Category Archives: Writing Process

Transported in Time and Place – Nicola Cornick, The Phantom Tree

23 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by in Historical Fiction, Transported, Writing Process

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Nicola Cornick is a writer and historian who was born and brought up in the north of England. She left the world of academia to become a full-time author and loves to write dual timeframe novels inspired by the history and legends of her local area.

Transported in time and place – Nicola Cornick, The Phantom Tree

As a reader of historical fiction first and a writer later, the concept of being transported through time and space via the medium of books has always intrigued me. As a child I didn’t travel far from home and so my reading became the way in which I learned about different and exotic experiences, from boarding schools to boating holidays. As I grew older the appeal of the past as a “foreign country” took hold of me. I wanted to travel back. I wanted to be transported via my imagination and the words on the page to another time and place, one of magic and vivid experience.

Writing dual time Gothic fiction, I use the idea of transporting a reader in several different ways. Firstly there is the historical research that provides an authentic framework for the book. In the case of The Phantom Tree, I was writing a book set in the later Tudor period of English history, so I read a lot of general political and social histories of the period before focussing in on the details of everyday life in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I – what people wore, what they ate, how they travelled. These elements are the threads that come together to create the background tapestry which I hope will help to build the world in which the story takes place.

The next layer of world-building comes from specific details and for this I study letters, portraits and diaries; this feels as though it puts me within touching distance of the people about whom I’m writing, the things that were important to them and their daily pre-occupations. I love the information that material objects can provide to a researcher.  The Phantom Tree was inspired in part by a little portrait of a Tudor lady that belongs to a member of my family. As soon as I saw it I was fascinated; I wanted to know who she was and to tell her story. So I studied the style of clothes, the colours, the background imagery, all the while building up an imaginative picture of who she might be.

My favourite part of the research process however, comes from visiting the place where I am setting a book and experiencing it for myself.  The Phantom Tree is set in Savernake Forest in Wiltshire and I spent many hours wandering along the paths and bridleways, losing myself amongst the trees. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what Savernake would have been like four hundred years ago. Studying the forest through the seasons, the plants, animals and insects, the way that the mist hangs over the fields in the autumn and the sun cuts through the leaves in the summer… All of these give richness and texture to the imaginative world I hope to create. So do the local myths and legends that I build into the story. Visiting Wolf Hall, the iconic home of the Seymour family in the forest, was the ultimate inspiration, especially when I went on a tour of the Tudor sewers under the house! You can’t get closer to the traces of history than that! [And yes, that’s Nicola coming up from the sewers!]

I’ve never been able to paint but I visualise the process of creating my imaginary world as a picture in which layer upon layer of detail is added, from the frame that surrounds it to the tiniest figure in the corner. I aim to take all the different elements that have made up my research and through vivid description, conjure a time and place that is waiting to welcome the reader in.

Below is an extract from the book where the heroine, Mary Seymour, experiences the forest as a child.

“Forests were full of concealment and surprise and I had known that from the beginning. I took delight in exploring Savernake. It was by no means an empty land. It seethed with people: Sir Edward’s Ranger, the foresters, the villagers whose pigs grubbed for nuts in the undergrowth in the autumn, the poachers who risked their lives to take the Queen’s deer, thieves, gypsies, runaways, witches. I saw them all and avoided them as much as I could, slipping between the trees like a wraith, like a hind.

Now that I had a bedchamber to myself it was easy enough to slip away at night, simply by climbing down the ivy that covered the old brick wall of the manor. I knew every ancient oak in the forest now including the one that marked the boundary of Edward’s land with its huge bulging belly. It was rumoured to be the oldest tree in the woods, already ancient when the Conqueror had claimed Savernake along with the rest of the kingdom, a tree in possession of old magic. I had heard Dame Margery whispering to the scullery maid, with many gestures to ward off evil, that the witches sought its power to summon the devil. I could imagine that they did and I shuddered to think of it. Old magic was dangerous and unpredictable. Even though I had never dealt in it myself but I had an instinct for it, never knowing where my knowledge had come from, only knowing that I saw and heard things that others did not. However the threat of heresy, of witchcraft, haunted my every step. I thought of my mother and longed for an ordinary life, free of visions, untouched by magic.”

Many thanks for sharing your perspective with us, Nicola. I’m sure readers will enjoy being transported to Tudor times in Wolf Hall and Savernake Forest.

The Phantom Tree by Nicola Cornick

“My name is Mary Seymour and I am the daughter of one queen and the niece of another.”

Browsing antiques shops in Wiltshire, Alison Bannister stumbles across a delicate old portrait – supposedly of Anne Boleyn. Except Alison knows better… The woman is Mary Seymour, the daughter of Katherine Parr who was taken to Wolf Hall in 1557 as an unwanted orphan and presumed dead after going missing as a child.

The painting is more than just a beautiful object for Alison – it holds the key to a past life, the unlocking of the mystery surrounding Mary’s disappearance, and the enigma of Alison’s son.

But Alison’s quest soon takes a dark and foreboding turn, as a meeting place called the Phantom Tree harbours secrets in its shadows…

FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION FOLLOW A WRITER OF HISTORY (using the widget on the left sidebar)

M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel, TIME AND REGRET was published by Lake Union. Mary’s other novels, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads or on her website www.mktod.com.

The Accidental Historical Novelist – by Hilary Shepherd

21 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Guest Posts, Historical Fiction, Writing Process

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Albi, Hilary Shepherd‘s third novel, has been nominated for the Not The Booker competition. When Hilary was twenty-three, she went out to Ghana with a baby and one suitcase to join her new husband. That experience prompted a novel titled In A Foreign Country. She’s also the author of Animated Baggage based on the two years she and her young family lived in the Sudan when her husband was working for Unicef. Recently, Hilary has completed Albi, a historical novel inspired by … well, let’s let Hilary tell us about that.

~~~

There are some places – and certain periods in history – that get under the skin and demand to be written about. Even so, when I came to write a novel set in the area of Spain where we bought a house in 2001, my storyline was firmly contemporary. There is so much history here it’s impossible to ignore it – indeed, our house has a large hole in the back wall where they used to hide the maquis, the resistance fighters who held out in these hills until the 1950s.

But we are foreigners, the stories are only the ones people choose to tell us, and sometimes language gets in the way. So I shied clear: the main protagonists of my novel were British, as we are, and their preoccupations were entirely contemporary. My focus was on the extraordinary landscape with its wild rocks and narrow gorges, the extraordinary light and very particular atmosphere of this part of Spain.

And then Alberto walked in. An imaginary character, and incidental, he looked like any one of the old men who still keep a handful of sheep all over this area of southern Aragon. He was short and stocky, with a quiet sunburned gravity and a beautiful smile. He appeared in the margin, served a small purpose, and then I sent him back out with his sheep. But he wouldn’t go away. And when he started to tell my protagonist stories of his past, based on some of those that had been told to us, he took on a life of his own until I was forced to acknowledge that really this book was his story entirely, and to write it I had to go back to 1938.

Why 1938? There is a statement in faded pencil on the wall of the village cemetery, written by the Nationalist commander who took over the village and surrounding area and dated September 1938. At this point the Battle of the Ebro was still on-going. The official end of the Civil War wasn’t declared for another six months, but in this village it was already all over and the long years of attrition began, the villagers trapped between the Guardia Civil and the resistance fighters, known as the maquis, who they were hunting down. This went on until well into the 1950s.

The ‘facts’ have blurred with telling now. Those who were there and witnessed this time have grown old and few of them are left. As younger generations re-tell the stories a certain romanticism creeps in, but the politics at the time, in a Republican village like this one, must have been muddled and shifting. Between individuals, even within families, the struggle to survive would have confused boundaries. Especially for a child.

This is rich ground for a novelist, and by exploring it through the eyes a child I could slide through the space between facts and fiction: nine-year-old Albi observes things, but he doesn’t necessarily comprehend them. Far more important to him than politics is whether he is doing the right thing in the confused circumstances he finds himself in, and will he go hungry tonight.

There’s a freedom in taking such a limited viewpoint but it’s important that the ghost of history is always there, and the detail must be totally convincing.

I’m one of those writers who is easily distracted by facts and research but I had one accidental gift at my disposal: our house, little changed since it was built in 1756. It came to us complete with the hay in the attic and the old ploughs in the basement. The beds and the chests were probably in use during the 30s, and the hand-sewn petticoats in the cardboard box in the larder would have been very like what was worn back then. The mangers and feed-troughs are all still there down in the byre. This is a house you can sit in and feel how people once lived in it, the rain coming down the chimney, the voices by the fireside, the draughts fierce under the doors. The sound of passing sheep bells, still audible even now, and a shepherd calling. The strangely precise timbre of voices of people in their best clothes going up the street to Mass. Yes, the cobbles have gone, replaced by concrete, but the water still rushes down the irrigation channels and fills the village with its music all through the growing season, as it has done for centuries, since the Moors were here.

How could I not write about history when it comes up so close?

Albi by Hilary Shepherd – A poignant, compassionate glimpse into the life of a child caught in a country at war with itself

Albi is nine years old when Franco’s soldiers arrive in the village and his life begins to change in confusing ways. It’s not clear quite who should be trusted and who should not. Some neighbours disappear not to be seen again, others are hidden from view in cellars and stables – like his brother, Manolo, who left long ago to join the resistance. Albi is charged with shepherding not just his own sheep, but also those of El Ciego who sends him on errands requiring a good memory and the ability to keep his mouth shut at all times.

Alberto, at 88, is haunted by what he did and what he may or may not have said. And then the daughter of his old friend Carlos turns up wanting stories of old times. Albi’s day of reckoning may be at hand…

Many thanks for letting us in on the secret of your inspiration, Hilary. And best wishes for the Not The Booker competition.

FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION FOLLOW A WRITER OF HISTORY (using the widget on the left sidebar)

M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel, TIME AND REGRET was published by Lake Union. Mary’s other novels, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads or on her website www.mktod.com.

 

What keeps you turning the pages?

05 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Books I've Read, Transported, Writing Process

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We all want to hear the response – “it was a real page-turner.” As readers, such an endorsement from friends and other sources offers a promise that a novel will be worth the time and effort invested. As writers, we love hearing from readers who describe our stories that way. And this writer, when hearing a book described as a page-turner wants also to understand what makes a book stand out in this fashion.

Often page-turners are plot-driven with fast pacing and lots of twists and turns and unexpected – though very satisfying – climaxes. In my recent reading, All Is Not Forgotten by Wendy Walker and The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn fit this category. I could also mention The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah or Pompeii by Robert Harris.

Sometimes a page-turner contains characters whose worlds we eagerly inhabit and whose absence, when the story ends, create a great hole in our hearts. The Alice Network by Kate Quinn and Mary: Tudor Princess by Tony Riches come to mind. But I could equally mention The Summer Queen by Elizabeth Chadwick or Mary Called Magdalene by Margaret George or The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (even though the sequel was much less appealing), or The Last Queen by C.W. Gortner.

In my case, many are historical fiction 🙂

Some time ago, I wrote a few posts about Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers by James Hall. Hall itemizes twelve features of best-selling books. The first feature he calls “An Offer You Can’t Refuse”, which he further describes as a novel that:

  • entertains
  • engages readers in a compelling, simple and dramatic premise
  • offers an unfolding story with “one complication after another”
  • includes characters “of deep conviction and fervent, stubborn resolve, capable of passions that rise well beyond the normal range of human experience”
  • makes the story worth the readers’ time by forging a “powerful emotional bond … composed of one part pity, one part fear”
  • minimizes backstory
  • creates “some form of serious peril” very early on
  • enhances the tension with “the power of the ticking clock”.

You can read two other posts based on Hall’s book: More Features of Hit Lit and Hit Lit: The Final Six Features. I wrote them in 2012, no doubt full of deep intention to incorporate these features into my novels. But did I?

In the last six years, I’ve learned a lot about writing and had modest success. And yes, some readers have used the phrase page-turner to describes one or more of my novels. But, as Robert Frost is so often quoted: “These woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”

I’d love to hear what keeps you turning the pages and novels that you’d describe that way.

FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION FOLLOW A WRITER OF HISTORY (using the widget on the left sidebar)

M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel, TIME AND REGRET was published by Lake Union. Mary’s other novels, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads or on her website www.mktod.com.