08 Thursday Nov 2018
Posted in Scribbling
Tags
Dorothy Dunnett Award, Historical fiction, Historical Writers Association, Jennifer Falkner, Longlist, Short Stories
In the middle of it all – and by “it all” I mean tech week for my own translation and adaptation of A Christmas Carol, opening this Saturday – I’ve had a lovely surprise: my story was longlisted for the HWA‘s Dorothy Dunnett Award for unpublished short stories… Continue reading
27 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in History, Scribbling, Stories, Theatre
Tags
Before Shakespeare, Historical fiction, James Burbage, National Archives Blog, research, The Theatre, writing dilemmas
As I was busy completing the la(te)st revision of my novel before pitching it at the HNS Conference in Scotland, I came across this lovely article at the National Archives Blog.
And so I learned that, while I’d always assumed that people walked to the Theatre via Bishopsgate, Bishopsgate Street and Shoreditch, this was not the case. Not that the Burbages wouldn’t have liked such a straightforward route to their playhouse – but there was opposition from the local landowners – particularly from the Earl of Rutland, who effectively blocked the easy access… Continue reading
19 Thursday Jul 2018
Tags
Caravaggio, Historical characters, Historical fiction, historical novels, historical plays, Manfred von Hohenstaufen
Some historical characters seem so very, very perfect for fictional treatments, don’t they? Whether they have lived enormously interesting lives, full of drama and colour, or we know tantalizingly little about them – just enough to make us want to fill the gaps – they practically beg to be written. Continue reading
05 Thursday Jul 2018
Posted in Scribbling
There is this competition, you see – short stories, historical setting… I really, really want to submit. I’ve known about it for quite some time – and, in fact, for some reason, at first I thought the deadline was in late April. So I began brainstorming ideas back in March, and went through old notebooks, mining for those little Could This Be A Story notes, or hastily sketched half-page notions, and wrote down lists of promising ideas… and then hit on something I liked. Something that was tied to my work in progress. Something promising. Continue reading
19 Thursday Oct 2017
Posted in History, Scribbling, Uncategorized
Tags
1453, carey mysteries, Diana Gabaldon, Historical fiction, historical serendipity, p. f. chisholm, Siege of Constantinople
Says Diana Gabaldon, in her introduction to P.F. Chisholm’s brilliant A Plague of Angels*:
One historical author of my acquaintance describes something she calls “historical serendipity.” This is the condition of knowing one’s period so well and so intimately that when one reaches a point in the story where it’s necessary to… (gasp) make something up, one’s fictional choices are not only historically plausible – but very often turn out to be the ex post facto honest-to-goodness truth, as well.
Did it ever happen to you? Continue reading
23 Thursday Mar 2017
Once upon a time I came across an interview or an article – I wish I could remember – in which a historical novelist gleefully told about placing in his latest novel’s prologue a handful of elements that could easily pass for anachronisms. He gleefully anticipated the mails, weblogs and reviews pointing out his “blunders”, and the joys of answering back that, in fact, a lack of written record for some thing before a certain date could not be taken as proof that the same thing did not exist… Continue reading
13 Tuesday Sep 2016
Tags
Historical fiction, HNS Conference, Melvyn Bragg, Michael Caines, Oxford, Times Literary Supplement, Toby Litt
So the Times Literary Supplement was in Oxford for the HNS Conference, in the person of Michael Caines, who covered “us” with a nice set of musings about what goes on behind the curtain of historical fiction.
He quotes from an essay of Toby Litt’s, affectionately calling HF a “deeply bogus” oxymoron of genre, in that its trick is done by conjoining “what was with what might have been”. Continue reading
16 Tuesday Aug 2016
Tags
I told you about Bryher’s The Player’s Boy, didn’t I?
Well, to this lovely, melancholy novel my Paris Press edition adds a wonderful afterword, consisting of a letter that Bryher wrote to a friend to explain her fascination with Elizabethan literature and history. It’s a charming little piece about growing up, reading, cultivating one’s imagination, finding strength in literature and history, and being slightly eccentric… It’s well worth reading in its entirety.
My favourite part, though, has to be the final musing on the historian’s perspective: Continue reading
21 Saturday May 2016
Posted in History
A little Saturday thought, from Milan Kundera’s The Curtain.
Something about history, and truth, and what – and how – is remembered or forgotten.
Something that goes very well with my own pet theory about the iridescence of history…
Says Kundera:
This is the most obvious thing in the world: man is separated from the past (even from the past only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms).
It is the most obvious thing, but it is hard to accept, for when one thinks it all the way through, what becomes of all the testimonies that historiography relies on? What becomes of our certainties about the past, and what becomes of History itself, to which we refer every day in good faith, naively, spontaneously? Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misconstrued, an infinite realm of nontruths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal.
A realm that, I might add, makes for wonderful hunting grounds, when you happen to write historical fiction…
06 Saturday Feb 2016
Posted in Scribbling
I’m sure we all think that our own genre is unlike all others…
I remember, years ago when I first took one of her courses, trying to convince Holly Lisle that I couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t plot quite like her other pupils because I wrote historicals… Continue reading
