Authors Electric

The audience at Novel Nights in Bristol A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to read at Novel Nights , a regular event in Bristol where local writers get the chance to air their work in progress.  I’ve been a fan of these evenings for quite some time and have followed them over two changes of venue.  Since guest speakers have been added to the programme, there’s the bonus of  picking the brains of a writing or publishing expert. And the cosy vibe encourages serious questions rather than the celebrity worship of high profile literary events.  In January, the guest was Celia Brayfield and the theme historical fiction, the module Celia leads on the Bath Spa M.A. As the guest is last to take the floor on these occasions, it gives writers (if they're anything like me!) the chance to recover from the anxietyof reading to an audience and take in the words of wisdom. So here are Celia's edicts for writing Historical Fiction, at least as I recall them. ...

Consider these three different scenarios: 1. The hero of a Regency romance stalks into a drawing-room and greets his bewildered valet with the words ‘What’s up, dude?’ 2. A generally well-researched novel set in Mediaeval Europe has a scene in which the protagonist gets out of bed and puts on his underpants. (Underpants, so I’m told, were not commonly worn in the Mediaevael era.)  3. An author deliberately and knowingly introduces anachronisms, such as spaceships or the internet, into a novel set in Tudor England. Which of these scenarios is worst, or best? Do all of them set your teeth on edge, or just some? Do anachronisms wreck historical fiction, or not? How much difference is there between an anachronism that is introduced by design, and one that is the result of shoddy research?  Historical fiction often (but not always) strives to be realistic, and this realism sometimes extends to a horror of anachronism. The argument seems to be that readers...

I remember having a heated discussion – okay, argument – with my historian friend, Dino Moro Sanchez, in Los Angeles back in the 1980s about Peter Shaffer ‘s play, Amadeus , which I had seen in New York not long before the Oscar-winning Miloš Forman film came out. My erudite friend was of the scholarly opinion that Shaffer had pandered shamelessly to popular myths about Mozart – to wit: that rival Antonio Salieri had something to do with Mozart’s untimely death, and that Mozart wrote his exquisite compositions off the top of his head, penned onto paper perfectly every time. Historians have debunked both of those clichés, of course. Much as I favor historical accuracy, however, I disagreed with my friend on grounds of poetic license. Shaffer’s play wasn’t supposed to be biographical, I argued. It examined the nature of envy and hypocritical ambivalence about genius. Fictional works should never be confused with history, I pontificated. They need only illuminate deeper truths to ...