Tag Archives: transporting readers in time and place

Becoming a Writer of History

13 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in Historical Fiction, Transported, writing historical fiction

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Lauren Speeth has shared her stories in film and print over the years with audiences around the world. In her first novel, Thread For Pearls, she shares what she has come to understand as the fundamental human experience of resiliency and hope. I’m delighted to have her visit today.

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The Lived Experience – Conveying the ‘60s and ‘70s in Thread for Pearls

I never imagined I’d become a “writer of history.” My “Aha!” moment, though, came when I visited a favorite antique store and saw something from my childhood labeled “mid-century vintage.” A lightbulb went off in my mind: I’m mid-century vintage, and that means I can write about it with authority. And so, I did. Meet Fiona Sprechelbach, a young girl I imagined growing up in mid-century America.

Putting pen to paper, it quickly became obvious that my fading childhood memories wouldn’t help me write more than a very few pages. I had to become a researcher to really get it right and then let my imagination soar.

Here’s how I made the process work: I sketched out the events that I felt were important to history. From the start of the book in 1962, I traced out historical landmarks in a sequence, from the Cold War to the Kennedy assassination, the Beatles, the Summer of Love, Earth Day, the Nixon impeachment hearings, Carter’s election, and so on. I then superimposed those historical events with moments from Fiona’s childhood that would make the history come to life: running from tear gas at a Vietnam War rally, learning side-by-side India’s “untouchables,” the highs and lows of living on a rural Pennsylvania commune…

A curious thing happened when I started sketching out Fiona’s world. I began noticing how her times and our times held some remarkable similarities. Back then, we were ducking and covering for a possible nuclear explosion. Today, the drills are for fear of gun violence. I realized that my work of fiction could ring true today and offer some help for coping in today’s world, and it could be a story of resilient hope.

I worked hard to transport the reader back to important moments in American history. For example, for the lunar landing, I had families gathered around the television set, as happened across the country.

The room was abuzz. Everyone huddled around the television, their plates laden with Jiffy Pop and other treats, and their free hands holding mixed drinks or Tang, the beverage of choice of astronauts, in honor of the occasion. Yet, when the big moment came, the room was so quiet, you could hear, well, a lunar landing…

The Vietnam War helped define the era. Addressing that fraught subject, I paint a picture of a family divided about the war. I included the terror of running from tear gas at a protest and juxtaposed that moment against stories from the soldiers’ perspectives. I needed those perspectives to ring true. The march scenes are conjured from watching my uncle’s documentary films featuring protest marches. I also talked to friends who’d served in the war, so the war memories in the book are true to the lived experience of a number of veteran soldiers. Here’s Fiona’s Uncle Bob, talking about his assignment to Da Nang:

“We’d just landed. I was looking out over the runway area, and all I could see were rows and rows and rows of gray boxes. I had no idea what they were and asked one of the crew members what was inside—freight? supplies? The crew member turned ashen and told me they were our boys, waiting to go home. There were thousands of them, Fiona. Uncountable thousands. Endless caskets.”

As Fiona grows up, her perspective on the war grows more nuanced. Because she loves her father, she takes in his anti-war rhetoric. Later, as she’s interviewing her veteran uncles—people she also loves and whose viewpoints she also trusts—about their war experiences for a school assignment, her thinking shifts. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, about staying open to perspectives other than your own. That’s one of the most enjoyable things about historical fiction. Your eyes are often opened to new ways of thinking. I know mine were during the crafting of this book.

We have a tendency to believe that times were simpler in the past—we search for those mythical, easier times of yore by tinting our rear-view mirrors in a subtle shade of rose. I wanted Fiona to have that wistful “life was easier in the past,” idea in her head, so I chose the Victorian era for her rose-tinted era. To evoke those times, I chose a Victorian doll that was being advertised to children in the 1970s. Thanks to eBay, I was not only able to see the contents of the dollhouse, but also verify the exact price.

The doll came with a dainty parlor that included a grandfather clock, player piano, purple sofa, rocking chair, telephone, and miniature tea set. Jody’s pet dog, painted on the outside of her parlor, was forever caught in the act of jumping after a butterfly. The J.C. Penney ad promised an old-fashioned experience, “just like it was when grandma was a girl.” It had been years since Fiona had played with dolls, but this one awakened an old dream. Looking at Jody made her yearn to touch her dreams, to imagine them with skin and pantaloons and a fabulous hat.

Another plot device I used to carry the story along and make it personal, to help bring the reader into the room with Fiona, is the music. It is so iconic that I expect you to hear it as you’re reading. The music invites you to experience another level of nuance that cannot be conveyed by words alone. And to submerse yourself more fully, try the stereoscopic promo ad we created for the book: http://elfenworksproductions.com/tfp-promo/.

What’s next after Thread for Pearls? I would like to tackle the 1980s and ‘90s. I’ve seen the very computers I worked on when I was a systems engineer in the 1980s on display at the Computer History Museum, lovingly placed behind red velvet cords. This next novel will be about an entirely new character. I want to leave Fiona free with a rosy, open future, able to move in whatever direction my readers’ imaginations wish her to move. Anything else I would write about her would just fence her in—not a nice thing to do to a character, once you’ve brought her to life and given her resilient hope. Wouldn’t you agree?

Hard for me to think of the 80s and 90s as historical fiction, Lauren! But nonetheless, bringing those times to life will be an intriguing challenge. Many thanks for being here today.

Thread For Pearls by Lauren Speeth

A near-death experience in a car with her Mother; running from tear gas at a Vietnam War rally hand-in-hand with her Pop; a year in India learning side-by-side the country’s ‘untouchables;’ the highs and lows of living on a rural Pennsylvania commune…and all before Fiona Sprechelbach’s thirteenth birthday.

Set during one of the most politically divisive eras in American history, Thread for Pearls is a coming-of-age tale that takes us on a young heroine’s journey to faith and freedom amidst a turbulent family dynamic. It’s a story of resilient hope that questions whether it’s the events of our lives that define us, or the thread on which we choose to string them.

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.

American Princess by Stephanie Thornton

06 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in Historical Fiction, Transported, writing historical fiction

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While researching for one of my own novels, I came across a fascinating journal written by Alice Roosevelt during a lengthy trip to Asia. Now there’s an idea for a novel, I thought.

Stephanie Thornton must have had a similar experience! She’s here today talking about her upcoming novel American Princess: A Novel of First Daughter Alice Roosevelt. Alice is an intriguing, forceful, and beautiful woman … exactly what a writer wants for their heroine.

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The goal of any good book is to transport its reader into another world, be it Middle Earth, Green Gables, or down the rabbit hole. When it comes to historical fiction, a book becomes a time machine (I prefer a TARDIS) that whisks its reader into the past to watch a bloody gladiatorial fight in the Colosseum, dance a brisk galliard with King Henry VIII (just don’t marry him!), or slog through the muddy trenches of Verdun.

In American Princess, I hope to make the not-so-distant 20thcentury come alive, as seen through the keen eyes of Theodore Roosevelt’s wildchild daughter, Alice Roosevelt.

My favorite revision of any novel is when I add in all the fun little historical details that really transform an era from shades of gray into vivid Technicolor. (I wait until nearly my last revision to add most of those, once the story is set and I’m fairly certain scenes aren’t going to get slashed.) For example, many people know that Theodore Roosevelt once quipped, “I can either run the country or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” He said that to his writer friend Owen Wister—who actually dedicated a western novel to the president—after Alice burst in and interrupted their conversation for the umpteenth time that day. For added fun in that scene, I pulled in mention of her younger brothers pounding on stilts down the hallway outside the White House’s presidential study (the Oval Office hadn’t been built yet) and included one of the Roosevelt family dogs, a yappy little terrier named Skip.

Source: Alice in Asia – the 1905 Taft Mission to Asia

One of my favorite distractions while writing is researching exactly what life would have been like for my characters. For turn-of-the-century America, that often meant looking up menus and digging through grainy black-and-white pictures in online archives so I could add verisimilitude to every scene. When Alice complains of her debut’s flat lemon punch or writes home about the gold filigreed fingernail sheaths she received from China’s Empress Dowager Cixi (which she later turned into a brooch), it’s because those were real things she experienced!

I was also fortunate to visit Alice’s childhood home at Sagamore Hill, to hear from National Park rangers about how the energetic family used the main hall’s fireplace as a spot to store their tennis rackets and how the children used to play hide-and-seek in the massive bathtub upstairs, which they aptly dubbed the Sarcophagus. In addition, the Library of Congress also allowed me to peruse many of Alice’s letters and diaries, plus one of Theodore Roosevelt’s famed doodle letters to his daughter. (They actually let me hold them with my bare hands!) It’s my hope that walking where Alice walked and seeing what she would have seen, plus reading her actual words has helped me capture what it was like to be her so I could pass that on to my readers.

A brief excerpt:

I ran an admiring hand over the car’s sleek twelve-horsepower wagonette body, rimmed by cherry-red wheels that begged to race. The speed gauge inside went all the way to a jaw-dropping fifty miles an hour, which promised an exciting caper from the train’s plodding pace. Plus, a news story covering my driving escapades might put to rest Father and Mother’s hysterics over those same papers reporting my five recent engagements. (Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s assertion that my suitors were as numerous as Penelope’s wooers from The Odyssey made me want to retch; I didn’t even know one of the men the papers claimed as my fiancé, and others speculated I might end up with cousin Franklin. I’d sooner have had all my fingernails pulled off and fed to me.)

Many thanks, Stephanie. I’m sure readers will be thrilled with American Princess.

American Princess: A Novel of First Daughter Alice Roosevelt by Stephanie Thornton … releasing March 2019

Alice may be the president’s daughter, but she’s nobody’s darling. As bold as her signature color Alice Blue, the gum-chewing, cigarette-smoking, poker-playing First Daughter discovers that the only way for a woman to stand out in Washington is to make waves–oceans of them. With the canny sophistication of the savviest politician on the Hill, Alice uses her celebrity to her advantage, testing the limits of her power and the seductive thrill of political entanglements.

But Washington, DC is rife with heartaches and betrayals, and when Alice falls hard for a smooth-talking congressman it will take everything this rebel has to emerge triumphant and claim her place as an American icon. As Alice soldiers through the devastation of two world wars and brazens out a cutting feud with her famous Roosevelt cousins, it’s no wonder everyone in the capital refers to her as the Other Washington Monument–and Alice intends to outlast them all.

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.

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.