Researching and Writing Historical Fiction, by Catherine Czerkawska

Cover image, courtesy of Glasgow Museums

I wrote this piece for a local (Glasgow) writers’ newsletter, but since I know a great many people who enjoy reading and writing historical fiction, including bloggers and visitors to Authors Electric, it seems worth while reblogging here, with a few tweaks and additions, especially since I’ve just agreed to tackle historical fiction for this year’s eBook festival.

I’ve always written a mixture of historical and contemporary fiction and plays. My first degree, from Edinburgh University, was in Mediaeval Studies and then I went on to do a Masters in something called Folk Life Studies, essentially a form of social history. I still love research of all kinds and that can be a curse as well as a blessing for an author. You have to know when to stop. But you also have to know when you need to know more and you have to learn to ‘give yourself permission’ to fictionalise something that may well be an unwieldy collection of miscellaneous facts spiced with lots of speculation.

I’m a voracious reader as well as a writer, and my most important criterion for judging a book is something akin to trust. If I believe in the world created by the writer, (however unfamiliar or bizarre) then I can forgive all kinds of other things. With historical fiction, the only way to take your reader with you is to immerse yourself in a particular time and place. But you don’t have to use everything you learn in the process. That will only result in the kind of book where the research seems to be bolted on, as though the writer needed to use every fascinating fact at all costs. Your research will inform your fiction, even when you don’t use it directly. But I’ve read scrupulously researched pieces of historical fiction that – even though they contained no obvious anachronisms – just felt unbelievable. Factual accuracy, however desirable, doesn’t always result in truth.

Everyone will have a different approach to this. There is no single right way, and it would be interesting to hear how other writers tackle this. I do a lot of research, but then I always make myself stop before I’m quite ready and write the first rough draft of the book or play. It’s in writing this early draft that I find out more of the things I really need to know, as opposed to the things that are fascinating but relatively unimportant. Then I do some more research. And I will often repeat the process several times. By that stage, I’m ‘interrogating’ characters who already exist in my mind.

This is the way it worked with the narrator, William Lang, in my new novel, The Physic Garden.  The garden in question is the medicinal herb garden of the old college of Glasgow University where William is a gardener. I researched the background of William Lang and Thomas Brown, the two friends who are central to the novel, for a short play, originally aimed at Glasgow’s Oran Mor venue, for which I had already written three plays, two of them historical. But when I started to draft it out, I knew that there was much more to the story. I needed more elbow room and eventually wrote it as a novel.

I already knew a lot about early 19th century Scotland from research for radio work, non fiction research and stage plays. I did a certain amount of specific research about the milieu in which William found himself. But later, once his character and especially his ‘voice’ – this is a first person narration – was firmly fixed in my head, the additional research became easier and much more focused. At some point on its journey to publication, it was suggested that it would be better as a third person narration. I simply couldn’t do it. William’s voice was much too strong, much too insistent. It was William Lang who told me what I needed to know. It was often as though he was shaking me awake in the middle of the night to tell me something else. If this sounds just a little spooky, it’s probably because it was! 

Way back when this novel was first submitted to my then agent, she passed it to an intern who remarked that it was ‘just an old man telling his story.’ Predictably, this casually thrown away remark was indelibly printed on my mind and it took some years and a lot of encouragement before I could go back to the novel and realise that she was wrong. Or only right in the most unimportant sense. It IS an old man telling his story. Just that it's an interesting and at times devastating story.

Waterstone's shop window.

Now, I’m researching a new novel and I’m in that preliminary state where you find yourself pursuing random odds and ends of information across the internet. It’s another piece of fiction based on real characters and I have just made a discovery which – although it isn’t earth shattering in an academic sense  – is gold dust for a writer of fiction because it evokes something about a relationship between two people that has – quite literally – brought a tear to my eye, this morning. It is also something that seems to have gone completely unnoticed by the ‘experts’. My fingers are just itching to fictionalise it.

Catherine Czerkawska
www.wordarts.co.uk

The Physic Garden is published by Saraband. (http://www.saraband.net/) and is available from many bookshops and online from Amazon.
The paperback will be launched on 27th March at Waterstones Argyle Street, Glasgow, at 7.00pm
There will be another launch in Ayr Waterstones on 3rd April at 6.30pm.
The eBook version is already widely available.