Dark Aemilia Publication

It is 23 days since my novel Dark Aemilia was published by Myriad Editions. Why, you might ask, did I wait this long to blog about such a momentous event? Partly because in a rather OCD manner, I felt that I should complete my Top 10 writing tips before having an intermission to talk about My Actual Writing Life.

Partly because of emotion - the joy of knowing that my book is out there is counterbalanced by the anxiety of not knowing what out there will make of it. 

Authorial anxiety

And partly because of good old fashioned busyness: I have spoken at two conferences and chaired a short story seminar since the book came out. And as well as working for the Open University, being the mother of teenagers is somewhat time consuming. 

Here's Georgia, on an early pub outing before she went all Katie Puckrik:

Georgia sitting quite near a bottle of beer

And the one in the green-rimmed shades is Declan during his 2008 film-making phase: 
:

Declan and Digby in the mean streets of Brighton

Keeping tabs on the two of them is a bit like trying to glue peanut butter to the ceiling. Writing fat books set in the Early Modern period is a breeze in comparison.

Writers, as Fay Weldon once said, have lives. One of the defining attributes of my own writing life is muddle - each day seems like an attempt to extract writingness, or to decide whether reading other people's books or talking about being a writer, or watching films to learn about plot is writingness enough, or whether real writing, in a notebook, must always take place. (It should do, but must it?) 

Publication day is always going to be one of the great events in the life of any writer, but it is also a curiously anticlimactic experience.  Unless you are already famous, the emergence of your new work will be incremental rather than immediately operatic. Your novel may already be on sale (mine was spotted at various airports by various friends). It may not immediately appear in all known bookshops. Amazon may seem curiously immune to its status as a major cultural artefact. And so on. The last 23 days have not shaken the world. It has remained on its axis, though there was a small earthquake in Rutland the other day so it did wobble slightly.

But just to focus on the great event of the birth of Dark Aemilia, here is a short extract from the speech I made at my launch party: 

'Like most writers, I’m rather obsessive and end-driven. It’s easy to get sucked into a state of mind in which all you think about is the next goal that Must Be Achieved – finish the draft, find the publisher, get reviewed, appear on the short list, improve your Google ranking. It can go insatiably on and on. But sometimes, a good thing, a brilliant thing, happens. And then it is time sit back and say – this is great. And today is one of those days – one of the happiest and most satisfying days of my life. Dark Aemilia is an actual book, and in one way, it doesn’t matter what happens next.'

More on how this all goes later, and before then I will impart six more nuggets of timeless wisdom about writing historical fiction. 

How to write historical fiction - be bold

This is the second of my top 10 tips for writing historical fiction.

Don’t be intimidated by the facts, or the personalities that you discover. The facts are a starting point, not a straitjacket. Remember that even biography is an inexact science.

Once you have done enough research to get a strong sense of the time and place you are writing about, and the people who lived there, you need to free yourself from the idea that you need to be 'faithful to the facts'. You must get the facts right, yes, but you actually need to be unfaithful to them. Being historically accurate means that you don't change the dates of battles, the deaths of known historical figures, or make other blunders which are anachronistic and undermine your credibility as a historical fiction writer. (This does not apply if you are writing altered history, of which more in a later post. But altered history has as much in common with fantasy as it does with this genre.)

However it is possible to decide that - for example - Thomas Cromwell was beaten and despised by his father, and this was a formative element of his psychology, as Hilary Mantel does in Wolf Hall, or that Charles II rewarded an obscure physician for saving his favourite dog, as Rose Tremain does in Restoration. If you don't make such leaps of imagination, then you might as well write a text book, which is fine, but it's not fiction. 

Biographers create a story: the story of the life of their subject. They research that person's life and perspective, using letters, their own work, their own diaries, the diaries of others, and perhaps interviews if their subject is still alive or died recently. Once this work is done, the biographer uses supposition to try to enter the consciousness of this person. They may dramatize or even invent certain scenes to bring the 'story' alive. Some are more audacious than others - Peter Ackroyd is well-known for using the devices of a novelist to explore the lives of writers like Charles Dickens.

Fiction writers go beyond supposition - they invent. You have just as much right to do this if your book is set in 1614 as you do if it is set in 2014. And this still applies if you are basing your story on the lives of real people.

You can't write historical fiction politely. You have to force your way into the past, and claim it as your own, no matter how crazy or impossible this may seem. This is what Fay Weldon said to me when I was working on an early draft of my novel Dark Aemilia 'If you are going to put William Shakespeare in your book, he has to be your William Shakespeare, and no one else's.'