fifteen and seventeen. But they are not boys, they are men. Young men, but men nonetheless. Nobody frets about them being out and about without parental permission, they fret about them being out and about at all, given that the Black Death is raging across England.

In my novels I tend not to go on a lot about what people wear – my concern is not to get it glaringly wrong rather than to describe every tunic and shoe – but if I had been keen to wax lyrical about the different styles of town and country, rich and poor, The Time Traveller's Guide would have put me on the right track.

Similarly the various kinds of dwelling people lived in are not hugely TB&TW's concern – my two young men spend most of their time sleeping under their cart, but Ian Mortimer rounds up and summarises a lot of what I had – laboriously and painstakingly – gleaned from elsewhere about the various habitations of men pre-Black Death.

Given that my book is essentially the novelistic equivalent of a road movie, the chapter on Travelling was one of the most useful to me. Who knew how scarce bridges were (very, especially the stone variety) or exactly how much woodland on either side of a highway had to be cleared (200 yards).

I knew that maps were basically as rare as hens teeth and, anyway, no use for directions but to be given an actual request for directions was amazing:

'Good people I go to [wherever]. At which gate shall I go out? And at which hand shall I take my way?'

A character in TB&TW remarks that his method is 'journey and ask, son, journey and ask' which is a slightly snappier version.

I could go on and on about The Time Traveller's Guide. Where else can you find out about underwear, about the games that people played, about the scandalous behaviour of some younger sons of the aristocracy, about female sexuality and remedies for sexual frustration?

If you're remotely interested in social history – or if you're remotely thinking of writing a book set in the fourteenth century – this is an absolute 5-star book.

The Paper-trail

2010-10-13T17:08:00.000+01:00

While I'm still on the subject of rewriting (as I had suspected, Prospective Agent is snowed under after the Frankfurt Book Fair and has asked for a fortnight's grace before I send TB&TW off to him) I thought I'd address the issue of the far-from-paperless process as it occurs in my house.

Though I try and do as much rewriting/editing as I can onscreen, there is a completely different feel about the printed page and I know that no part of my book is properly combed-through and appraised until I've done it on the page. Consequently, I have piles and piles of A4 printouts of various bits and drafts of The Black and The White hanging about the place. As of yesterday I decided to chuck them all in the recycling bin and just keep the most recent, clean copy.

What does everybody else do with printed-out drafts?

Finished!

2010-10-11T12:28:00.005+01:00

This, Blogger tells me, is my 300th post which seems auspicious because the news today is that my work in progress is finished. (For now).

Yes, after 17 months of research and writing, The Black and The White has reached a version I am happy to send off to my prospective agent.

I have to confess that part of me just wants to send it straight off to my editor, Will, at Macmillan, but the other, more strategic, part of me knows that I need an agent. So, agentwards TB&TW will go today. Actually, I'll probably just give him a quick email first to see whether now might be an appropriate moment to land a longish typescript in his inbox. (Just short of 144 000 words).

As ever, it's an odd sensation to have finished because 'finished' is a decision rather than a distinct state.

I know perfectly well that if I were to start working through it again I'd find other things I want to change but it'd be nitty-gritty, change-a-word-here, remove-a-comma-there stuff so I need to leave it and walk away. I need to look up from my laptop screen and remember what it is I do around the place when I'm not spending the majority of my waking hours with my head in the fourteenth century.

Apart from stuff around the house (anybody know a truly mould-resistant sealant for showers?) the biggest thing waiting to be done is the additional material our publisher wants for the autism book. The deadline for that is the end of October so I need to get a move on with that but I'm actually looking forward to it – it comes from a different part of my brain and is so much more under my control than the fiction that it's rather restful!

As well as that, I'll also be starting on the research and thinking for the next book.

It's a bit like 'the king is dead, long live the king.' The book is finished, clear the desk for work on the next one...

BBC 4 History (or BBC4 history)

2010-10-03T18:45:00.003+01:00

For reasons to do with topography and dodgy aerials we can't get Freeview in our house so I have been late in catching up with several things medievally-related on BBC4 recently.

First off, there is an excellent programme, still airing weekly, by Richard Taylor who describes himself as somebody who 'writes books about churches and the messages hidden inside them'. It's called Churches: How to Read Them. We're on episode 5 now (cued up on iPlayer waiting to be watched) which is going to deal with the churches of the Enlightement period but it was the first two or three – those episodes which dealt with churches from the Dark Ages to the Reformation – which particularly interested me. If you're into medieval history or the history of art and architecture, it's a fascinating and massively informative series.

Then there's The Story of England – historian Michael Wood's programme about how a popular project to excavate various bits of the Leicester village of Kibworth (roughly in the heart of England) can teach us about the history of the whole of England. As the first one was from Romans to Normans, it was fascinating for me. I now need to catch up with Number 2 – Domesday to Magna Carta. And the whole programme makes me want to get involved in archaeology. It's great.

Also waiting to be watched is the second installment of In Search of Medieval Britain – last week about a fourteenth century woman called Christina (which was weird as I have a character in TB&TW called Christiana) who lived through the Black Death, this week about medieval Wales which will be great for me as that's where I grew up. Not medieval Wales, obviously (though that would explain a lot!) just Wales, specifically the West - Ceredigion.

So, lunchtimes are being taken over by iPlayer-watching instead of novel-reading, which is unhelpful as I've got one book group meeting this week (Andrea Levy's Never Far From Nowhere, since you ask) and another next week (Mrs Jordan's Profession by Claire Tomalin).

So, thank you BBC4 – I love you!!

And please can the powers that be put a decent Freeview aerial somewhere in the vicinity of Canterbury?

Language in the Historical Novel

2010-09-26T20:55:00.004+01:00

One of the debates that rages - or, at least, grumbles gently – in the hist fic community is about language. Should you, or should you not, use language that is recognisably different from that used in contemporary fiction or what I like to think of as now-fic.

I had fun with this in my (sadly unpublished) last novel, Not One of Us, in which I played with the notion that somebody in the present might have written a supposedly historical document. How good was the language used? Was it authentic enough? Was it, possibly, too authentic?

In Testament, though I wasn't consciously playing with it, the language used in the contemporary sections is markedly different to that used in the fourteenth century sections.

I've consciously ratcheted this up in The Black and The White. Though I had a policy of using Anglo-Saxon sounding words in Testament's fourteenth century bits, I wasn't by any means ruthless with myself. This time, I decided to be far more rigorous. I didn't want it to sound too overtly 'historical' – I wanted to give it contemporary credibility (eg all my people use contractions – don't, won't etc and generally sound like people talking to each other not people going 'ooh, look at me, I'm being all historical) but to mark it, somehow, as different. So I decided to confine myself, as much as possible to English words which had their root in the period.

Now, I'm sure I haven't excluded all those latin-derived words that the eighteenth century grammarians and linguistic style-gurus were so keen to import into English to give it what they considered to be the necessary gravitas – one or two are bound to have slipped in under the radar (in this context that should probably be 'watchman's eye') here and there – but I have checked every time I find myself about to use a word which sounds appropriately medieval. To this end, as I use a mac, I have put on my dock a little dictionary/thesaurus gizmo which means I can check words out without having to go out of my document and online (or open my dictionary which will probably fail to have migrated to whatever room I'm writing in) each time.

Take the word 'bewilder' – it has an Anglo-Saxon feel. You feel that, if Chaucer didn't use it, then he missed a trick. The prefix be- clearly puts it with definitely Old English-derived words like 'bestride'. But no. My dictionary gizmo (powered by Oxford dictionaries so, surely, it must be right) tells me that bewilder didn't come into English until the late 17^th century. So, do I use it because it sounds right, or not use it because it didn't appear for another two and a half centuries – at least in print? It's a tough one. I proceed on a case by case basis. If it sounds right, I'll usually go with it and not be too purist about it.

One thing I have learned though is that, as previously expounded in these posts, the fourteenth century is when it all happened for England. The sheer number of words which – when you look up their derivation – fall into the category of 'Late Middle English' (ie early fourteenth to mid fifteenth centuries) is vast. And, I suppose, it's not surprising. With the time taken for English to mingle successfully with Norman French, this period is when English became recognisably English rather than Anglo Saxon (aka Old English). Most educated people can have a go at Chaucer – granted, some of the words have changed their meaning (vertu in the bit below means power, for intance) and some have gone out of use but you'd mostly get the gist. Here are the opening lines of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote

the droghte of march hath perced to the roote,

and bathed every veyne in swich licour

of which vertu engendred is the flour

Not too difficult. But even educated speakers of English would have considerably more trouble if they were presented with chunks of Anglo Saxon. Here's the beginning of the tenth century poem, The Wanderer.

Oft him anhaga

are gebideð,

metudes miltse,

þeah þe he modcearig

geond lagulade

longe sceolde

hreran mid hondum

hrimcealde sæ,

wadan wræclastas.

I'm guessing that, unless you've studied Anglo Saxon at some stage, that's pretty much gibberish to you. Let's face it, it's even got letters we don't use in modern English.

[If you're dying to know what is says, it's this:

Often the soliary one

finds grace for himself

the mercy of the lord

although he, sorry hearted,

must for a long time

move himself by hand (ie row)

along the waterways,

the ice-cold sea, tread the paths of exile.

Not, sadly, my own work – thanks to www.anglo-saxons.net for both original and translation.]

So, the fourteenth century produced our language, aided and abetted – certainly in terms of speed of uptake by the upper classes – by the Black Death.

But more on that in another post.

Crises in the present tense and their averting

2010-09-22T08:51:00.002+01:00

I've now reworked about a quarter of the novel which means, given that it's the quarter that needs most work (the first), that I've done the bulk of the heavy lifting, as it were. But yesterday I had a bit of a crisis about the restructuing. To understand the crisis, you need to know about tense.

The novel, in its previous form (I won't say original form as that beast died long ago after my first readers had read the first 100 pages) began with a prologue in the present tense. We then moved back in time six weeks or so to begin Part 1 of the book which explained how we'd got to the prologue. Part 1 was written in the past tense. At the end of Part 1 we'd caught up with the mood and timeframe of the prologue and Part 2 was written in the present tense.

Since I've now hacked away at those six weeks and made the prologue problematic if not redundant, I decided to abandon parts and to write the whole thing in the present tense. I know, given Philip Pullman's recent remarks, that this looks like a 'brave' decision but I'd always wanted at least the latter parts of the book to be in present tense as it allows for a final catastrophe in the life of the first person narrator more readily than past tense. I also felt (and I made this decision before reading, or hearing the furore about, Wolf Hall) that a historical novel written in the present tense would have a better chance of breaking the barrier between now and then, that the reader might get more readily involved, be more prepared to suspend their disbelief and enter into that world. And, given that the fourteenth century is so long ago as to constitute a really different country, that seemed important.

Anyway, by Monday night, I had got to the stage where I felt that writing it all in the present tense had been a mistake and that Mr Pullman was right when he said that it makes it impossible to show a wide temporal perspective. I began to long for the little asides in present tense which I'd allowed myself in the midst of the past tense narrative, the hints to the reader that things are only going to get worse; I mourned the loss of the moment when the reader finally caught up with the prologue and began racing, headlong to the end. I was, in short, having a crisis of confidence.

So, I printed out the first hundred pages – roughly the section of the novel I've reworked so far - and I began to read with a view to re-winding back into present tense.

But I'm not going to. Because present tense works. Right from the new opening, which has the flavour of the prologue but is now very firmly unknowing of what is to come, I think it works. And, because it works, I now see the tense-devices tricks I was playing with in the previous version as facile and a bit cheap. I went back and read some of the asides and found them artful (not in a good way) and nose-tapping. I've never really been convinced by obvious foreshadowing of the 'if only I'd known then what I know now' variety in other people's work, so why was I perpetrating a slightly more sophisticated version of the same thing in my own?

I like the new present-tense narrative. It's taughter. Interestingly, despite cutting the slides into present from past, it feels more emotionally keyed-up, not less. And it also makes flashbacks much easier to write. There's no convoluted use of the pluperfect in the seguays from main narrative past tense to flashback past tense; as we spring back into the main narrative with a sprightly 'now' it actually means 'now' and not 'in the main timeframe of this book which is set in the past and is actually, therefore, then'. And I'm finding that having the main character reflect on the past from the standpoint of a present to which he cannot possibly know the resolution gives his recollections a poignancy which they wouldn't have if he was already in the past, narratively speaking.

Gold stars to those who kept up with that.

So, crisis over. Others may not like it, specifically putative agent and subsequent editors, but at least I like it now. And that's a huge part of the battle for a decent novel, isn't it?

Rewriting - advice

2010-09-17T08:28:00.004+01:00

While I am engaged in the re-write all this seems very germane. I'm particularly interested in Elmore Leonard's opening advice - cut, rewrite then cut and rewrite again.

Rewriting the Novel - everybody's at it!

2010-09-15T08:24:00.003+01:00

There's a lot being said at the moment by Macmillan New Writers (eg here and here as well as here at HB) about the rewriting/editing process and it's obvious that there's something of a divergence of opinion on the whole process. Some love it, some dread it.

I'll come clean, now and admit that I really enjoy the process of rewriting. I enjoy it so much that I'm constantly at it. I edit a huge amount as I go along. At the most basic level, I'll change a sentence twice or three times in the writing of it, just because I'm thinking and working out and weighing up the sound of the thing as I go along.

This will correctly suggest to you that I don't know what a sentence is going to sound like until I've actually written it; I have a vague, subconscious feel of what's happening and the act of writing turns this into something more real, more concrete.

I remember reading an interview with somebody, once – I think it was Mary Wesley – who said that writing on a typewriter made you far more economical with words and less prone to having to rewrite as you had to work out each sentence in your head before you started. That wouldn't work for me. Not at all. I'd go into terminal stall. I need to find out what a sentence is going to say by watching and listening to it unfold. And then rewriting it so it says it better. And then again. And then I'll move on to the next sentence.

But the editing doesn't stop there. That's the beginning. At the end of each day, I go through the day's output, rewriting, cutting, adding, trying to get it exactly right.

The following day, I read the previous day's work again, out loud. Again, I tweak sentences, add, cut and re-think. That'll take an hour or two. Then I start writing new stuff.

I'll go through the whole thing again when I read through the chapter before I add it to the file containing the whole of the work to date. That means each chapter has been through numerous batches of rewriting before I've even got to the end of what we probably shouldn't call draft one of the novel.

I can hear your question now. 'What the hell is there left to rewrite at the end?'

Well, actually, quite a lot.

In just the same way that I don't know what a sentence is going to say until I've written it, I find it really difficult to structure my books until I know what they're really about.

Let me explain what I mean when I say 'really about'. I'm not talking about plot, here. I know roughly what's going to happen – the beginning, the end, a few key events in between - before I begin, but what I don't know is what it's all going to turn out to mean. I don't start writing thinking 'ah, this is a book about loss/alienation/fear of being abandoned/insert your own overarching theme' I just wait to see what things emerge. I may have a notion of what will turn out to be important, but I'm loath to commit to that before seeing how my characters interact with each other and where they go with the action I've sketched out for them.

The other thing i'm often hazy about is motivation. If you know what happens but you want to let your characters develop naturally and not force them into some kind of cardboard cutout persona, then you're setting yourself up for a lot of reworking. I've spent a lot of time whilst writing The Black and The white getting to grips with why one of the characters does a particular thing – not just any old thing, a seminal thing that sparks the whole of the action. I tried one motivation but the whole thing just wouldn't gel – I was trying to force the issue and rely on my own interpretation to decide why he did it rather than just writing the story and letting him show me why he did it.

OK, I've just read that and it sounds flaky. I used to hate it when heard authors saying 'my characters just did this' or 'they just wouldn't do what I wanted them to' and I'd think 'they're your characters, make them behave!' But the truth is, if you're writing character-driven fiction they're only your characters up to a point. And after that point, they're you (or your unruly subconscious) and are you always under your own rational control?

So, anyway, the point is, I can't work out the best structure until I know what the important themes are and I can't decide why the events of the plot happen until I know who the characters are, and I can only find out both those things by writing the damn' story. [The whole 'write your characters' biography down to their earliest memory and their inside leg measurement' thing has never worked for me. I've tried it and one of two things happens. Either the characters fail to become real and I'm just making the whole thing happen rather than finding out what really happens, or the minute I start writing the book, they become somebody else and I might just as well not have bothered with the whole biog thing.]

The point of this rambling is that I'm always going to be stuck with a certain amount of structural rewriting because of the way I allow my novels to develop.

At the moment, I'm managing to cut at least half the material from the first 70 pages because I now know what matters and what doesn't, and also because some of that material needs to come later in the book for reasons of character development and suspense. But I couldn't possibly have written the book in its current (ie rewritten) form from the beginning, because I needed to find out a) what it was really about behind the plot and b) who these people really were behind the vague notions I had of the characters moving my plot forward.

Given all that, it's a good job that I like rewriting, isn't it?

Rewriting the Novel - Day 3

2010-09-10T17:50:00.003+01:00

When you're rewriting/reworking your novel – as I am – and you have jumped to page 38 and started there instead of continuing to allow your novel to begin on page 1 like any sensible person, you need to decide what to do with all the information contained in pages 1-37.

I am deciding this by reference to a list of questions I have asked myself. I jotted them down at the beginning of work on Monday under the inspiring heading 'Questions that need to be progressively answered.'

They emerged in no particular order and I shall quote them in full for your bafflement:

Who is the saint?
What has happened to M and what did the saint have to do with it?
What happened between M and his F and why/how? (I would leave you to guess but, prosaically, F = father)
Birds.

This last is not a question, just an aide memoire.

Of course, how to do backstory is a question a million writers before me have had to answer. That is, after they've answered the far more important question – is any of this backstory necessary?

It is necessary. Honestly.

And, now I've got M feeding the reader titbits of his backstory instead of laying the whole thing out in one go, there's a lot more scope for the unreliable narrator thing.

I like unreliable narrators.

Or do I?

Strings and bows

2010-09-08T19:02:00.001+01:00

No work on TB&TW today as I have been pursuing a non-fiction publishing deal. As you may or may not know, I work at a secondary provision for boys with an autism spectrum disorder and my boss and I have co-written a day-to-day survival pack for teachers that we've provisionally entitled The Really Useful ASD Pack.

Speechmark, a publisher that specialises in educational resources, clearly think that it would be really useful because they're going to publish it. So, today, my boss, Jan, and I have been meeting with them in Milton Keynes to discuss additions to the material we've already submitted, contracts, timeline etc.

We're all actually quite excited about it!

Since everybody in the writing business is being told that they must diversify and have more than one writing string to their bow, turning to non-fiction seems like a good idea. Speechmark would be interested in us producing more books for them, too, which is good news.

I shall be at work at the aforementioned secondary provision tomorrow, so no rewriting will be done tomorrow either. But I shall be up at the crack of dawn on Friday getting on with it.

Rewriting the novel – end of day 2 - not The Road

2010-09-07T21:54:00.002+01:00

Today, things are beginning to take shape. I'm beginning to see how the new, streamlined beginning of The Black and The White is going to work.

I've decided that the best place to begin is with chapter 5. However, that does not mean that I am simply jettisoning the first 4 chapters, in a bid to out-extreme-edit Nicola Morgan (see previous post for details).

No. Fortunately, I have not allowed myself to be so self-indulgent as to write four irrelevant chapters. But...

The big but is the book's structure. The novel is a quest narrative and, fairly obviously, the main character needs to get off on his quest as soon as may be if the reader's not going to be sitting there tapping a foot and looking at their metaphorical watch. Until today, 'as soon as may be' effectively meant page thirty four, halfway through chapter 4. As of today, it's page one.

OK, now I've said that, readers of HB are likely to fall into two camps:

Camp 1 - Of course it needs to be page one! Not to start with the quester on his quest on page one is like starting Goldilocks and the Three Bears with the marriage of Goldilocks' parents and their subsequent rather uneventful honeymoon in Colwyn Bay.

Camp 2 – You can't just wave him off on page one! How is anybody supposed to know what the quest is all about if he's already setting out on it when we first clap eyes on him? Where is the princess with the demanding line in tests of commitment? Where's the king who doesn't really want anybody to marry his daughter and stage a hostile takeover bid for half the kingdom? Or whatever.

And there, friends, is the dilemma. Yes, if it's a quest narrative, he needs to be on the quest, hanky-wrapped belongings over his shoulder on a stick. (No, my character doesn't have a hanky - a) a handkerchief, as such, would be anachronistic and b) it would be altogether too Dick Whittington.) But there's also the need not to leave the reader totally in the dark as to why he's on the quest at all. (Which, by the way, is what Cormac McCarthy does in The Road. I have to admit, I didn't get more than halfway through TR because it is depressing to a horrible degree but there was never a sniff of an explanation of where they were going or why they were going there. Call me picky, but I'd have liked to know. I'm told, by those who have actually got to the end of TR (son no. 2) that I'd have been none the wiser (just much more depressed) if I'd read to the end. 'They go south' he said, when I asked. 'Why?' I asked. 'Because south is where they're going' he said.

Anyway, rant over. Let's re-focus on the novel I actually can re-write as I like.

OK, I acknowledge that 34 pages before the waving off with the hanky-wrapped etc. is probably being a little too generous with the scene-setting. But a lot of what happens in those pages is going to have to go in somewhere. Some of it – maybe five pages – has already been slid (in substantially modified form) into what were chapters five and six and are now chapters one and two. (Stay with me here.) The reader is getting the information in a significantly more oblique form than previously and, in a novel with a strong mystery element, this can only be a good thing.

So; so far, so good.

You'll have to keep reading if you want to see how I decide to deal with the remaining couple of dozen excised pages and their associated information.

And I may have to rant some more about The Road, because two of the four people who have, so far, read portions of The Black and The White have compared it to that depressing (but yes, I know, very literary) work. But you'll have to wait and see.

Reworking the novel - day 2

2010-09-07T08:13:00.002+01:00

So, I've fallen at the first hurdle. Failed to blog yesterday as I spent the evening editing a short story for a friend. A very good short story, I'm pleased to say, and one which needed only a tweak here and there rather than some kind of root and branch hacking.

Anyway, the rewriting. I started yesterday morning with a huge brick of 412 typescript pages sitting on the dining room table. The structural element of the rewrite is going to consist, largely, of deciding what elements of the first 75 pages are really essential and deciding how to weave them in elsewhere in a felicitous manner.

Reading those first 75 pages again, I recalled a recent post on Nicola Morgan's blog that contained this advice on editing:

Shorten chapters, unless they are already stupidly short. Alter the places where they begin and end so that they usually end mid-action. Give every chapter a knife-edge beginning and ending. Do not let your reader stop reading.
Remove much more description than you want to.
Ditto with back-story, philosophy, scene setting and world building. Just because you know it, doesn't mean the reader needs it. Think iceberg.
Remove at least two of the first five chapters. Just do it. See what happens.
Remove all your favourite sentences.

Now, for me, some of those are a bit extreme. The last one, specifically. But, in general, I take her point. Self-indulgent writing is no good to anybody and will just be flicked past, if the book is read at all.

My chapters are already pretty short but, as she advises, I'm not sure all of the first six need to be there. Ms Morgan would undoubtedly dismiss chunks of them as world building/back story/scene setting. Can I remove two? Yes, though bits of them will need to turn up elsewhere.

She's right about description. I like a well-turned phrase as much as (probably more than) the next reader but if the description goes on too long, however exquisite it is, I find myself skipping to the next salient bit. So I've always favoured the 'key but telling details' in terms of description. Less is very definitely more.

So, what do I have at the end of my first day of reworking?

Five paperclipped chapters with bits of text highlighted and 'put this in when/after/before...'
A completely reworked first chapter.
A mild feeling of having ended up with a ball of string composed of five different strands which I now have to untangle into a single thread.

As AL Kennedy would say, Onwards!

Later: Not sure why the font changes halfway through that post - sorry!

I'm back!

2010-09-05T19:41:00.000+01:00

So, the A levels were got through to everybody's satisfaction and the results were all that was hoped for. (Phew!) The novel was finished – later than anticipated but still in time to take time off with my Other Half and have some holiday. And now the summer holidays are over and, though I am back at school part time with my autistic young men, I have no children at school. This, after sixteen years of everything associated with having school-aged children is quite a shock. No more bleary-eyed teenagers at breakfast. No more soccer/hockey/cricket kit to wash. No more 'can you sign this form it's got to be in today?'. No more fetching and carrying from practices, rehearsals, school social events. No more stopping work at four thirty to stand about in the kitchen watching them make sandwiches and – if I'm lucky – tell me the edited highlights of their day.

The times they are definitely a-changing.

Today, I printed out the novel. The Black and the White. Well, let's be honest, it's still actually the work in progress; tomorrow the re-writing begins. I have a snag-list to address and a suggestion from a prospective agent which will see me completely re-structuring the first quarter of the novel. It's the old 'if I were you I wouldn't start it here' thing. Or, more accurately, in a book which – if it were a play – could be summed up as a two-hander, the rather less-often heard 'you need to get the second character in more quickly' thing.

I knew that right from the beginning. If anybody had asked me what the book's main flaw was, I would have 'fessed up to needing Protagonist No 2 in more quickly. Thing was, I just couldn't see how to do it without marooning the reader in the middle of the story and requiring industrial quantities of flashback. Not an option.

But I think I see how to do it, now. And I also think it'll make the book stronger and not just because the main character gets his antagonist sooner.

I shall be posting (see below) about how the re-writing is going but I thought I'd just say a few things, first, about the experience of not blogging for the last few months.

My last blog was posted on the 14^th of April – almost five months ago. Initially, it was a relief not to have to find something cogent to say once or twice a week; like many bloggers, after two and a half years of regular posting, I had found that the blog had become something of a millstone. I applied myself to the book and to making sure that everything was on track for the A-levels and resolved to keep my head out of the blogosphere.

I quickly missed it - not so much my own blog, however, as those of other people. Initially, it had seemed like a good idea to stop reading other people's blogs as well as to stop updating mine – just to keep clear of the online world altogether. It can be, as we all know, a monumental drain on time which could more profitably be spent on the work in progress.

But I had underestimated the water-cooler effect. That's how I described keeping a blog (and commenting on the blogs of others) to somebody once, as the equivalent of water-cooler conversation at work. Writers being somewhat isolated as a profession, we need somewhere to chew the fat with people in the same line of work. So, I quickly abandoned the 'no blogosphere' approach and started reading other people's blogs again.

It has seemed like an unfair bargain. I get to read their comments, thoughts, observations etc but I'm not reciprocating. Ok, so I'm responding to what they have had to say, but it's not the same thing. It's like eavesdropping on other people's conversations and never bothering to start an interesting one of your own.

So, with thanks to all those of you whose blogs I have been eavesdropping on and who have been solicitous after the welfare of the work in progress, I am beginning another season of blogging. And, as I'm coming back to the blog at a very specific point in the journey through my book, I thought I might experiment with actually keeping a proper blog – a weblog, a day-by-day account.

So, if I can manage it, I shall try and post something about how the re-writing is going each day.

Watch this space.

And a longer break...

2010-04-14T08:21:00.003+01:00

Hi everybody!

After much thought, I've decided to take a break from regular blogging for a little while.

There are two reasons for this - the current novel which is beginning to need all my attention as I head into the last section and my younger son's A-levels which are the main reason why the novel can't have all my attention.

So, brain space for blogging is limited and even thinking about it has begun to be oppressive so I think the best thing is if I make a conscious decision to stop until the book's done and exam season is over.

Thanks, all of you, for your support - keep your fingers crossed for me and see you anon.

Easter break

2010-03-31T17:13:00.003+01:00

I'm going to be away for a week or so over Easter to see the Boat Race in London and to visit my parents in Wales so I shall wish you all a peaceful, sun- and primrose-filled holiday (keeping all fingers crossed for a change in the weather) and see you at the end of next week sometime.

Happy Easter!

Writing rules

2010-03-27T22:27:00.001Z

I'm a big fan of the Guardian Books blog and never more than today, where there is a digest of many, many famous writers' rules for writing. They make for interesting, and potentially helpful reading.

Publicity and the Author

2010-03-26T10:51:00.003Z

Publicity – it seems to be the talk of all the authors I know at the moment and an awful lot of those I don't. How much publishers are or aren't doing, how much we should be doing as authors, how much difference the right kind of publicity makes, debates about what the right kind of publicity actually is... etc.

I have no idea whether publishers really are doing less publicity for their authors than they were wont to do but, perhaps, in our YouTube culture, we are all aware of how much more we could (and therefore feel we should) be doing for ourselves. After all, it's our book, our livelihood (or some portion thereof) we should be at least as keen as any publicist to see it do well.

This article appeared on the net a fortnight or so ago (thanks to Eliza Graham for the link) and makes some interesting points. I was particularly interested in this one:

In the run of things though there should be honesty and collaboration between author and publisher. A collaboration of equals where the author cannot any longer wait at the end of a phone for the publicist to call with an itinerary. They really do need to be out there helping themselves. This is not an abdication, just a fact of life.

Well, it may be a fact of life but it's not necessarily as simple as just going out and doing some publicity, is it?

Most of us aren't marketing professionals – we don't necessarily have the aptitude or the knowledge to organise our own events. Book tours and signings are rarely any use to the unknown as nobody is going to come and see somebody they've never heard of and events other than these need some imagination and inspiration. And turning imagination and inspiration into publicity events is a very different thing from turning them into books.

So much for aptitude. Then there's the time element. If you're an author who has a day job then taking off a lot of time to publicise your book may simply not be feasible. Bosses who are prepared to wave you off for a month's book-tour are few and far between. Normally they say things like 'that'll be the whole of your annual leave for this year then.' If you're any kind of professional you're even more constrained – you need not to do things which might bring your profession into disrepute or ridicule. If you were a doctor, for instance, your hospital or PCT wouldn't necessarily be vastly keen on seeing pictures in the press of you bungee jumping off a local landmark with the name of your book stretched along the length the bungee cord or dropping primroses along the length of the M25 so as to get on the national news hugging your book. Teachers could expect even more stick for being seen to be in the public eye – after all most kids are amazed to see you in the supermarket, never mind in the newspaper or on the television.

And, even if you are in the fortunate position of not having to support yourself and/or your family by gainful employment other than literature, taking a lot of time to 'do' publicity is still problemmatic. I mean, when are you going to write the next book? Because, if this one's a success, your publisher certainly isn't going to want to wait an indefinite period for the next.

Which leaves us all exhausted and hoping for the thirty-six hour day to be invented (and our body clocks adjusted accordingly) sometime in the alarmingly near future.

While I'm on the subject of publicity, can I point you in the direction of Natasha Solomons' website. She is in the process of organising her own publicity tour for her very intriguing-sounding book, Mr Rosenblum's List. I am impressed and it's making me think about publicity for The Black and The White – a book that isn't even finished yet.

In praise of the semi-colon.

2010-03-14T21:17:00.001Z

I love the semi-colon; I freely admit it. I love the fact that I know how and when (and when not) to use it. But even I have been struck by how often I find myself using it in my current book; and that has started me thinking about the voice of my central character.

Clearly, the use of the semi-colon implies that he qualifies what he says a lot, that he's keen to back up his assertions, that he makes sure that we know what he's talking about. He's not a self-confident character but he has pretensions to being a thinking person.

And this got me thinking - what grammatical devices would other kinds of character use?

The gossip – parentheses (constantly remembering and inserting extraneous information) and lots of double inverted commas (reporting what other people 'honestly said'!!) And exclamation marks.

The bully – imperatives, statements, challenging questions. What do you mean, no they don't? Of course they do.

The chronically uncertain person – ellipsis.... probably. Because they don't want to impose.... they're not quite... sure...

The person who can't shut up – sentences strung together with and and but and then and so and because and if and when and so on and so on.

OK, your turn...

More on e-readers.

2010-03-11T08:43:00.002Z

Just in case anybody was getting really into the whole 'green or not green?' debate about e-readers, I came across this today on the Guardian books blog which sheds a little more light (and asks more questions) on the subject.

The great e-book debate reaches HB

2010-03-07T19:50:00.002Z

E-books. I've been galvanised into writing about them because Frances Garrood has put up a post on the subject over on her blog but it's something I've been thinking about, on and off, since Testament was published and Panmac acquired the rights to sell it electronically as well as in physical form. I have no idea how many e-versions of Testament have been sold (if any at all) maybe I'll find out in my royalty statement at the end of the month.

I've never had any objection in principle to e-books. I quite like technology and e-readers have an aesthetic all of their own – granted, it's a very different aesthetic to that of a print book but there is an aesthetic, nonetheless. In fact, I've been waiting for Apple to produce an e-reader and am slightly disappointed that they seem to think that the iPad is it. Since it uses the same backlit screen technology as every other laptop and phone, it's qualitatively different (and, in this respect, inferior ) to the dedicated e-readers, whose screens look like paper and need to be lit by ambient light, just like an ordinary book.

I also have no objection to not having a physical book in my hand. Hardbacks are heavy and lots of paperbacks are tiresome to hold open unless you can break the spine, so just holding an almost weightless e-reader is a pleasant change.

Then there's the issue of space. We live in an averagely sized terraced house and there are books in every room, not excepting the bathroom where they seem to congregate however hard I send them away. I think we're at shelf-capacity now, and we have to prune our books regularly, to the benefit of the local Oxfam bookshop. If we lived in a smaller house, or a flat, a houseboat or a caravan, housing physical books would be a nightmare. For everybody who lives in a confined space (and more and more people do) e-books must be a godsend. You can own hundreds of titles that take up no space but the electronic variety.

So, on grounds aesthetic, manual and spatial, e-books are winning

The green issue seemed like a no-brainer – all that processing of paper, printing, binding and shipping that wasn't going on with e-readers - until I heard a radio documentary about the energy required to keep central servers (essential for all this downloading) running. Suddenly e-readers' green credentials didn't seem quite so verdant.

And then there's the piracy issue. If e-books are going to be ripped off in the same way that music has been, that's going to be very bad news for writers.

I used to assume that, whatever people of my generation thought, physical books would begin to lose ground to e-books with time as the next generation – used to doing everything onscreen – would automatically gravitate in their direction. But my eighteen-year-old son tells me that this isn't necessarily so. Precisely because they spend all the rest of their time with electronic screens, he says, his generation escapes into real books when they want a break. Even as I type, he is sitting and doing exactly that.

So maybe e-books and print books will continue to exist side-by-side, with those for whom space is an issue pragmatically choosing e-books and those of us who think a house isn't furnished unless it's got books on every wall continuing to favour physical books, unless we do a lot of travelling or want a lighter option for holidays and train-commuting.

Or is there some determining factor I've not thought of?

Fiona Robyn's Blogsplash

2010-03-01T08:16:00.003Z

In case you're wondering whether you've come to the right blog, don't worry, I'm taking part in Fiona Robyn's Blogsplash to introduce her new novel, Thaw. I don't know Fiona but I'm intrigued by her work and even more intrigued by this idea for promoting her work. She has two other novels in publication which you can find here.

Anyway, let me introduce Fiona, who is, in her turn, introducing her main character, Ruth:

Meet Ruth. She doesn't know if she wants to carry on living or not, and she gives herself three months to decide. Her diary is Fiona Robyn's new novel, Thaw, and you can read it for FREE, beginning today.

Now, over to Ruth.

These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It's a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we're being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they're stuck to the outside of her hands. They're a colour that's difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I'm giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don't think I'm alone in wondering whether it's all worth it. I've seen the look in people's eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I've heard the weary grief in my dad's voice.

So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I'm Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I'm sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat - books you have to take in both hands to lift. I've had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I've still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about - princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad's snoring was.

I've always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I'll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say, 'It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for,' before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It'll all be here. I'm using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I'm striping the paper. I'm near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I'm allowed to make my decision. That's it for today. It's begun.

You can continue reading here.

I'd be very interested to hear what others think of this innovative way of reaching new readers.

The Three Living and The Three Dead

2010-02-26T17:58:00.003Z

Apologies to any regular readers that I still have left for being dilatory with my posting recently – the Black and the White really is occupying most of my available brain space at the moment (well, that and half term last week...)

In my last post I promised – if anybody was interested – to talk about the medieval story of the three living and the three dead. Well, there was at least one taker (thanks, David!) so here we go.

Before I start, I must give all the credit for this post to one of the most wonderful websites I have discovered in my medieval research. It's called Medieval Wall Painting in the English Parish Church and is an encyclopaedic collection of thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth century wall paintings. It's run by Anne Marshall, a retired associate lecturer with the Open University.

The website is brilliant because it's simple, informative and organised. All the examples of particular themes – everything from the familiar story of Christ's passion (ie Easter) to the more obscure St Eloi shoeing the possessed horse – are bracketed together so that you can see the different artists' and different centuries' treatment of the same subjects.

Anyway, here's what the site has to say about the three living and the three dead.

The subject is French or Flemish in origin and is first heard of at the Court of Flanders in the late 13th century, where it is the subject of five poems, Les Trois Mortes et les Trois Vifs . Three kings went out hunting (in the poems they are specifically described as young) and came across three corpses who castigated them for their preoccupation with pleasure and with wordly things, adding ominous words to the effect that ‘as you are, we once were; as we are, so shall you be’. Paintings of the subject on walls and in manuscripts followed, and the subject soon came to England, where it proved equally popular.  Quite a few paintings of the subject survive in the English Parish Church. There is clearly a good deal of scope for imaginative narrative treatment of the story, and many paintings show fine clothes, elegantly caparisoned horses, dogs, hawks and a variety of flora and fauna. Sometimes there are speech-scrolls, with a version of the text quoted above (Wensley, now featured here, is a case in point). The Three Dead, needless to say, are painted in more or less gruesome detail - some are skeletons, some have flesh and skin visibly peeling from them, along with flies and other signs of mortal decay - Wensley’s remarkable example is again a case in point. This (the fifteenth century in particular) was after all an age of elaborate funerary and tomb sculpture - much of which survives - often rendered in similarly unsparing fashion.

Whether all this says something about a particular taste for the morbid in the later Middle Ages is debatable. The Black Death, the devastating effects of which had been felt in England as elsewhere in the decades after 1350 may have had something to do with the popularity of subjects like the Three Living and the Three Dead.

You can see pictures of the subject here, here, here, here and here.

Do have a look at the rest of the site to see what medieval churches would have looked like (though you do have to imagine all the colours unfaded). I think one of the biggest misconceptions about the medieval world was that all their stone buildings were grey and austere and bleak. No, that's just how they've come down to us - it's we who feel that bare stone is somehow more spiritual – but then we modern people are heirs of the Puritan reformation which taught us that ornamentation was bad and simplicity was good. The medieval world wouldn't have agreed at all!

When WAS the fourteenth century?

2010-02-14T19:38:00.009Z

When I tell people that my current novel is set in the medieval period, they will often say something like 'Oh, I love the medieval period, it's fascinating'. And it is, I'm not arguing with that. But I'm never quite brave enough, then, to go on and find out exactly what they mean by 'the medieval period'. Wikipedia – repository of all instant knowledge - defines it as covering a period from the fifth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century. In other words, a millennium that includes the Dark Ages. I think that's a bit broad, myself and would probably have the medieval period beginning somewhere about the reign of Alfred the Great in the mid-ninth century, though others prefer to refer to anything prior to 1066 as The Anglo-Saxon period and to see the medieval period in England as the years between Conquest and Tudors. Fair enough.

But, even if you limit it to the period 1066 to 1485, the medieval period still totals 419 years, which makes research for the historical novelist quite tricky. I mean, life was very different in 1066 and 1485. OK, not as different as between 1485 and 419 years later in 1904, but still, very different.

Even when you narrow things down to the century I'm interested in - the fourteenth - things get very little easier. As I've mentioned before, the fourteenth century was an eventful, happening time and to assume that things in 1400 would look anything like those in 1301 would be a big mistake.

Most of all, the century is hard for the historical novelist (and, by the same token, wonderful) because of the HUGE event that sits bang smack in the midlde of it. 1348 -1350 - The Black Death. It changed pretty well everything, some things immediately, some things slowly. But it changed them. And if you try and research the fourteenth century so that you can get your historical details right, it's sometimes very difficult to find out which bit of the fourteenth century people are talking about.

For instance, I've done a certain amount of research into medieval church wall paintings. Now, there are, sadly, few mural works left in medieval parish churches because of the iconoclasm of the Reformation. What's left was whitewashed or plastered over and is, therefore, not always in the greatest nick. However, conservators all over the country are conserving and writing about the examples that are left and their work is invaluable to people like me. The trouble is, because of the poor condition of the paintings, they can't always say when, exactly, they were painted.

So, when I read - in a reliable source - that it was widely believed 'in the fourteenth century' that to see an image of St Christopher would keep you from dying a sudden death that day, I was delighted. (Clearly, I'm easily pleased.) Surely, I thought, everybody who was afraid of dying of the plague (ie everybody who was alive) would be buying up St Christopher medals and painting images of the saint on their church walls like nobody's business, wouldn't they?

It seemed like a sensible assumption until further (a lot further) research revealed that this belief seems to have come about as a result of the Black Death and that, therefore, those remedies were not immediately available at the time of the Black Death. Most of the surviving St Christopher wall paintings seem to be late fourteenth or fifteenth century. They wouldn't have been there for people to look at while the plague was raging, they were there as a prophylactic, should the plague return.

So the nice device of having people relying on the fact that they wouldn't die that day because they'd taken the trouble to go and look at St Christopher carrying the Christ-child across the river was a goner. As was a point of contact between my characters and my readers – after all, most people know who St Christopher is; they're likely to be far less familiar with the story of the Three Living and the Three Dead which every medieval parishionner would have known. (I'll tell you another time if you're interested.)

And, though I am interested in wall-paintings (as any reader of Testament will know) that's not why they make an appearance in the book. You couldn't possibly have a character walk into a church in the period before the mid 1540s without knowing that the plastered walls of any parish church would be covered in paintings. Our austere way with bare stone was unknown to medieval people and they would have found it incredibly barren and unhelpful. Their religion was very different to anything practised in Britain now. And not just different but bigger. Much bigger. Bigger than most of us can possibly imagine; as big a social factor (though not in the same way) as Islam is in, for example, modern Iran or Saudi Arabia. And, of course, for 'religion' think Roman Catholicism, the only brand of Christianity then flourishing in Western Europe.

But any unwary novelist who assumes that medieval catholicism can be mapped straight on to pre-second vatican council Roman Catholicism is going to get things wrong.

Take a small example. The hail Mary. Even non-Catholics, like me, know that this goes:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen

As such, with its references to the hour of one's own death – which was pretty much in the forefront of everybody's mind during the Black Death – it seems to be the perfect prayer for my main character to be muttering pretty constantly.

Except that more detailed research reveals that the second part of the prayer was only added in the late fifteenth century, almost a hundred and fifty years after the Black Death.

Drat; another point of contact with modern readers gone.

So many things changed as a result of the Black Death – the value of labour, the standard of living, the status of English, the respect people gave to the church, the relationship between the land and the towns, the feudal system – that the early and late fourteenth centuries turn out to be very different times. People literally thought differently about life after it. Not immediately, of course, but the outlook and world-view of the generation that was born after 1348 is different in many ways to that born, for instance in 1308.

The unwary historical novelist has to tease all this out. Every reference to things 'in the fourteenth century' have to be explored, teased out, evaluated and pinned down to exactly WHEN in the fourteenth century. Otherwise, the howlers generated would be as bad as having a hip and trendy character putting a record on the gramophone in the year 1999, while they smoked their medically endorsed cigarette from a chic ivory holder.

Me and My Opinions...

2010-02-05T12:11:00.003Z

I seem to be playing away a lot at the moment. Many thanks, once again, to Norm Geras who has asked me to appear in the Friday Normblog Profile. If you're interested in my views on such diverse topics as philosophies to be disseminated (or not) and who I'd ideally invite to dinner, you can find out here.

Medieval Women as Master Craftsmen

2010-01-30T09:41:00.001Z

Often, when speak to groups about Testament, the same question will arise: 'Would Gwyneth really have been able to be a master craftsman in her own right?'

It's an interesting and valid question but it does seem to be based, as most of the askers are prepared to admit, on preconceptions of a time about which people know very little. Even if medieval history is taught in schools it will mostly consist of political history – the Norman Conquest, the civil war between Stephen and Matilda, the Hundred Years War with France, the Wars of the Roses. Social history doesn't get a look-in. And the fourteenth century was probably the century in which English people experienced the greatest social upheavals until the dawn of the industrial age.

Given this dearth of social history teaching, a general assumption seems to exist that the role and position of women started out, at some stage in pre-history, as a species of semi-slavery and proceeded, by excruciatingly slow historical degrees, to the equality of rights and opportunities that exists in the twenty-first century. On this thesis, if women were given few rights in the sixteenth-century Tudor period (a period most people seem more familiar with, though, again, I would suggest that their preconceptions come, largely, from the experience of noblewomen rather than those lower in social status) then it follows that they must have enjoyed even fewer rights in the fourteenth century.

This is a false assumption. Women were far less constrained in many ways in the medieval period and - certainly, in terms of labour and the workplace – the lower the woman's social class, the less constrained she was. In terms of work on the land, there is a certain amount of controversy about whether women (I'm not going to use the term peasant but you can if you like) were allowed to do things like wield a scythe because there is no pictorial evidence for this and a good proportion of our evidence for life on the land comes from pictures, as well as manorial records. However, women certainly did work in the fields and the poorer your family, the more likely the women were to have to work – there was no choice, the land had to be worked and if you didn't have enough men and boys, the women got roped in.

This wasn't just the case on the land, either. In the craft guilds, the need for cheap labour made family involvement a must and all the children of a family would have been expected to help; unless there was an abundance of sons, daughters would get at least the rudiments of their father's craft. Obviously, the expectation was that, once a girl was married, her job was to look after her husband and children but, before she were married, her help could be vital to the family economy. Unless her husband was a particularly high-ranking guildsman (and therefore rich enough to employ lots of people) he would also be likely to expect her to help him at times of need. If a woman was widowed young, she might very well carry on her husband's trade after his death because, frankly, otherwise she and her children would starve.

I think people tend to forget that, in the pre-modern period, what you did for your 'living' meant exactly that: if you didn't work, you didn't earn money, you couldn't afford to eat and therefore you didn't continue living. What you did – your profession or job – was, literally, your living.

But, back to women. If a woman was widowed on the land, she might, if she was very lucky, be taken in by a member of her extended family. More likely, she would be expected to marry again or manage the land on her own or with her sons' help. In the towns, where many people of Gwyneth's generation didn't have family because they were first-generation immigrants following the Black Death, there was nobody to step in and look after you so you had to marry again or work. And if you had the means at your disposal to work at a trade or profession, then you did that.

It wasn't a lifestyle choice, it was a necessity.

Admittedly, there was not this compulsion in Gwyneth's case but her working for Simon has to be seen against this background of economic necessity.

The fourteenth century is also a very interesting time in terms of female roles because, in the wake of the cataclysm that was the Black Death, opportunities didn't so much knock as come in through the door and drag you out to the workplace kicking and screaming 'but I want to be in the kitchen!' The workforce had been reduced by anything from a third to a half and anybody who had a marketable skill found themselves in a seller's market. Gwyneth is approaching forty when Testament opens in 1385. This means that she survived the Black Death as a child of four and that she grew up in a world that lacked an abundance of skilled people.

Gwyneth's backstory, as anybody who has read the first chapter of Testament carefully will know, is that she was raised by her father as an only child. He taught her his skills as a master carpenter because he had no other children and because he was worried, in that rather uncertain time, about how she might make ends meet if he died suddenly. And, don't forget, people did die suddenly. Quite apart from the astonishing violence of society and the fact that you could die (from septicaemia) of a casual cut or (from gangrene) of a broken limb there were recurrences of the plague throughout the 1360's, most notably in 1361 and then, again, in 1369.

I'm not saying that female master craftsmen were common. They weren't. A women practicing a craft independently was an exceptional circumstance and I known of no evidence, anywhere, of a woman who was recognised and accepted by an English town guild as a master craftsman in her own right. Gwyneth's father explicitly says this: 'They may not see you a master, Gwyneth, who can tell in these times? But the craft may be meat and drink to you.' (p.4)

So, what the novel catalogues is a chain of events which is unlikely but not impossible (and it is a novel, remember, a book that asks 'what if..?'.) Gwyneth, a child at the time of the population-decimating Black Death survives as her widower father's only child and is, therefore, taught his trade. He, in the absence of readily-available apprentices because of the labour shortage following the plague, is happy to rely on her home-grown talents. She marries a man who has professional need of the skills she possesses and, as his wife, her skills come free which is no small consideration to a man making his way in the world. She continues to be able to work with him as their marriage progresses because she has failed to conceive. Simon is not in the king's favour so the pool of carpenters he can draw from is never going to contain the real stars of the day but, fortunately for him, his wife possesses the kind of talent he needs. Their son is born damaged and this, together with Simon's association with heresy, further reinforces their professional isolation. Simon makes it quite clear to Gwyneth (and the reader) that, without her as his master carpenter, the college simply will not be built. As it is to be their son's memorial, she cannot refuse.

It all comes back to fathers and their children; to Gwyneth's father who has passed on all his skills to her; to Simon's father whose forthrightness to a king has denied Simon the royal patronage and name-making work he craves; to Simon and his desire for a son and the consequences of that desire.

Catch me elsewhere...

2010-01-26T13:08:00.003Z

The lovely Norm Geras of the Normblog runs a Writer's Choice feature every Tuesday in which an author chooses a book that means something specific to them or their work.

He very kindly asked me if I would contribute something so I have written a piece on Geraldine Brooks' wonderful Year of Wonders.

You can read it here.

Cornflower book group

2010-01-25T08:27:00.002Z

As I may have mentioned, Testament was the Cornflower blog's book group read this month and generated a certain number of comments which you can read here if you're so minded...

Many thanks to the group for all their comments and for picking Testament in the first place. (For which I have the inestimable Juxtabook to thank.)

A really nice review

2010-01-22T08:47:00.003Z

Thanks to Google alerts, I came home from work yesterday to read this on the Shelflove book blog. I don't often come across readers who prefer the contemporary strand of Testament, so it was nice to read Teresa's opinion on this in the comments trail.

I understand that some better-known book bloggers - Dove Grey Reader, for instance - are now being quoted alongside print reviewers on book jackets. They are also inundated with review copies of new novels and I notice that, on the Shelflove site, co-bloggers Jenny and Teresa make it clear that publishers are welcome to send review copies.

So, has the day of the independent, amateur book blogger come - are they now becoming as influential as print reviewers where readers (as opposed to the literary establishment) are concerned? The comments on this post would certainly suggest that they are.

Do others have a similar experience?

A Waterstone's Volte Face

2010-01-19T09:54:00.004Z

Has everybody heard - I've literally only just picked it up from the booktrade update Book2Book (subscribe here) - that Waterstone's is abandoning its central command-and-control model and going back to 'localised' bookselling practices as Tim Waterstone initially set out to do with his shops?

You can read about it here.

What about that then, readers and writers?

Creating a Blog Splash

2010-01-16T08:42:00.004Z

Writers are always looking for new ways to get their books noticed, to generate an audience and the word-of-mouth buzz I was talking about in my previous post. I'm guessing the fact that you're reading this means that you may have a blog of your own whether you're a writer, reader, bookseller, publisher or other person involved in the whole business of books.

Author and blogger Fiona Robyn (author of The Letters and The Blue Handbag) has come up with an innovative idea to generate publicity for her new novel Thaw. Starting on the 1^st of March next year she's going to blog it so that peole can read it, free, online. The novel follows 32 year old Ruth’s diary over three months as she decides whether or not to carry on living.

To help spread the word she’s organising a Blogsplash, where blogs, including mine, will publish the first page of Ruth’s diary simultaneously (and a link to the blog).

I think it's a really innovative idea. Not only does it generate reader traffic for her blog (and those of the others involved) but it's using the blog network to give people access to the new novel rather than relying on readers' (notoriously subjective) reviews after the book is published.

She’s aiming to get 1000 blogs involved – if you’d be interested in joining in, email her at fiona@fionarobyn.com or find out more information at http://www.fionarobyn.com/thawblogsplash.htm.

Recommendations and Word of Mouth Successes

2010-01-11T09:28:00.004Z

One of the things all writers want is for their book to become a word of mouth success – not to be depedent on the vagaries of marketing and publicity but simply to have written a book so amazing that everybody is recommending it to their friends.

The internet, of course, means that there are other ways of generating a word of mouth success. Because I have a Google alert set up to tell me when anybody mentions my name online, I came across Fiction Forum on Amazon where people can share their favourites and their opinions with others and where people can ask questions about those of similar tastes. The page I was directed to was this one on 'time-slip' novels. Which, when I read the comments by Kesali and I Readalot, was a pleasant surprise.

Older, more traditional media are also getting in on the act. Mariella Frostrup hosts a Radio 4 programme called Open Book which has a section called The Reading Clinic. A couple of weeks ago a listener wrote in to say that he had very much enjoyed Ian Mortimer's A Time Traveller's Guide to the Middle Ages and would like to read fiction from the same period. Could Ms Frostrup's guests offer any advice?

Interestingly, from the point of view of somebody who has also read Mr Mortimer's excellent book (subtitled A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century) and who is writing a book very firmly based in the fourteenth century (ie me) there seemed to be little recommendable adult fiction set in the medieval period and written in English. Umberto Eco's novels were - of course – highly recommended (though it's astonishingly difficult to find the name/s of his highly talented translator/s) and I was introduced to the works of George Mackay Brown but, other than that, the novels the panel were keen on were mostly children's books by Kevin Crossley-Holland and German author Lilli Thal (whose work is translated by John Brownjon).

Looking at the list (follow the link above) I can't help wondering about the prejudices of the panellists. I mean, can you seriously make recommendations about current medieval fiction without even mentioning Karen Maitland's Company of Liars and Owl Killers?

Anyway, there are two ways of looking at the apparent dearth of medieval fiction from my point of view as the writer of a book set during in the Black Death.

One: Hooray! This is a niche that is crying out to be filled, bring it on!

Two: Bugger, there's no demand for fiction set in this period, I'm on to a loser.

Does anybody have any other recommendations or feelings about this market?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

After posting this, my lovely editor, Will, sent me a link to this article in the Telegraph. I think I know the answer - it's One above. Hooray!

Writing Review of 2009

2010-01-02T15:59:00.003Z

Over the holidays I've been thinking about what kind of a writing year 2009 has been for me and, slightly to my surprise, I've come to the conclusion that it was actually a rather good one. Inevitably, it's been coloured by the fate of Not One of Us but, not necessarily in a bad way. So, here's my writing year, 2009.

Testament was published in paperback in January and went into Waterstones' New Year 3-for-2 promotion which was amazing. I'm pleased to say that the exposure paid off and the paperback has sold in pleasing numbers. In January I heard that Testament had been longlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award and was asked to go and talk about the book to the Waverton book group which was an extremely enjoyable experience. Testament didn't win (Child 44 by Tom Robb Smith did) but it was fun to be part of the literary prize scene if only for a while.

In February, Testament made a brief appearance in the WH Smith's bestsellers list which was both amazing and encouraging.

In April, the blogosphere started to notice Testament's existence with a glowing review from Juxtabook which, latterly, has resulted in other blog activity.

Meanwhile, away from novel writing, in May I had been commissioned to write a promenade play for Rochester Cathedral's launch event for their new Heritage Lottery Funded interpretation project. Though I've always been interested in the theatre and have written bits and bobs of drama and sketches at various times, as well as a lot of unbroadcast radio drama, this was the first full length play I had written for public performance. It turned out to be a lot of fun putting it together (I directed the play as well as writing it) and it all went off extremely well on the day. It gave me a taste for working with actors so if you run a heritage tourism site and think that a play associated with your venue would be a good punter-draw, I'm your woman...

Also in May, the axe fell on Not One of Us, the novel I'd been working on since before Testament was published. Though it was a blow (obviously) it did make me take a couple of resolutions which you'll find if you read my post about the rejection here. And have I kept those resolutions? I'll come to that in a minute.

As well as writing and rehearsing the promenade play, the summer months were full of research for the new book whose working title is The Black and The White. I acquired several books on the history of charcoal burning and the Other Half and I went to the Forest of Dean for some hands-on experience of the craft. This doubled as excellent location research as the book starts out in the very real Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and ends in the entirely fictitious Salster – the city in the east of England that I invented for Testament. I read wonderfully informative books like John Hatcher's The Black Death, An intimate History and Ian Mortimer's A Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England, A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century both of which have been massively helpful and which still bristle with those little page-marking post it notes. I scoured internet sites for everything from bird folklore and belief in fairies (and some of those sites were, I have to tell you, deeply weird...) to fourteenth century hemp-retting and bread-making techniques. I wrote a lot of notes on index cards and created spider-diagrams of thoughts. I bought maps, learned how to bend Googlemaps to my will and how to access OS maps online to plan a likely route for my hero, cross checking with maps of ecclesiastical sites from the medieval period and making sure that I knew whether what I was looking at was a river (probably there or thereabouts six hundred years ago) or a canal (almost certainly not there six hundred years ago). Eventually, by the middle of September, I knew enough to start writing - though, on average, an hour every writing day is still spent on the internet checking facts. (What kind of knives did fourteenth century people eat with? What was the difference between an eating knife and one used for hunting? What kind of herbs could they grow and what did they have to buy, when were tinder-boxes invented... etc.)

So, to pick up my earlier question – did I keep to my resolutions to write 'straight' historical fiction and to allow others to see the drafts along the way? Well, The Black and The White is now half written and is entirely historical; for the moment, at least, I am a very happy writer of historical novels. And, as for showing my working, as it were, I have kept to that too. Right from the discussion of the initial concept with my editor, Will, back in the summer, I have tried to get over my disinclination to talk about my work. I told my other half what the book was going to be about while we were on holiday in the Alps and she was able to help my thinking along significantly. She read the first few chapters and – in spite of a quite natural wish not to upset me – had helpful and astute things to say. When I was almost half way through, I asked another MNW writer whose work I admire and who had very kindly offered to read for me, to look at the first hundred pages before I sent them to Will. Her comments saw a far taughter, better-thought-through MS making its electronic way to his commissioning editor's desk.

And has it worked, all this unwonted discussion and reading of drafts? All I can say is that Will was very encouraging about what I've done so far and complimentary about the synopsis that I'd sweated blood over. Actually, though I hate to admit it, even the process of writing the synopsis helped as I was able to look at the bare bones of what I had decided the book was about and see that I need to strenghten certain threads which have, maybe, begun to wear a little thin in the narrative. Not, I suspect, that that will stop me bellyaching the next time I have to write one...

So the writing year ended on a very upbeat note which is a great place from which to start work again this week.

Anyway, enough from me. A happy new year to you all and, to those of you who write, may this be a year of fulfillment and success!

A Very Merry Christmas to One and All!

2009-12-23T16:31:00.003Z

Before everybody leaves off blogging and reading blogs for the festive season I thought I'd put up a quick post.

I began this blog, as most writers do, as some kind of marketing strategy. Get your name on the web! Form a fan base! Be a visible presence!

I've no idea whether any of those things has happened but the blog has become important to me in a totally different and unexpected way. Writing is a solitary business and I have found it more important than I would have predicted to receive the support and companionship of others on the journey I make through various books. This has been particularly true this year with the disappointement over Not One of Us. The generosity and kindness many of you have shown in comments and emails has really helped keep my writerly spirits up this year.

So, this is just to wish everybody who visits Hawkins Bizarre - whether as follower, commenter or simply as a reader of what goes on here - a very happy, peaceful and joyful Christmas.

I shall be back between now and the New Year with thoughts on the writing year and books I have read in 2009.

Synopses and other Curses

2009-12-17T15:43:00.002Z

Actually, that's a misleading title. There are no other curses chez Bizarre now that I have (mostly) got over the cold that has been thickening my head for the last week and more.

No, there is only the need to write a synopsis.

I knew I was going to send the work in progress to Will, my editor, once I reached the hundred MS pages mark but I - foolishly - hadn't bargained on him wanting a synopsis as well.

Can I just say that I HATE WRITING SYNOPSES?

I know this puts me in the same category of intransigent moody teenagerishness as most other novelists when it comes to having to do this task but that knowledge doesn't make it any easier.

I know all the standard lines: If you can't explain what your book is about simply and economically then you don't really know. A synopsis helps you bring things into focus. It's a skill you need to develop so that you can talk cogently to editors, publishers, agents etc etc. I've heard them so often I don't even know whether they're true or a load of baloney any more. All I know is that I'd rather write a whole 120 000 word book than a measly 1 000 word synopsis.

How do you make your book sound literate, unputdownable and deeply satisfying in workaday prose that bears no resemblance to the 'voice' of the book? How do you convey themes and layers without sounding like somebody who needs to get out in the fresh air a bit more?

I know I have to do it. I know I'll have to do it for every book I write. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

Testament - Book of the Year!!

2009-12-09T10:45:00.003Z

I am extremely proud to link to this announcement by Juxtabook. It's on Twitter, which I don't do, so I hope the link continues to work for more than today.

I feel really privileged to have Testament announced as book of the year by a blogger whose taste and judgement I respect as much as Juxtabook's.

Thanks Juxtabook!

Oh and while I'm on a boast-fest, there's this too...

I'm feeling stroked.

Bestsellers and Blockbusters

2009-12-07T20:30:00.002Z

Over at Tomorrowville, David Isaak is talking about how books are bought and sold and he quotes an interesting concept from a book called 'Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour'. In this book the author, William McPhee

'noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better.'

McPhee wrote his book in the USA (presumably based on US consumers' behaviour) in 1963. So I got to wondering – does the same thing hold good here in the UK in 2009?

I looked up Waterstones top 10 bestsellers on their website. The top 5 were either Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (interestingly the ebook was at Number 1 and the hardback at Number 5 which probably tells us how many ebook readers have been acquired for Christmas presents) or one of Stephenie Meyer's YA vampire series (New Moon, Eclipse and Twilight at 2, 3 and 4 respectively).

OK, maybe the theory holds good for the Dan Brown; I know that lots of people who rarely read will succumb to buying a book that has received a lot of hype and whose predecessor made it into film. But is it true for the Stephenie Meyer books? All the young adults I know who have read the Twilight series (to say nothing of the adults) are absolutely avid readers and have just wombled this series up along with everything else in a voracious reading life. I'm aware that that probably says more about me and the reading habits of the people I associate with than about young adults in general, but still.

(I should probably admit that I have recently borrowed the Twilight oeuvre in its entirely, largely based on a laudatory review by Juxtabook here).

Number 6 is Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife. I loved TTTW and despite the considerable numbers of brickbats thrown at it, I don't think that it's the kind of book that people who don't habitually read books would buy. OK, it's probably at No 6 currently because of the film (sounds of my argument being shot in the foot) but it was made into a film in the first place because it's a massively good story, well told, and because it was a bestseller first time round!

Number 7. The Girl who played with Fire by Stieg Larsson. I am a huge fan of Larsson's work. I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when nobody had heard of it simply because I plucked it off the shelf, intrigued by the title. I found it strange – like no crime novel I'd ever read before – but very satsifying and very good. I read the other two in hardback because I couldn't wait for them to make it to paperback. Now, I don't know whether the Larsson books qualify as 'books read by non-readers'. I think they may be bought by such because the covers suggest some degree of salaciousness from the eponymous girl but I suspect that they are read, in their entirety, by few people in that category. They are meticulous, interestingly crafted, psychologically satisfying and they don't always rattle through the story – sometimes you're obliged to think and consider. In other words they are not your standard blockbuster. So, do they fit McPhee's model? Not sure.

I don't think Waterstones' number 8 fits. It's Maeve Binchy's latest novel Heart and Soul and, though my own purchasing of Ms Binchy's books is probably not going to keep her in any particularly opulent manner, I do know that a lot of people are absolutely nuts about her books and buy them accordingly, not simply because they are hyped and piled high.

Number 9 is – coincidentally – the book I am reading at the moment, John le Carre's A Most Wanted Man. I haven't read any le Carre before but the Other Half has. She read this one and was complimentary about it. She said she thought I would enjoy it and, as she has a track record of being 100% right about books I would like , I'm reading it. She remains at 100%. I think le Carre falls into a niche just like Maeve Binchy – there are enough people who love his writing and who buy his books for their own sake for us not to fall back on McPhee's model to explain why he is in the top 10.

Number 10? It's the first in the Larsson trilogy. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If you haven't read it, I do recommend it. OK, so it's probably benefiting from the release of the third and last element of the trilogy – The Girl who Kicked The Hornet's Nest – now out in hardback (and at number 18 in the bestseller lists), but maybe it would be there anyway.

So, where does this leave us? Is the 'people who buy bestsellers/blockbusters don't buy other books and aren't really readers' model correct? Or is it out of date and US-biassed?

Sarah Palin and Other Misguided Efforts

2009-11-30T22:45:00.003Z

I read the following on the excellent Guardian Books site today:

Rupert Murdoch's biographer Michael Wolff has called on "literate people" to boycott books until publishers stop bringing out ghostwritten memoirs by the likes of Sarah Palin.' [See the rest of the article here.]

Whilst my liberal blood-pressure shoots up at the mere mention of two of the names mentioned, I think I'm going to have to take issue with the owner of the third. Boycott books? How's that going to help?

Leaving aside the fact that Mr Wolff's argument, as presented in this article, is rather confusing (is he suggesting that we boycott all books or simply all ghostwritten ones which remain misleadingly attributed) I don't actually agree with his central argument which appears to be:

People are reading these books under false pretences because they're not actually written by the people they pretend to written by.

Why don't I agree? Well, firstly, I'm not sure that most of the people who buy these books actually give a monkey's who writes them – I think they're just fascinated by the characters involved. Sarah Palin, whatever you think of her politics, is a larger than life character who never fails to elicit a reaction of one kind or another. People want to read about her either in an uncritical, adulatory fashion if her politics and image appeal or in a species of guiltily horrified wonder if she appears to be as entertainingly mad as a spoon. Granted, it would be more honest if the cover read 'ideas conveyed by Sarah Palin in conversation with A. Ghostwriter who then put them into a coherent and readable form' but I don't honestly think it would affect the likelihood of people wanting to read it.

Secondly, I wonder how many people actually believe that these books are written by the people whose photographs appear on the front cover? Maybe I'm crediting the celebrity-autobiog-reading public with too much insight but I would have thought most people realise that if you're famous for – as an example – playing football superlatively well or revealing your rather magnificent chest in newspapers, then you are unlikely also to be blessed with the necessary talent to write about your experiences in a cogent and literate manner.

But, whether we accept Mr Wolff's central argument about false pretences or not, do we agree that registering our displeasure by leaving off buying books would be a good idea?

I can only speak for me, so here's my answer. No. It's a stupid idea. Sleb-memoirs are, notoriously, Christmas- and gift-book fodder bought by people who buy few other books. But they buy these particular books in their hundreds of thousands for the reasons outlined above vis-a-vis La Palin. If people who generally fight shy of literary sleb-fests in favour of the Booker/Costa prize list (which is the group I understand Mr Wolff to be referring to when says 'literate people') stop buying Booker/Costa type books, the only books to suffer will be the latter which, generally, already fail to sell in their hundreds of thousands (unless they win said prize, obviously.) It would be a far better idea to buy more of these books, not fewer, as it might just make the difference next time an unusual but 'literate' book strays over a publisher's horizon.

Mr Wolff clearly thinks that, on many levels, these books are bad. Fair enough. If you think a book is bad, don't buy that book. But don't stop buying books en bloc as some kind of misguided protest.

That's my view, what do the rest of you think?

Guest Blogger - Neil Ayres

2009-11-22T20:23:00.009Z

This week, it came to my attention that the lovely Neil Ayres of the veggiebox blog has published The New Goodbye - a collection of short stories - as an e-book through Smashwords.

(That's Neil, in the photo.)

The Smashwords site describes The New Goodbye like this:

In this collection of realist short stories, Neil George Ayres details the often overlooked depth of modern relationships. From the self-contained love story of a modern marriage, through to the microcosm of the patrons of a working class public house, all life is here. If you love Raymond Carver or Jon McGregor, you're in safe hands.

I know Neil is proud of the stories in this collection so I invited him to Hawkins Bizarre to say a bit about e-publishing in general and the collection in particular. So, over to him.

Alis has been kind enough to invite me on here to pimp my new short story collection and talk a bit about ebooks, so here I go.

As someone well aware of how expensive it is to print and distribute a book (I’d worked in print and print production for over seven years before moving over to the web), and how little of the overall price goes to the publisher (even less filters through to the author), I fail to understand why mainstream publishers are being so hesitant in embracing the ebook. The majority in the UK—imprints like Harper Collins’ The Friday Project are exceptions—are insisting on listing their ebooks at similar prices to the paper equivalent. The intention may be an effort to stall a drop in print sales, but the effect is more that they’re leaving customers who could potentially save them a good deal of money out of pocket. If this behaviour continues, then long-term traditional publishers are in danger of losing these customers to new publishing models, such as Cursor, the one being developed by Richard Nash, or to Mark Coker’s Smashwords, which I’m using myself and which has struck distribution deals with both Sony and Barnes & Noble, with more in the pipeline.

The book publishers are letting booksellers - who already have a stranglehold over them on the high street - lead the way in the ebook market. Most publishers seem content to let Sony fight their corner for them, and offer little support, against the online retailers like Amazon and Waterstones.

What’s the alternative? The production costs for an ebook are an infinitesimal fraction of those for print, and can probably be soaked up by retraining production staff and ejecting some of the expensive processing software they use for their jobs. Rather than plowing the money saved into an even greater share for the distritbutors, publishers should now be taking the fight to them. A single house selling its own books is never going to be able to take on the might of a giant like Amazon, but a collaboration between the major houses, perhaps partnering with a technology provider like Sony, which has already shown its support for publishers over retailers, may be able to. What book publishing needs is an effective body promoting co-operation between houses and representing the interests of the entire book industry, including the readers.

To me, the model for the future of publishing is simple: retain the hardback for readers who still aren’t ready to surrender the feel and smell of a paper product between their fingers. If anything the publishers will make more money on hardback sales than they do now (as hardbacks are a bigger money-spinner per unit sold than a paperback), and ditch the paperbacks altogether in favour of ereaders.

But for now, the people that will invest in e-readers, or receive them this Christmas - which I feel will be the time that the UK market really wakes up to how important they will be - will be genuine read-a-holics, people passionate about the books they read and also ones who talk about books, recommend them to friends and play an important part in the word-of-mouth success garnered by bestsellers. Surely these are the people publishers should be courting?

Personally I love books. I own probably a couple of hundred, yet most, once read, end up in my loft, given to friends or donated to charity shops. I have a bookcase with maybe twenty or thirty of my favourite books on it, and that’s it. Anything else I could be re-educated to use an ereader to digest.

If you’re one of these lucky types, to already be using an e-reader and looking for something new to get your teeth into, you can download my short story collection, The New Goodbye, for free. It’s available for both the Kindle and Sony Readers, as well as the Stanza app on the iPhone and most other formats, as well as HTML for your computer screen.

I’m likely to release a revised version of my first novel through Smashwords at some point too. So keep an eye on the Veggiebox if you’re interested in that.

Thanks for reading, and thanks again to Alis for having me.

Thanks, Neil, and the very best of luck to The New Goodbye.

PS - I've just finished re-reading The Leaving Present, one of the stories I know Neil is most proud of in the collection and found it both accomplished and touching. I recommend it!View and download the whole collection here - you don't need any kind of e-reader, you can read it from your laptop or PC.

The kind of books I read

2009-11-19T22:05:00.002Z

I read all kinds of different books from young adult to crime, from thrillers to historical fiction and literary novels but there is one kind of book I'm not keen on – translations. War and Peace? Never read it. (Could have something to do with the fact that I'm not a huge fan of the 19^th century novel, of course). Love in the Time of Cholera? Nope. The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Afraid not.

More recently, there have been bestsellers like Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind or Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier. People raved about these books but I couldn't get past page 100. Am I a horrible xenophobe? I hope not. It's just that these books never sound quite right to me. (I do mean 'sound' – when I read I hear the words as if somebody were reading the book to me.) There are always sentences that make me frown and think 'that's not real English, not really real English'. Every time it happens, I'm pulled out of the fictional world, my connection with the author is interrupted.

There are exceptions. I made it all the way through Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (author: Peter Hoeg, translator: Felicity David). And whoever translates Steig Larsson's Millennium trilogy (the translator doesn't get a mention on Amazon or the Waterstone's site) is clearly a genius. Halfway through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I had to check that I was actually reading a translation.

But generally... I think it would be fair to say I don't do translations.

I have a Croatian friend who is determined to cure what she sees as my dreadful literary parochialism and who keeps lending me books in trnslation. And, finally, she has struck gold. Or perhaps I mean I have. Last weekend she brought me Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver, translated by Thomas Teal. It is, quite simply, beautiful.

The True Deceiver is almost a fable. Though it's clearly set in the twentieth century – there is a motor vehicle (just the one) and there are merchandising deals for the children's author who is one of the main protagonists – there's a timeless feel to the book. The whole book takes place during the course of one winter but there's a dreamlike quality to the passage of time and the characters almost seem to be suspended in the snowy season as events shake the snow-scene around them.

The book is full of beautiful, spare, luminous prose. Characters are strongly drawn but never charicatures. With enormous economy Tove Jansson shows us how people's inner life and outer worlds collide as conflicting needs come to the fore; the need to retain independence but to feel secure; the need to make money out of somebody whilst at the same time securing that person's financial interests. People don't talk much in this book, speaking to each other is something the characters do only in extremis – communication takes place through actions not words; and the actions speak very loudly.

Will The True Deceiver convert me to reading more books in translation? Probably not, to be honest. But I shall definitely be reading more Tove Jansson – particularly if I can get hold of translations by Thomas Teal.

A further notch on historical fiction

2009-11-08T22:34:00.003Z

Reaction to my last post seems to indicate that, for readers of historical fiction, authenticity of both voice and detail is as important as plot; a view which I heartily agree with.

So, can I move the debate on a notch?

If the authentic historical details box is ticked and the decent plot box is ticked, how important is it that the people in the novel are as representative of their era as the novelist can make them?

In other words, how important is it to the reader of historical fiction that the characters they are reading about are not simply twenty-first century people transplanted into a well-drawn historical setting?

When I started reading historical fiction in my teens, I think I automatically accepted that historical characters would think and feel like me – I mean, how else was I going to identify with them?

It wasn't until I started doing the research for Testament that I began to understand how very differently the people of the medieval period thought and felt about the world they lived in. This realisation didn't stop me enjoying hist fic which failed to acknowledge this – I remain a huge fan of Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael books, for instance - but, in general, my criteria for judging historical novels became far more exacting.

Historical fiction with a crime/murder theme is suddenly big in publishing terms – it's a genre on the up – and I read a fair amount of it but, I have to confess, a lot of it doesn't ring true because the way the protagonists think – particularly those who are investigating the crimes – doesn't stack up in terms of authentic world view.

So, what does everybody else think? Does coming across recognisably modern people with twenty-first century views about justice, social politics or religion put you off certain kinds of fiction, or will a good plot and external period detail get you through? Are there excellent examples you've come across (I was recently massively impressed by Shona MacLean's The Redemption of Alexander Seaton and here's somebody who agrees with me) or real howlers (I'll let you fill those in)?

What do you want in your historical fiction?

2009-10-27T22:12:00.002Z

I've recently joined the Historical Novel Society. Amongst other things, each issue of the society's journal – the Historical Novels Review - briefly reviews a great number of historical novels and, having read quite a few of the back numbers the society has kindly sent me, I am struck by something. Though the reviews talk a lot about plot, character and authenticity and, to a slightly lesser extent about structure there is very little comment on language, voice, vocabulary – how the author has used the narrative tone to convey some impression of the period they are writing about.

Now, for me, this is one of the most important – and interesting – things about writing histfic. But how important is it to readers?

If you read historical fiction, what are the criteria by which you judge a historical novel? What are the things you look for? What are essential and what optional extras? I'd be fascinated to know.

Wolf Hall - Rush out and buy it now.

2009-10-21T22:08:00.004+01:00

I'm on record as being the sort of person who doesn't automatically rush out and buy the whole Man Booker shortlist. Or even the eventual winner. Actually, my automatic tendency is to curl a lip and think 'not for me, I think'. But I really did rush out and buy this year's winner – Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

I've read a couple of Hilary Mantel's other novels and been very impressed; also slightly at a loss to know why she isn't more widely read. But Wolf Hall knocks them into a cocked hat.

OK, I suppose it was a pretty fair bet that I'd like it – it's a historical literary novel – my absolutely favourite genre, if genre it be; but it is an absolutely cracking read.

I must admit I did groan slightly when I heard that it was about Thomas Cromwell – not another novel about the Tudors, I thought. But this is not another novel about the Tudors. This is very much a novel about Cromwell – who, as if his centrality needed emphasising, is 'he' throughout the text. I'm not sure Mantel ever refers to him as Cromwell herself after the first chapter – she lets other characters do that. And they do refer to him, a lot, though they're not always so polite as to call him Master Cromwell.

Because I'm fundamentally a medievalist and find other periods of history less compelling, I have to confess to not knowing a huge amount about Thomas Cromwell. OK, there's Hans Holbein's painting which makes him look like a toad - kind of sticks in the mind, though I can't say that he looks particularly like a murderer, an appearance several people accuse him of in the book. But then my knowledge runs out with CJ Sansom's rather machiavellian Cromwell in the Shardlake books and the nastier version in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Bolt's play portrays Cromwell as the jealous, scheming villain who is out to bring down hero of the hour and popular saint, Sir Thomas More. Mantel does it the other way around and, I have to confess, I found her version more convincing. Bolt's More was heroic – yes – but chilly, too, as fanatics are prone to be. Mantel's Cromwell is anything but chilly – he is a humane pragmatist who combines a very street-smart kind of wisdom with a deep understanding of what makes individuals tick and a vast capacity for loyalty. Portrayed as unswervingly faithful to his patron and mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, even in the latter's downfall, Wolf Hall's Cromwell is a man it is very easy to like – as even the haughty and autocratic Duke of Norfolk discovers. And it is his commoner's disarming lack of personal vanity, coupled with an uncanny ability to make things happen for Henry which sees him rising up the notoriously greasy Tudor political pole.

It's not just Cromwell himself who is humane in Mantel's Tudor court. Unlike many other fictional Tudor-fests – both on TV and film as well as in novels – there are no monsters here; though Thomas More in his unyielding fanaticism and unlikeable treatment of his family comes close. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and Anne Boleyn's uncle, is usually presented as, essentially, a ruthlessly ambitious pimp of his neices. Whilst Hilary Mantel doesn't let him off this particular hook of accusation neither does she major on it, allowing us to see Norfolk as a rather more human character, one whose initial antipathy to Cromwell is worn down by the latter's sheer, unremitting competence and utter failure to pretend to be other than he is.

On the whole, it's the women who come off worst. Whilst in Cromwell's immediate household (a wonderful place – a cross between a job centre and a refuge) the women are feisty, opinionated and generally full of the usual human foibles, those at court are an unappealing bunch. Chief amongst them, of course, is Miss Unappealing 1533 herself, Anne Boleyn. Mantel's Anne is calculating, selfish, ambitious, jealous and ruthless. It will be interesting to see whether she can – or indeed wants to – generate any sympathy for La Ana, as the French ambassador calls her, in the sequel to Wolf Hall.

Jane Seymour – whose destiny the reader knows, as the characters do not – emerges as a the only kind woman at court and as someone Thomas Cromwell has more than a passing interest in. And it is the Seymours' family seat in Wiltshire that gives the book its name. This confused me, initially, as Wolf Hall itself receives very little attention in the book beyond the recounting of a notorious and quasi-incestuous scandal which took place there. Then I realised – Wolf Hall would actually be a wonderful alter ego name for the Tudor court where, as Cromwell says on more than one occasion homo homini lupus – man is a wolf to man.

Unlike many historical political novels Wolf Hall takes zero time to get into. We are plunged in to Cromwell's abused childhood and, within a few pages, he has fled his brutal father and packed himself off to the continent to make his fortune, returning in the next chapter after a decade and a half as Cardinal Wolsey's right hand man. At first, I thought this opening chapter was simply an attention-grabbing device on Hilary Martel's part but, as the book progresses, you realise that she is making the reader privy – as nobody else in the book is except Cromwell himself and his despised family – to the truth about his origins. Wolsey, obviously delighted with his diamond in the rough protege, has told numerous scurrilous stories about Cromwell's upbringing and it's amusing to see who has been told what and who has believed what. But then, it becomes increasingly clear, as the book progresses, that it is possible to believe anything of the king's fixer.

Thomas More says of him 'Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.' He has the knack of knowing what to do, who to placate, who to threaten, who to pay off, in any given situation. And he does it with charm and wit and we love him. That's why over 600 pages in his company still feels insufficient.

The priviliged-information trick of the opening chapter is hardly Hilary Mantel's only clever device. The whole book is an object lesson in historical fiction writing. She manages to convey a flavour of the speech of the time without ever resorting to gadzookery or making it feel anything less than fresh and authentic. You can hear the characters speaking, they're then and they're now – it's the true historical writer's trick.

And how does she manage to encompass so much politicking, so much grandeur, so much intrigue in 672 pages and still write a book which feels so light of touch? Answer – she never labours a point, sometimes she barely makes a point, allowing the reader the satisfaction of grasping what she is talking about without having it spelled out. Time and place are beautifully conveyed but in the small details of recipes, lacings, books; a hanging here, a painting there. I was dribblingly grateful to be spared endless details of what everybody was wearing – Wolf Hall has no acres of velvet, seas of brocade nor bushels-full of seed pearls - only occasionally do we get an insight into what people are wearing and it's always relevant, always tells us something about the character.

So as to help the narrative and the reader along, Mantel also surrounds Cromwell with younger men (as I'm sure he would have himself) which means that he always has a reason – other than the need to explain things to the reader, I mean – to unpack what's going on, what he's thinking, why he's doing what he's doing.

I could go on but that would involve going and getting the book and prising it from the Other Half's desperate fingers, so I will stop and just urge you to go and buy Wolf Hall – now, don't wait for it to come out in paperback, it's the sort of book (and I rarely say this) that you need to own in hardback. Except, as I know to my cost, that it's ruinously heavy for reading unobtrusively in bed...

If all Man Booker prize winners were this good, I'd be waiting on the bookshop's doorstep on shortlist morning, ready to devour the lot.

Quests

2009-10-16T18:25:00.001+01:00

The Black and the White is a quest narrative. (I don't think I'm issuing any prospective spoilers in saying that.) And, at the moment, the writing of it feels a lot like a quest, too.

My central character, Martin, has no maps - nobody did in the fourteenth century, maps were political nor topographical - and he is having to navigate from one known point to the next, never knowing what each day's journey is going to bring.

And I'm doing something similar. While I was writing Not One of Us, I used a technique I have used in writing other novels: I had a general outline, I knew where it started and ended and I had a few 'set pieces' that I was working towards. Each new chapter was plotted as I came to it - before I started writing I would map out, spider-diagram fashion - what was going to happen in the next few pages. It helped me to see the themes I was bringing out, some of the conversations I might want the characters to have, the overall flow of the chapter and how it dovetailed in to what had gone before and was going to follow.

I'm not doing that this time. I didn't actually sit down and decide not to do it like that, I just started writing one day without making a chapter plan and found that things emerged as I was writing which would not have made their way into a spider diagram; so I came to the conclusion that that kind of roughing-out might actually be inhibiting my subconscious. Since this is where I think all my best writing comes from, I decided to give the new, freer, approach a go.

It's having its ups and downs. Like Martin, I'm prone to look up every now and then and think 'where on earth am I and how am I going to get to where I want to be from here?'. But, just as often, I find I'm looking up and thinking 'blimey, didn't know we were going there but I'm glad we did!'

In other respects, my approach is similar to what it's always been. I know the book's end. I know several big things that are going to happen but what happens between them is something the book and I are finding out in our own time.

It's slightly scary. But if I can tap into some of Martin's fear about what's going to happen, that can only be good. Can't it?

Editing onscreen vs offscreen

2009-10-06T22:14:00.001+01:00

Why does what you’ve written take on a different character when you print it out? Yesterday I printed out what I’d written of The Black and the White so far (about 18 000 words) as I wanted to get back into the book after an enforced 10 day layoff caused by the play, my Mum’s 70th birthday and attendant visits, then sorting out the Ultimate Frisbee Freak for university and taking him up on Sunday.

So, I printed out the words I’d written and proceeded to read them.

Now, you need to bear in mind that, of the (at least) two kinds of writer I am not of the ‘get it down fast and dirty but get it down’ variety. I find it impossible to move on to the next chapter until I’m pretty satisfied with the one I’ve just written. In theory this should keep later editing to a minimum. It doesn’t. I don’t know whether I’m a) a perfectionist b) inefficient c) indecisive or d) all three but, anyway, these chapters that I’d printed out had already been scrutinised, read aloud, cut, augmented and polished. Each had at least four versions of itself saved in a folder marked ‘chapter x’.

And still there was work to do.

Things which I would have expected to notice first time round – infelicities of style, repetitions, saying things twice, confusing paragraphs where I knew what I meant but the poor reader would have to be telepathic to grasp – suddenly leaped out at me.
Was it the ten days’ distance from the words?
Or just that it was printed and not in ‘first draft’ mode on the screen?
Or perhaps I’m being unduly self-critical and not allowing myself the luxury of writing myself in to the book in peace without expecting it to be instantly satsifactory.

I know that lots of longhand first drafters say that when they type up what they’ve written and see the words appearing as print onscreen, they immediately see what needs to be changed, rewritten etc. The change from scrawl to ‘clean text’ seems to be part of the editing process.

So, should I routinely print out my chapters once I’m happy with them on screen?

What does everybody else to in this context?

Green Men, Murder and Religious Mayhem - the Rochester Promenade Play

2009-09-30T22:21:00.014+01:00

Yikes, what a week! I’m just back – today – from celebrating my mother’s 70th birthday by taking her to see La Traviata at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff and, finally, I have a few minutes to talk about the promenade play.

Actually, I feel like the last person who should be telling you about it – I didn’t even see it properly as I was the prompter for both performances. My eyes were glued to the script so I just listened and snatched odd visual snippets of what was going on. I will be able to watch it – eventually - as a cameraman from Kent Online has provided us with some uncut footage and the Ultimate Frisbee Freak was there with his digital video camera and the cathedral’s tripod recording it for family posterity.

We’d dreaded bad weather – particularly as one scene was played almost entirely in the cloister garden and we had no contingency plan other than to issue the audience with as many umbrellas as could be mustered – but, in the event, the sun shone all day, leaving the cast – most of whom were in medieval-style woollens – overheating in the unseasonal weather.

And the Indian summer encouraged the crowds to come. We had excellent audiences for both performances – in fact the audience for the first was almost too large, causing some delays between scenes and nasty moments of ‘do I come in now or not?’ for the poor cast. But all the actors coped with that – and all the other minor hitches of ‘with the audience’ performance - admirably. With ad libs to the fore and some nice moments of cast-audience interaction the whole thing was carried off with great aplomb.

Here are some pictures of the actors in action:

Actually, this one isn't an actor in action but, behind the mask (click on the picture to enlarge it) which was fixed to the outside of the organ loft, stood Bob, an actor with a mighty Green Man's voice which filled the cathedral with his rage during his anguished conversation with Justus, first bishop of Rochester:

Then there were the monks:
Ulf, the novice, who nearly slithered down the stairs in his haste to make his meeting with the Novice Master and

...Gundulf (not to be confused with Gandalf, despite the magician-like robes) aka The Weeping Monk of Bec who built the early bits of Rochester cathedral, its castle and the White Tower of London for William the Conqueror whom he didn't much approve of.

Then the audience was treated to a garden-based murder most foul. One of the cathedral's two saints - William of Perth, a thirteenth-century baker on pilgrimage - was done to death by his treacherous foster-son...

the story told by a storyteller and observed by a Madwoman...

...I'll leave you to work out which is which...

Then we watched as a conservator had a fright when the bishop whose memorial she was working on suddenly showed up with a lot of difficult questions...

...which were partly answered by the following scene in which two men who, in all probability never met - John Fisher and Nicholas Ridley - confront each other with chaplains at the ready...

The last scene, involving Dickens and a wholly fictitious biographer whom I had great fun inventing, allowed us to end on a poignant note - that of Dickens's last days.

Many thanks to my son, The Bassist, and to Richard Simmons both of whom took wonderful pictures of both performances in difficult circumstances.

And, in case you’re wondering where we came by all our fantastic costumes, the majority were designed and made by Berthe Fortin, a professional costume designer with whom we were very lucky to work. Berthe researched and produced all the medieval costumes which gave the early scenes – and particularly the story of William of Perth and Rochester’s madwoman - a great sense of unity and cohesion. The Dean and Chapter kindly made real vestments available for some of our Bishops and their chaplains which meant that the contrast between bishops Fisher and Ridley was wonderfully highlighted by the difference in clerical clothing the two men wore.

Of course, most of the experience of writing a play and having it produced is unlike novel-writing. The interactivity, the different medium, the audience… But one thing is exactly the same – the minute it’s finished and you can’t do anything to change it, you want to rewrite, cut, polish and change.
Fortunately for the actors, I restrained myself...

Many, many thanks must go to the Dean and Chapter of Rochester cathedral for giving me such free rein to interpret the history of their lovely cathedral in my own way – their faith in me is very much appreciated.

The Play's the Thing.. or is it the Actors?

2009-09-25T12:10:00.003+01:00

As a novelist, you always know what your characters look like, what they sound like, how they move, what they’re fundamentally about.

It’s different with plays. When you write dialogue for actors you can have your views on these things but – in the end – they will be decided by the actor playing the part. Of course, if you’re the director as well as the author, you can influence how the character is played, but only to a certain extent. After all, an actor’s appearance can only be altered just so much; you can’t make a tall man short or a person of 50 look 20 (though it’s possible to do the reverse operation if you’ve got a good makeup artist).

So, writing and directing a play has been a very interesting process. (If you don’t know what I’m going on about, read this post.)

When you’re writing a novel, words are the only tools at your disposal. Crossing the tracks to writing dialogue, I kind of assumed that – to an extent - words would suffice there, too, but I’ve been surprised at how much of a difference costume and location within the cathedral make.

For instance, at the beginning of the dress rehearsal on Wednesday night, I walked in to the dressing room and saw a grey-haired, bearded man in a frock coat whom I completely failed to recognise as Owen, the actor who is playing Dickens! Suddenly, he was Dickens. And it may or may not have made a difference to how he felt about the lines, how he spoke them, but it certainly made a difference to how I heard and felt them.

What I’d forgotten, of course, is that both the writer’s and the reader’s imagination are constantly moving beyond the words on the page to see the characters they’re reading about. Writers and readers do what actors do – they use their imaginations to see the people on the page and to breathe life into them.
Obviously, the imaginative work required of the reader is slightly less onerous than that required of the writer – the reader doesn’t have to invent everything from scratch, merely to put their own interpretation on what the writer has written but, without imagination, the process of reading and understanding a book is impossible.

So, actors do for their audience what a reader’s imagination does. They take the bare words on the page, imagine what lies behind them and flesh the characters out, bringing them alive in the process.

All of which makes play-writing a far more collaborative process than novel writing, even if – as they playwright – you never get to influence the production. You are still in a process of collaboration with the actors to present the finished piece to the audience. In my case, I’ve been lucky enough to influence the production very much as its director, and it’s been wonderful to work with the actors.

Tomorrow is production day. If anybody is in or around Rochester, do come along to the cathedral and join in the festivities for the new interpretation project’s launch. You can try out the new audio-guides (voiced by Jools Holland) look at all the spiffy new display panels, see the audio-visuals and even watch the promenade play. First performance is at noon and the second will begin, seamlessly, just after one.

And the cathedral has a very nice tea-room too…

What you might call writing balls...

2009-09-17T20:53:00.001+01:00

One of the lovely people we met at the charcoal burn in the Forest of Dean told us that the architects at the practice she manages don’t sit on office chairs – they use exercise balls instead. You know - those huge things that look like space hoppers without the ears and the goofy face…

So, because I have a back that enjoys tormenting me by popping its sacro-iliac joint fairly regularly and – according to my osteopath – pretty naff ‘core stability’ I decided I’d get one.

Foolishly, I followed the height recommendations at Argos and got a 65cm one when I should have looked at ~~less cheapskate~~ more medically-oriented ones which tell you ‘if you have unusually long legs this may necessitate the use of a larger ball’. Well I do have unusually long legs. I’m just shy of 5’10’’ and I have a 34’’ inside leg. Nightmare for buying trousers – average women’s trousers are 29/30’’ with 31/32’’ considered long or even (hah) extra long. For me, only Long Tall Sally trousers will reliably fit, so if I don’t like what they have on offer, I go without. I have a lot of very well-worn trousers…

So, having used my 65cm ball for a week, I sent off for a 75cm one instead. Of course, it arrived today. When we were all at work/school/in Portsmouth in the case of the Ultimate Frisbee Freak. So I’ll get it tomorrow.

Has anybody else tried alternative seating in a bid not to completely knacker themselves by sitting at a desk for large parts of the day?

Here we go...

2009-09-09T21:55:00.001+01:00

Well, it’s only Wednesday and so far it’s a spiffingly good week – I’ve started actually writing The Black and the White rather than endlessly droning on about research for it and I’ve been quoted on the Bookseller’s online presence here.

In case any of you follow the link and are wondering where I said all this, the original guest-blog post is here on the lovely Juxtabook blog.

So, finally, the thing is started. I got the house straight (OK straight-ish) over the weekend, organised a new working space (I’ve been doing all my research work in the kitchen) and bought a box for my index cards instead of keeping them in a nasty confused pile on the kitchen table.

I spent Monday and Tuesday getting in to it and, after being at work today, I’ve decided I’ve started in the wrong place. So I think a long walk will be necessary tomorrow morning to try and get my head around how I’m going to start where I think I should have started.

More anon…

Charcoal burning escapades

2009-09-03T20:31:00.011+01:00

As a parting shot in a comment I made on Tim Stretton’s blog last week, I asked – slightly breathlessly – ‘Don’t you just love research?!’

Because I do. Love research. But that was taken to a whole new level this past weekend when the Other Half and I headed down to the Dean Heritage Centre in the Forest of Dean so that I could watch a charcoal burn in the traditional, thousands-of-years-old manner.

I had thought I’d just watch. I’d spoken to the guy running the burn – Pete Ralph – on the phone and he had very kindly said ‘come and join in as much as you want’ but I didn’t think I would. I’m not a gregarious person and the thought of gate-crashing an event already supplied with sufficient volunteers who knew what they were doing and having to talk to loads of new people for hours on end didn’t appeal.

But I hadn’t anticipated the warm welcome of the volunteers – most of whom were our age or older and the easy way they just included us in the whole process. There wasn’t a whiff of ‘who the hell do you think you are?’ they just naturally included us and assumed that we knew as much as they did and were as fascinated as they were. Which turned out to be true – certainly the fascinated part, anyway.

The process of burning charcoal is actually quite simple. (And, like lots of things that are simple in principle, it takes years to learn to do well.)

Here’s a recipe for one smallish charcoal-burning clamp:

Ingredients:

2 cords of wood (a cord is a stack of wood eight feet long, four feet high and two feet wide, each ‘log’ being 2 feet long and approximately 3-4 inches in diameter. Interestingly the stack is called a cord because an eight-foot cord was used to measure the stack – the cord was doubled over to measure the 4 foot height and then doubled again to measure the 2 foot width. I always knew a piece of string would come in handy…)

Enough turf (approx half an inch to an inch thick) to cover the whole stack (a dome approximately 8 feet in diameter)

A mix of soil and charcoal dust/debris lifted from the hearth (ie the area of forest floor where the burn is going to take place) prior to building the clamp.

A nice flat area away from too much wind (which causes the stack to burn unevenly).

Method (in pictures...)

First build a central chimney...

then...

and...

then you put the turf on...

then you start covering it with earth...

and when it's nicely covered in earth, you (ie Pete) go up a ladder on the outside of the stack and , with a shovel, put loads of burning embers and half-charcoaled logs from the outside of the last burn (the brunts) in to the central chimney to start the fire.

We spent 5 hours building the clamp and watching the firing process on Saturday and then, on Sunday, we went back as proper volunteers on a shift which combined watching the clamp for signs of collapse or turf-shrinkage and putting patches on with chatting to members of the public who’d come to see what it was all about. We sounded like pros in no time.

One of the things I’d really been hoping I could do was to see the stack at night to find out what it looked like in the dark and how the woodland felt once the dominant sound wasn’t human but animal. (The owls were particularly vocal). Thanks to the generosity of volunteers James and Tina who were on the Sunday night shift we stayed until about ten o’clock and I was able to get a wonderfully atmospheric picture of what it might have been like to do the same thing in the mid-fourteenth century. I won’t wax lyrical here because, no doubt, a certain amount of that will find its way into the book. Many thanks to James, too, for sending me an article he had written on the evidence for medieval charcoal burning.

Sadly we weren’t able to see the clamp quenched (ie have lots of water poured over it) on Monday night or opened on Tuesday as we had to drive home on Monday. I’ll have to find another burn to discover the feel of those parts of the process. And I will. Because however many books you read, actually seeing, smelling, hearing and feeling the thing gives you the kind of first hand knowledge you can’t get any other way, no matter how erudite and specific your reading matter.

We’re so hooked we’re going back to the Dean Heritage Centre in May, as volunteers this time.

Who’d have thought there’d be so much entertainment value in watching a turfed-over pile of logs smouldering gently…?

PS Many, many thanks are due to the Dean Heritage Centre for putting me in touch with Pete Ralph and to Pete and his team of volunteers who made us so welcome. Thanks guys!

Accountants, index card boxes and the Forest of Dean

2009-08-24T21:01:00.004+01:00

It appears I am low maintenance. At least according to my accountant.

I have, apparently, not claimed enough expenses in the last tax year.

Well, writing is pretty low-imput isn’t it? Even taking into account the internet which I use constantly for research, it’s not exactly a technology-intensive job. And you don’t need posh clothes to do it. Or a car. I keep trying to persuade myself that my laptop needs replacing but, as I generally can't bear to replace anything I own while it still actually works/fits/isn’t actually steam-powered, I plod on, bearing with it as it takes three minutes to log on to the internet and crashes if I even think about having iTunes and webmail on the go at the same time...

I may be about to gladden my accountant’s heart, however, as this weekend will see the Other Half and me and set off for the first of what will probably amount to half a dozen research excursions for The Black and The White. (It's what I heard Antonia Fraser refer to on the radio the other day - quaintly I thought - as 'optical research'. Aka actually eyeballing the places you're writing about as opposed to reading about them or looking at a map and inferring madly.)

To start with, we are off to the Forest of Dean because that’s where my central character comes from. And – hooray of hoorays - the Dean Heritage Centre is running a charcoal burning demonstration over the bank holiday weekend. So, I shall be in my element. I may have to borrow the Ultimate Frisbee Freak’s video camera and record the whole thing. The Other Half suspects I may be mentally preparing myself to back an unsuspecting charcoal burner into a dark woodland corner and fire arcane questions at him for as long as he's prepared to bear it. She says she’ll be in the café reading her book.

This has all come to pass thanks to the wonders – of course – of the internet. I was surfing around looking for details of the medieval extent of the Forest of Dean when I came across a reference to the Dean Heritage Centre and its lovely website.

Other things I have been using today as I plot – literally – my character’s journey through the novel are the online Domesday Book which will give you a list of every village in any given county mentioned in the said tax record (excellent for checking whether villages which are there now and look ancient were actually there then looking new) and Google’s map function which enables me to look at terrain as well as where things are in relation to each other. I basically have to get my main character across England while the Black Death rages and I want to make sure he’s taking a sensible route and not choosing to go over nasty steep hills when there are convenient valleys he could be following instead. In theory I can read an OS map perfectly competently, but it's so much more mentally strenuous than letting Google paint you a simple picture.

I also spent a lot of time today toggling between about four different websites as I tried to work out whether the bridge in Gloucester which crossed the Severn in the fourteenth century – a bridge which no longer exists as it crossed a channel of the ever-dividing river which also no longer exists – was inside or outside the city wall. OK, I know I could fudge it (‘…after crossing the river at Gloucester, he….) but I don’t want to. The people of Gloucester barred their gates to all comers to try and keep the plague out (sensible them, shame they didn’t know they should be trying to keep rats out) and I want to put that in. If he couldn’t go through the gates when he needed to, then that would have implications, even for a fudge.

Lest you think all my research is internet-based and therefore shallow and of dubious authenticity I would (if I wasn’t so lazy about taking and downloading photos) include a picture of my current work-area in our kitchen. The table is littered with books propped open, books sprouting yellow post-its like slim pointy fungus, books still waiting to be consulted and dozens and dozens of index cards with spider-diagrams and cryptic notes-to-self on them. For reasons of economy, when I bought the index cards (usually I’m a notebook person but my notes were beginning to resemble the disjointed ravings of a lunatic) I neglected to buy an index-box. However, this means that any minute now I’m going to have to go all Blue Peter and make one out of a cereal box before the cards start to migrate about the house and I lose track of some pearl-like thought or vital fourteenth-century fact.

Or maybe I should just bite the bullet, buy a plastic box and gladden my accountant’s heart….

Anxious times

2009-08-17T15:58:00.002+01:00

I am in a state of anxiety at the moment for which I am prescribing myself long walks undertaken at marching pace. These are mostly working.

Why the anxiety? Well...

We came home from holiday to a million things that needed doing and which I had been putting off before we went away. Repairs to our kitchen roof, sorting out issues with our internet service provider, getting the boiler seriviced, thinking about my Mum’s 70^th birthday… and a ton of other, lesser things. The list seemed to go on and on. Last week saw most of them sorted, at least prospectively (appointments made etc) but there are always new things popping up.

Then there was the awful shock, ten days ago, of a friend of ours being admitted to the Royal Marsden Hospital with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. He’s just started what will be a 2-year course of treatment.

In a less dramatic vein, this Thursday sees both the first full rehearsal of Ancient Stones, Stories Told, my promenade play for Rochester Cathedral, and The Bassist’s AS level results. Both need to go well or the future is going to look bleak.

But, if I’m honest with myself, none of these things actually account for the gut-churning anxiety that’s plaguing me. All of them are difficult in their various ways but I would cope with them.

No, the anxiety-provoker in chief is, inevitably, The Book. The Black and The White. I’m a couple of weeks off being ready to begin writing. Outlines for the big, ‘set-piece’ scenes are beginning to form in my mind and I am frantically trying to decide where to begin the damn thing. (And don’t say ‘at the beginning’ or I may scream…)

I’m anxious because I’m captivated by the story and I DON’T WANT TO GET IT WRONG. I know it could be good and I don’t want to make mistakes at the outset which will compromise the whole thing. I am more excited by this book than by anything since I began my original draft of Testament which induced a similar state of nervous tension. I’m hoping that’s a good sign. Much as I enjoyed writing some of Not One of Us, it was nothing like this.

But there’s a problem. The more I think about my original structure for the book – the structure I discussed with Will – the more I’m convinced it won’t work. And I have a slightly dramatic solution which is also contributing to the lizards fighting in my intestines.

I need to discuss it with Will before I say anything here, so perhaps I’d just better go and compose an email.

More anon.

Back in Blighty...

2009-08-12T12:51:00.004+01:00

France. Lovely weather – three weeks in which we only had one day where the weather gods even thought about rain. Wonderful. Less wonderful was the fact that, since we were last there two years ago, something dramatic seems to have happened to the cost of living: it’s now frighteningly expensive. And, as ever, the public toilets leave you longing for Britain…

But we did have a lovely time, including me wheeling out my very rusty A-level French (tenses all over the place, can never remember the gender of non-immediately-obvious nouns – A-levels are beginning to be a frighteningly long time ago…) with all and sundry, but particularly our Belgian campsite neighbour who concealed the fact that he spoke perfect English until the last evening. ‘The English – they never learn French, but you’re very good [clearly a lie but flattering none the less] and I think it’s good for you to practice.’

He had clearly had less than wonderful experiences of Brits abroad and was prepared to find my willingness more than compensation for my linguistic all-over-the-placeness. When our conversations revealed that I am more Welsh than English, he decided that this was obviously the explanation for my readiness to speak other languages. The Other Half hastily foregrounded her Irish credentials (50% genetically, 90% temperamentally).

Fortunately, because we live in the bit of England nearest to France, we haven’t come back to wet or dreary weather, which is nice…

Whilst we’ve been away, the work in progress has been on my mind hugely – in fact I can’t remember any of the books I’ve written (6 at the last count) ever preoccupying me so much. I’m hoping this is a good sign – and being able (after my resolution to turn over a new leaf and discuss my work instead of keeping it a deep dark secret until the end of the second draft) to discuss it with the Other Half helped. In fact, she came up with an idea which may go a long way to solving my approach to what was threatening to become the ‘sticky middle section’ of the book.

Now we’re home I’m back to research and while the teenagers – back from their various trek- and frisbee-based jaunts and not yet returned to work – languish in bed, I am reading about the Peasants’ Revolt and general life in the fourteenth century. Oh, and I’m also trying to find a demonstration of traditional charcoal burning so if you know anywhere that offers this, let me know!

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England really is a gem. In research for previous books (mostly Testament) I’ve read a couple of the more academic books that he quotes and have been referring to one of them (and getting bogged down in tables and endless details) as I read his lucid prose. How he manages it, I don’t know but Ian Mortimer manages to give you the most astonishing amounts of information (a digest of the more academic stuff, basically) almost without effort – reading his book feels like chatting with an immensely knowledgeable but highly agreeable person: an absolute treasure trove.

But more of that anon.

Meanwhile, the other thing which has been occupying my mind since we got back a day or two ago and I started the cyber-catch up is: should I be on Twitter?

Are you?

Is it a good thing?

Is it something writers should do?

Discuss…

Comings and Goings

2009-07-17T17:10:00.004+01:00

I met up with my editor, Will, last week to talk to him about my ideas for The Black and The White. All the way up to London, on the train, I looked at the notes I’d made, thought more about my ideas, moved the thing on a bit more and - above all – wondered what he’d make of it.

And, of course, his making anything at all of it would be done in the context of what other writers of historical fiction are doing at the moment, how readers are responding to that and how TBATW might fit in – or not – to that context.

As you’ve probably spotted, there’s a vogue at the moment for historical crime, with or without a clear series intent. I’ve just read an extremely good book called The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona Maclean which is a case in point. Though more of a historical novel than a murder mystery, there is a murder and it is central to the book and that gave me pause for thought. If somebody this good at time and place (Banff in the stiflingly repressive seventeenth Calvinist presbyterian century) feels it necessary to hang her story on a murder, should I be thinking along the same lines?

The Black and The White is not conceived as a murder mystery. There are deaths (it begins in the Great Pestilence which we know as the Black Death and ends in the Peaseants’ Revolt, deaths are pretty inevitable) but the novel doesn’t concern itself with finding out about how or why these people died. It’s the consequences of the deaths we’re primarily interested in.

But there is a mystery. And a quest. And an obsession. Or two.

So, if it’s not quite going to fit neatly in to what’s selling, is it a goer? And did Will like the idea?

Well, I hope it’s a goer and Will definitely liked the idea.

But, he and I both know that, for it to succeed, I’m going to have to get the central question which lurks at the heart of the novel absolutely right. Nails need to be banged exactly on the head. No thumb-dinging can be allowed, or the accompanying swearing. Which means that I’ve got to get the central relationship and its two protagonists spot on. There’s no real room for sloppy characterisation or anything less than perfectly focussed point of view. I’ve got to get it right.

It would be so much easier to just base the whole thing on a murder. Or at least, I think it would. Maybe that’s just because I’ve never written a murder mystery.

I mean, think about it (the murder option, not my lack of any relevant experience). England in the grip of the Great Plague would be the ideal time and place to hide a murder – if a dead body turned up, nobody was going to look too closely at it to see how the person had died and the fact that they’d been seen – perfectly fit and healthy – on the morning of their death would not need to throw any suspicion on the fact of their demise. The plague had three distinct varieties – classic bubonic plague with lymphatic swellings in groin, armpit or elsewhere which took a week to kill you and was contracted (probably) from flea-bites from infected rats; pneumonic plague which was spread from person to person, infected your lungs and killed you in two to three days; and last but definitely not least, septicaemic plague in which the bacillus entered your bloodstream directly and killed you in hours.

Anyway, murders aside, I’m still reading background stuff for the novel and, when we go away next week, I will be taking a couple of books to continue my research, among them Summer of Blood, the new book on the Peasants Revolt by Dan Jones who you can see talking about the book here.

He’s clearly as mad about the fourteenth century as me.

Before we can get away on Monday, however, there’s still tons to do getting the house in some kind of order a) because I hate coming back to a mess and b) because we have a kind friend coming in to house/cat sit and she can’t be expected to live with our mess.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I suspect I will next appear here when we’re back from our Francophile jaunt.

But, while I’m away, perhaps you’d like to leave your comments on current historical fiction, murder-based or otherwise…

Blogging compliments

2009-07-13T18:05:00.001+01:00

As well as being dilatory on my own blog recently, I’ve also fallen behind on keeping up with many of my favourite bloggers so I’ve only just read these very kind words on Juxtabook’s blog.

It’s a privilege to be in anybody’s top ten books of the last decade, but when Testament finds itself in the kind of company Juxtabook mentions (Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood) it becomes even more of a compliment.

I’ve read only four of Juxtabook’s top 12 though two others are on my tbr list. How many have readers of this blog read?

I am still alive...

2009-07-10T17:37:00.001+01:00

I have, I fear, been a very dilatory blogger recently. This is partly because I have been busy with the promenade play, partly because I am - meanwhile - trying to fit in as much research and thinking as I can on The Black and The White and partly – no, mainly – because I am utterly knackered. In ten days' time we go on holiday and I can barely wait. Not having a proper summer holiday last year has had a terrible knock-on effect into the whole of the last twelve months and the Other Half and I are determined never to let it happen again. A fortnight off must be taken – a week is barely time enough to begin to relax.

So, where am I on various projects?

Well, the promenade play is now complete and has had its first run-through, though we were minus a number of cast members. Walking the thing through the cathedral raised a couple of issues – for instance the area in which I’d planned to have a murder taking place can’t actually be seen very easily from the position in which the audience will be standing at that point, so we’ve had to move it to a less dramatic but more visible spot – but, in general, it was felt that the action fits nicely in to the space. It does look, however, as if the people with the most to do on the day will be, not the actors, but the stewards whose job it’ll be to chivvy the audience through the cathedral at an appropriately fast clip so that we can get the whole thing done on time!

‘Aren’t we going to have long ‘lags’ whilst the audience catch up?’ a cast member asked.

Bloody valid question, I thought, gnawing some handy fingernails.

‘No’ said our casting director/the cathedral’s education officer who’s also playing The Madwoman of Rochester ‘we’ll just start when we’re ready and they’ll soon get the hang of the fact that they’ve got to keep up.’

Ruthless, I thought, but good… definitely good.

It was great hearing real actors speak my words as we went through the first read-through. People laughed when I hoped they would, nodded sagely at things they hadn’t known but were interested to learn (phew!) and the Green Man – cast for his wonderfully booming voice – is going to be fantastic as he fills the cathedral with his roars and his pagan cries of ‘Where are my trees?’

If it rains, the scene in the garden may be abandoned by the audience but the actors are hardened veterans of outdoor performances and were adamant that the show will go on however drenched they get. Stick some cathedral umbrellas by the south door and at least a few people will come out… seemed to be the general consensus.

There was a sticky moment when I realised that there’s going to be no honeysuckle in bloom in September (an essential prop in one scene) but our costume designer quickly came to the rescue and said she could so something in silk.

Yes, our costume designer. Not somebody’s mum or a put-upon volunteer, a real bona-fide costume designer. The Heritage Lottery Fund have given us a budget for the launch of the interpretation project, most of which is going to go on promenade play costumes. So, instead of having begged, borrowed, stolen and home-made costumes for each scene, we’re going to have the real thing, made by a professional whose last commission was to design all the costumes for a community opera in Lewes. It’s going to give a fantastic visual unity to the whole piece and Berthe (the lady in question) came along to the walk-through and took a whole memory-card’s worth of photos of the cathedral to inspire her and to use as background information. (What colours will stand out against this screen, will the black and white of the Tudor chaplains get lost in the polychrome of the lady chapel and if so what should be done about it, etc etc)

So, the promenade play is all coming together. The little casts for each scene will now go away and rehearse together and learn their lines before the next rehearsal towards the end of August when we’ll ‘block’ moves and start polishing things up. That’s going to be an interesting rehearsal as we can’t do it in situ because the cathedral’s being used for something else (tchah – a cathedral being used for services, how inconsiderate!). So I’m going to have to go around taking measurements at the site of each scene, so that we can mock up the approximate acting area, with columns, altars, steps etc, rendered in sticky-tape and cardboard boxes.

Should be fun…

As for the novel. Well, I’ve now met with Will, my editor, and talked it through, but news of that can wait for the next installment, I think.

As I mentioned, I am knackered…

The dangers of oversimplification

2009-06-26T18:10:00.001+01:00

Sorry for the dearth of recent posts here – the promenade play, plus a couple of other work-related matters have been keeping me very busy. But, as I have now subdued the Reformation, so to speak, and am well on the way to finishing the last playlet (Dickens) I thought I’d post a few reflections on what I’ve been doing.

As John Fisher and Nicholas Ridley were both Bishops of Rochester and were on opposing sides (as it were) of the Reformation, we thought it would be interesting to have them confronting each other over an altar (which could plausibly act as a symbol of the whole Reformation argument as all altars moved from being stone, carved and ornate with beautiful hangings to being plain and wooden and bare – Rome vs. Puritanism).

But trying to distil the complex Reformation arguments of theology and religious practice into something around nine minutes long proved surprisingly (or, perhaps, unsurprisingly) difficult. Take into consideration the fact that this promenade play is not being written for an audience already well-versed in Church of England practice and history but for anybody from Rochester and the surrounding Medway Towns district who fancies a bit of casual Saturday afternoon entertainment and saying anything meaningful in such a short space of time moves into the realm of ‘distinctly tricky’.

So, I’ve slipped a bit of Why the Reformation Happened 101 into the transition from the previous scene to this one (as the characters and audience walk from the High Altar through the Quire and down into the nave, since you ask) and I’ve gone for lots of visual imagery so as not to make the whole thing too wordy. Oh and introduced two chaplains to the bishops who are basically into a whole game of ‘my bishop’s better than your bishop’. So we’ll see what everybody else involved thinks at the first production team meeting on Monday.

But one thing has struck me and that’s how easy it is to slip into saying things which are so simplified as to be scarcely recognisable as the actual truth. Strangely, my elder son came across this phenomenon when he was studying A-level biology. ‘Don’t worry about what you were taught at GCSE’ the class was told ‘because that was so over-simplified it was, basically, wrong. ‘ Actually, they were given to understand that, compared to the wonders that they would discover on a degree course should they choose to pursue the wonders of biological science, they’d discover that A-level wasn’t exactly 100% accurate either.

But then, isn’t it true that the more you look into anything, the more complex and multi-faceted it becomes? Nothing is simply cause and effect; everything is a multi-layered confection of causes, effects, spin-offs, unforeseen consequences, more effects and further causes of the next major upheaval.

When I was writing a speech for John Fisher (who fell foul of Henry VIII’s determination to divorce Catherine of Aragon in pretty much the same way as the more famous Thomas More did) on the whole sorry episode of ‘The King’s Great Matter’ I found myself making him say ‘If Catherine of Aragon had borne Henry a healthy son there would have been no break with Rome, no suggestion that the king was the ‘supreme head of the church in England’.
But is that true? If the sons Catherine gave birth to had lived to young manhood (bear in mind he was married to her for sixteen years before Anne Boleyn came on to the scene) would he really have been content to stay under the sway of the Pope? Would he have left the monasteries alone or did he have his eye on their great wealth anyway?

The problem with research is that you need to do it otherwise you’re in trouble; but the more you start asking questions, the more complicated everything becomes and you can end up in trouble anyway.

But ain’t that true of life in general?

A capital letter century

2009-06-17T17:39:00.005+01:00

The fourteenth century. You’ve gotta love it. The Great Famine, The Black Death, The Peasants’ Revolt – it’s a century of capital-letter happenings. And it also had something we’ve got – climate change. Between 1300 and 1400 mean temperatures fell by one degree centigrade in England. The country went from having numerous vineyards to, effectively, having none.

Like us, fourteenth century people had a feeling that things were going downhill rapidly and that they might be looking at the end of the world as they knew it. Except they thought that the Biblical apocalypse was going to be responsible rather than a catastrophic rise in global temperature…

Through my research I'm getting the sense that a feeling of impending doom was very real and it’s going to be interesting to see whether our twenty-first century feeling of personal helplessness in the face of global forces has any resonances with the fourteenth century’s feeling of helplessness in the face of a God who had apparently tired of the waywardness of humanity.

I’m reading a couple of books at the moment – Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century and The Black Death, An Intimate History by John Hatcher. They’re both very modern history books in the sense that they try to give the general reader a feel for what it was like to actually live then. They’re the kind of smell in the street, dirt beneath your fingernails, terror behind the next sneeze kind of books that I love.

These books appeal to me particularly, as both authors seems to be coming from a very similar standpoint to my own when I write about the past; their books ring with the conviction that human nature doesn’t change. The circumstances may change, the diet, the clothing, the worldview but human nature with its ambition, greed, violence, love, altruism and fear will always be the same until homo sapiens becomes another species altogether.

As Ian Mortimer says in his introduction ‘..most of all, it needs to be said that the very best evidence for what it was like to be alive in the fourteenth century is an awareness of what it is to be alive in any age, and that includes today.’

I think that’s right. What I aspire to in writing historical fiction is to make my reader see that though the people they’re reading about had a very different experience of life and very different expectations of it, they were the sort of people we meet, know and love in our own lives. They are us. In historical costume.