Dancing with Plain Jane
I once wrote a book – The Lieutenant’s Lover – which was a historical novel set mostly in the St Petersburg of 1917 and then, after a long gap, in 1945/46 Berlin.
(The book was my first and only proper romance, though it had big elements of historical adventure too. The heroine was forty-something by the time of the Berlin chapters. She was also a sergeant in the Red Army and had just experienced a pretty bruising thirty years. The cover designer chose to represent her as an extremely elegant young woman, with immaculate make-up and a jauntily fashionable chapeau. I don’t think he knew a lot about the Red Army.)
(Oh, and look, am I allowed two parentheses, even right at the start of an email? Yes? No? Yes. OK, so I also want to tell you that my German publisher liked the book but said that it was a bit different from my earlier fiction, which hadn’t had been primarily romance. So they asked, could I please adopt a penname for the work? I said yes. My full name is, as it happens, Thomas Henry Bingham, so I suggested that Tom Henry might work fine. They said OK, but they were thinking a woman’s name might be better …? I quite liked that idea, and was going to publish under the name Emma Makepeace, which I still think is a GENIUS name. Unfortunately, something happened to foul up the deal and that book was never published in German. I still have the petticoats though, just in case.)
Anyway, the point of this email is neither cover design, nor pennames.
I want to talk research. In this case, my research had to do with two well-studied historical periods, but really any kind of fiction might call for research. If you’re writing a psychological thriller where one character works in an advertising office, you need to know how advertising offices work. If there’s a bit of ocean-sailing adventure, you need to be able to tell port from starboard. Even if your work is totally speculative – full of androids working uranium mines on prison planets – you need to know something about uranium and the technology behind those androids and have a working model of the gravity / atmosphere / geology of your planet.
To do that research, you’ll naturally hit Wikipedia and you’ll pick up some books.
In my case, I learned a lot about the very interesting politics of Germany’s post-war occupation. The Western allies took very different approaches to the management of their sectors. The Soviets had, from the start, a no intention of anything other than a complete takeover of theirs.
I like my history and I gobbled up plenty of textbooks and learned loads. But there’s a huge difference between regular history and the stuff that’s of interest to a novelist. So yes, you need to know the broader political history of a time. (Or a bit of formal geology, if you’re researching uranium mines. Or a bit of marketing theory if you’re researching ad agencies.)
But ultimately you are in search of detail.
So take my characters in 1946 Berlin. I knew a lot about the politics. I knew a lot about reconstruction of the city and the teams of women chipping mortar off fallen bricks so the things could be reused. I had some curious little family details. (My wife’s grandparents were German/Poles who ended up in Munich at the end of the war and lived in a refugee camp for years.)
But none of that answered my questions. What did characters eat? What did they cook on? What occupation-bureaucracy did they have to deal with? With paper money almost worthless, what did they barter with?
The best answers to those questions didn’t come from formal history books, but from ordinary diaries and memoirs. It didn’t even matter if those memoirs were badly written. They just needed to be chatty, discursive, full of detail.
Those details are the ones to pounce on.
Same thing with uranium mines. It’s all very well to read things in Wikipedia like this: “In conventional mining, ores are processed by grinding the ore materials to a uniform particle size and then treating the ore to extract the uranium by chemical leaching.”
Good. You need to know that. But that doesn’t get us close to the felt experience of being a uranium miner. Uranium is radioactive. Humans need sheltering from the exposure. Open-cast uranium mining is therefore mostly done by miners operating inside sealed cabs in order to prevent them breathing in radioactive dust.
But what happens when the sun shines on one of those cabs? Do they get hot? Are they air-conditioned? Does the driver even have the ability to open a window? What are the washdown procedures after work? What happens if you have a mechanical breakdown and have to leave the cab?
Answering those questions will get your fictional miner ever closer to a believable character with a believable set of experiences.
And you’re not just looking for details. You’re hunting for words. With uranium, it’s words like yellowcake, roll-front deposits, Geiger counter, shear zone, gamma ray spectrometer, heap leach, contamination, haul truck, primary crusher, and so on. With a vocabulary like that, you can already feel the credibility of the story beginning to build.
Another trick: have your characters toss those words off as though they’re ordinary, not needing more explanation. It doesn’t really matter whether your reader completely understands the nature of yellowcake or knows how a primary crusher operates. If your characters use those terms with the fluency of the very familiar, your entire setting gains in authority. You’ll actually get more colour and credibility that way than if you burrow into a detailed description of the crusher. (Unless it matters of course. If you’re about to drop an aggressive robot into a primary crusher, then yes please, tell us about it.)
And accuracy?
Well, look, I’m an imagination-first kind of guy. If I’m considering whether or not to read a novel, the recommendation that “it’s very accurate on the topic of post-war Berlin / modern ad agencies / uranium mining,” is likely to make my heart sink. In the end, I think Imagination needs to dominate poor old Fact, the plain Jane of that sisterly pairing.
But the more you know, the more your imagination can leap. Very often, you’ll find yourself holding back from a sentence you might want to write because you don’t quite know the factual detail needed to support it. So accumulate the facts, then leave them behind. Or, if the facts are wonderful, place them front and centre. I once wrote a book about the 1920s/30s oil industry. There were two or three major oil strikes described in that book and they were all closely based on the actual facts of what happened.
And often fact just trumps anything that you might have dreamed up. A tiny example: in my research for the oil book, I read about a driller who fell out of the derrick onto the roof of the pumping shed and from there to the ground. He broke multiple bones but, while he was waiting for medical help, he said to his co-workers, ‘Well, ain’t you going to find a cigarette for this broken-assed son-of-a-bitch?’
That’s such beautiful colour, you can’t help but want to use it.
Even Plain Jane has her moments in the sun. Grab em. Use em. Have fun with them.
What are you researching? What bountiful colour and detail has Plain Jane given to you? And who out there writes under a penname of the opposite sex? Maybe one of you is actually called Emma and writes under the name Butch Ribeye, or something. I’m really hoping so.
Harry, Thanks for your generosity with your regular Friday posts, always the highlight of the week.
It made me think about two novels that I’ve betta-read: they were set in well-known big cities but the description of the layout of the streets didn’t make sense. It was like someone saying they arrived in London, checked into a hotel in South Kensington and took a stroll around the block to a cafe in… Hampstead, which is miles away, and then just bumped into a friend that lived nearby in… Battersea, the opposite side of town. This sort of mistakes, when spotted by readers, descredits the whole novel, makes it feel shoddy, leading to bad reviews. What else has the writer got wrong? Is it worth reading on?
Sometime ago I read this in a biography: the MC takes a train from London Victoria Station to Bath. But… but… but trains from London to Bath don’t depart from Victoria Station. Either she was confused or… that part of the biography had been badly made up. Again, what else could be wrong? Was this a biography or… fiction?
Writers create immaginary places all the time, but if you set your story in London UK or any other well-known place, make sure you are true to it, or avoid anything that you cannot verify as correct. Using online maps and pictures only goes so far, if you already know the place, been there, etc. You cannot get a geographical setting right, from just online research. Unless you say very little about the setting, but then you’d be missing a very important part in storytelling.
That’s just my MHO (Modest Humble Opinion) LOL
I think the point you make about sounding credible is very important. About eighteen months ago I read a much acclaimed novel that had several blatant factual mistakes. This influenced the manner in which I read the remainder of the book. About mid-way through I came across another factual mistake and decided to pout the book to one side.
Ah yes, the unsettling feeling those cause. There’s a historical fiction writer whose books I generally enjoy, but one of them opened with a party at the turn of a new century, followed a couple of months later by the death of Queen Victoria. This jarred unpleasantly, as Victoria died in 1901 and I believed the turn of the century to be the start of 1900- certainly a century later we celebrated the new millennium at the beginning of 2000. It was annoying enough to make me go and do research and I gathered that some people do and have held to new centuries beginning in ‘01 rather than ‘00. But I couldn’t find any evidence of that being the case in Victorian England. Coming right at the beginning of the novel that set everything off on a bad footing for me and I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy the book at all.
I agree Catherine, I was reading a best seller by an author who is now a competition judge and she gave the wrong date for the Russian Revolution. I don’t know if her publishers changed it in subsequent editions but I kept thinking how can this happen in a book that must have been checked, proof read etc by so many people.
Nope. Not just your humble opinion. You’re dead right. Bad errors just deflate a novel. An ex-boss of BP, who had a side-hobby as a historian of the oil industry. once told me that my description of 1920s oil technology was “really pretty good”. High praise indeed …
So far none of us have mentioned research by trying things out. We had a chat in the townhouse some months ago about this. Obviously only some research topics are suitable! But sometimes it’s the easiest way of finding those little details. I once forced pottage on the family by way of research, only for it to become a family favourite.
That’s a good point, Catherine. I don’t think I saw that chat. Amusing about the pottage!
In one of my scenes, one of my villains goes to a barber to have a haircut and a shave. Whilst being shaved his throat is slit. I decided to go to a barber shop to request a shave with an old fashioned cut throat blade; I closed my eyes whilst I was being shaved and tried to imagine what my villain would have been thinking.
You’re brave, Roger!
That’s cool, Roger. I imagine there are lots of possibilities – images of throats he’s slit, physical sensations too…
Sweeney Todd your barber? Brilliant play.
My story is set in a castle and I have taken great inspiration roaming around a castle or two, getting a feel for the size of the rooms, closing my eyes and imagining what it would have been like to inhabit one…or be stuck in the dungeon!
Hi Caroline, That sounds interesting. What genre is your story, and what’s it about?
Calvin refers to “Write about what you know about” and lists a range of subjects he knows about and his experiences. That has been my starting point. I have experience in the construction industry, working predominantly with the Irish at the start of “troubles”. I drank with them and listened to their comments about a united Ireland, the IRA etc. At another point in my life, I interacted with the wealthy and entitled in the F1 circus. I’ve evaluated measures to monitor and prevent money laundering in the Caribbean by drug lords and other criminals. Similar to Calvin, I am a railway enthusiast. I have worked on issues such as human rights, human trafficking, water democracy in post-Apartheid South Africa, the social impact of closing the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and in the Soviet Union during the so-called Transition years.
From the mid-late 1980s, I was involved in programmes to prepare institutions in Warsaw Block countries and some Soviet states for the inevitable transfer to an open market economy. After the breaching of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, this work intensified. In January 1990, I was invited to Moscow and it was during this visit that I had the embryonic idea for my book. I attended a meeting in a private apartment where the future of the Soviet Union was discussed. Those around the table were members of the KGB, senior Party officials and future entrepreneurs (oligarchs). (I must stress that I have never worked in the intelligence services!). In the subsequent 3-4 years, I witnessed the Western experts and politicians, especially those from the UK and US, falling over themselves to “get a piece of the cake” all the time being set-up by the KGB for future blackmailing (cultural evenings of the carnal kind!)
I was convinced I could create a story but I didn’t want it to be factual. It may have been interesting; at the same time, I could easily put my own life and those close to me in danger. I decided that I needed to research. I needed to understand the Russian culture and history, that of those with a sense of entitlement in the UK. Why? I think as Harry mentions, more information stimulates creativity. Had I not read about, among others, Russia’s history, I would not have been able to come up with this piece of dialogue. The British Home Secretary Lord Friggington goes to Russia to meet a rogue right-wing group with whom he wished to collaborate.
Lord Friggington “What has been Russia’s preoccupation over the centuries?”
Lebetov thought for a moment “Our western borders and Islam in the South”
Lord Friggington “Exactly the same problem we have in Britain today. Too many Polish plumbers and too many Burkas.”
Research is important but in the end, it is used to stimulate our creativity and in some way to make what we write credible. However, I think using creative licence to manipulate our own experiences, “write what you know” into what I would like to term as a yarn. In my case I have drawn upon experiences of dealing with money laundering, human trafficking, illicit trade in nuclear material, creative observations from many meetings in the former Soviet Union and my pub talks with Irishmen.
Unfortunately, my work involving travel, often intense negotiations, prevented my fulfilling my dream. The 1600 pages of the trilogy have been written at different periods since my Moscow encounter, invariably influenced by changing moods and the world itself. Despite this, the first part – The Silent Russian, novel and screenplay, is taking shape.
Good luck with the book, Roger. Sounds like there’s plenty of material there!
Same here, Roger. Good luck.
But don’t forget to slot it in the speculative history genre.
My current WIP is partially set in first century Alexandria/Rome/India, so the rabbit hole of historical research is one that I have (happily) spent many hours in.
Couple of points to add to your excellent list, Harry.
Visual mood boards – my desk was surrounded by images of the buildings of Rome, the clothing, the food, carriages for a while, to then be replaced by Alexandria with its great library and so on. Found this a valuable tool.
Maps, especially street level. As the characters move around, helps to have an understanding of what they would see, how long it would take to get from one place to another and so on
Dates – As you mention, many people who read historical fiction are interested in that exact period and nothing will quite annoy them as much as getting a key date wrong (or even to ignore a major event that was happening at that exact time)
Details – Nothing quite beats the feeling of finding a delicious fact that actually changes your story arc because you absolutely have to include it! Original texts like diaries are the place for this, Wikipedia will not be anywhere near deep enough.
No one has yet suggested that I change my name…may just research a few options just in case…
Wait, what happened to the PS’s? I was going to kindly send a matched set of commas, semicolons, and em dashes all the way from Vancouver. Was happy to see you still have a store of parentheses. And, sorry, I’m fresh out of checkmarks after the sign-up process provided an interminable sequence of revolving fire hydrants to be checked off.
Translation: I love your posts!