Write what you know?

That is the advice that is frequently given to writers yet we often rebel against it. Writing what we don’t know often seems more exciting.

Writing what you know can be more authentic

Classic writer Louisa May Alcott wrote a lot of other material before she wrote her famous Little Women and much of that earlier material remains obscure. Whether she actually wrote as much melodrama as her character Jo we can’t be sure, but we do know that in this book and the others that followed about the same characters she was tapping into something with which she was familiar. That authenticity shone through.

But what about historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction?

Naturally these explore the unknown. We can find out facts for our historical fiction but we aren’t personally familiar with the circumstances in which our ancestors lived. For fantasy and science fiction we have to create new worlds. How do we do that? And are they in the end all that new to us? Surely all of this is actually based on what we know?

What would I or even they do in these circumstances?

So, we create our world and our characters. We put our characters into those worlds and predict how they’ll act. Don’t we base that prediction on how we would act in those circumstances? So we are still coming from a position of knowledge. A type of method acting takes place.

When fantasy and science fiction aren’t

Have you noticed that in fact most fantasy worlds relate to our own? They become symbols for our life and society. They act as glove puppets and anthropomorphic animals do for younger readers. They give us some objectivity about our own world. Science fiction often fails to predict and much of it is an extension of what is happening now. Dystopias too are frequently a reflection of our own society and explore what happens when some aspects of it go unchecked.

Using what you know as a tool to find out about you don’t know

We have several tools at our disposal when we do research for our writing. We can look at memorabilia and the physical world around us. We can repeat experience. But when that fails we can project forward and work out how things will pan out. We do that from the point of what we know.

However, what of the “unhiemlich”?

This the German word for “uncanny”.  The “heimlich” is that what belongs to home, the familiar, that with which we are comfortable.  But the “unheimlich” is the unknown, what doesn’t belong to our familiar circle. According to our story gurus most stories start with a call to adventure.  The hero is invited to step outside of their comfort zone and cross a first threshold. They are forced into the unknown.

Can it be that even here we are writing what we know? We know story shape and we know that even in our daily lives we have to challenge ourselves. We also know the fear that accompanies that. So again we are back to writing what we know.       

Girl in a Smart Uniform

It all started from one of those situations where truth was stranger than fiction. In fact the truth was so strange that I eventually decided to self—publish all of my books in the Schellberg Cycle. Most publishers thought it was just too far-fetched:  Renate Edler didn’t realise that she was Jewish until a few days before she came to England on the Kindertransport. “How could she not know she was Jewish?” they cried. Well, she just didn’t.  

Something else very odd happened at about that time. Her grandmother, the Jewish connection, but long since converted to Lutheranism, sheltered a school for the disabled children in her cellar. It survived there pretty well undisturbed and after the war ended continued much as it had before the Nazi regime arose. In fact it carried on in the house and only moved out when it got too big for this residential property We know that the equivalent of Dad’s Army were asked to destroy it. They refused and the Hitler Youth were charged with the task. They too refused so it was left to the girls. But for some reason they decided to let the children out first. Thank goodness.

Girl in a Smart Uniform attempts to work out how that may have happened. It also looks at what motivated young women to become good BDM members (the girls’ version of the Hitler Youth).

It does contain some people who really lived. Yet they are background figures here. This it to date the most fictional of my stories in The Schellberg Cycle. You can read more about them here.  

I find this an interesting process. It’s a little like acting. You have to get into the characters’ heads and work out what they would do in these circumstances. I suppose we might call it imagination. I found this useful at many stages in this project. There are primary resources, repeated experience and this very useful tool: the imagination. It’s as essential for writing historical fiction as it is for fantasy.  

The Theology of a Setting

Setting is important and should be as carefully crafted as character and plot. And as with both of these you don’t have to give every detail but you have to know all of the detail. A reader should be able to ask you any question about all of these and you should be able to answer, even if you’re talking about details you haven’t revealed. Even more importantly, you should be able to ask your reader the same questions and they should come up with more or less the same answers.

Yes, spooky. Don’t ask me how it works but it does. There is also something uncanny about the way we manage to select the right details that convey the whole. I think it’s something to do with the subconscious though I’m not sure. PhD topic, anyone?

One exception might be plot in young adult novels where a writer may claim some ignorance allowing the reader to decide.  Even then, though, the writer must be well aware of the same number of possibilities.

Before I wrote the Peace Child trilogy I spent months and months working out the details of Kaleem’s world. What did people eat and wear? How were they educated? How did they travel? What were their values? How was their society ordered? As this was dealing with earth fifteen centuries into the future, what might be logical developments based on what is happening today?

A mixture of reasoning and imagination comes into play here.

I made notes on my thinking about this setting whilst in cafes, pausing during a long car journey, on short train journeys and in hotel rooms. I did my thinking whilst ironing, walking or on long drives.

I thought I had this world all sussed out. However, as I started writing I discovered I needed to work out some more details.

Always the question is: what would it be like if this world was thus and how will these characters, given their personalities, react in these circumstances which inevitably include the setting?

Historical fiction

Here we have a mixture of verifiable facts, primary resources (diaries, letters, photos, film – particularly amateur), repeated experience and again the imagination to work with. Given that the women wore calf-length dresses by then, bobbed their hair, and, if in Germany, were struggling with mass inflation and the beginnings of a depression, what would it have been like? These are issues I’m dealing in Clara’s Story, the fictionalised biography of Clara Lehrs, Holocaust victim. For sister novel, The House on Schellberg Street, a story about Holocaust survivors and German innocence, I’ve taken train journeys, looked at documents and letters written at the time, studied amateur footage in Auschwitz, read eyewitness accounts of the Kindertransport and attended several 1940s’ events. A central true story that never had an explanation is uncovered here - just how did Clara Lehrs manage to keep up to sixty children with Downs Syndrome and severe learning difficulties hidden during World War II when even she herself, Jewish by nationality but not be religion, was forced out of Schellberg Street, first to a ghetto in the Black Forest, then to Theriesenstadt and finally to Treblinka where she was murdered? Here I use “what if” to work out what may have happened.

Fantasy

This might appear to be the freest form. The river can run backwards. There is neither future nor past to be accounted for. Anything goes. Except: it must be logical and consistent. Everything needs to be worked out, just as in science fiction. We must relate all of that actually to our world or neither we nor our readers can understand. What is the equivalent of what we do here?

Real life

We might think that if we set our story in society as we know it in the 21^st Century the setting is less of a challenge.  However, we need to remember that the particular combination of motivations, personalities and constraints imposed by the setting is unique in every story. The writer needs to establish those just as carefully here as in the other stories. Both reader and writer should be able to answer the questions mentioned above. 

Aren’t we advised to write what we know?

Arguably if we only ever did that we would never write science fiction, fantasy or historical fiction. In fact, it might not be possible to write any fiction at all. We’re not describing what has actually happened. We are inventing a story.  Yet we do actually do that from our own experiences. We tend to see our characters as pretty much like us and ask ourselves what we would do in the circumstances into which we put them. Part of the circumstances can be a lack – such as the lack of emotion in Star Trek’s  Spock. We base the new worlds on the worlds we know and assume we need to replicate human experience. And often we create for ourselves experiences we know we need to have in order to understand our stories and render them authentic for our readers.

How do we show our readers all of that?     

The temptation is to use a lot of exposition and I’ve seen several new writers do that. This is where some trust in creative process needs to come in and with that an acknowledgement that reading is in fact a part of creative process.

But we do need to show and not tell. Let it be matter of fact. It is just part of what is.  If we write with the knowledge that all of the care in our research has given us somehow the message comes across as if the little that we write carries the DNA of the whole. I don’t know how it works but it does.

If you want to see a master at work, look at the novels of Oisin McGann. In particular, The Gods and Their Machines.     

       

CWIG Conference Cambridge

It was good, as ever, to spend a few hours with other writers. It helps to counteract the isolation and paranoia. It was also good to put names to faces of all those people you correspond with in email forums, and even to remind yourself of what those people you do know look like.

The venue was pleasant, with beautiful gardens and Cambridge is such a delightful place anyway. The food was copious, well prepared and well presented. The company was, of course, exquisite.

The first plenary session, Fantasy and Reality, introduced us to William Nicholson. He is an excellent speaker. He told us about how his life as a TV writer actually enhanced his novel-writing, which he considered to be his real work. He’s faced rejection and criticism, just like the rest of us. He pointed out that criticism is actually useful. He did this all as well in such an entertaining way.

Julia Eccleshare and Nicolette Jones gave us some insights into how books come to be reviewed. Of course they can’t review every book sent to them. There was a also some discussion about the difference between a critical review, as they offer, and the lay review such as the ones you get on Amazon. It made me think about my own reviewing process. Yes, I review for Troubadour ( magazine about self-published books) and Armadillo, Mary Hoffman’s on-line magazine. I jut review what I’m sent for those. On my own site, I put details of anything which has really impressed me and try to work out why.

I attended parallel sessions on time-management (Mary Hoffman) and writing historical fiction (Celia Rees). Mary’s session reminded me of how many other activities, apart form sitting in front of the computer, are actually writing. I was very impressed with the note books Celia keeps as she fills in details about the settings of her historical novels.

On Sunday, there was the debate about age-banding took up the second part of the morning. I agree with much of what Philip Pullman says. It is actually a little surprising how many authors are now beginning to waver and think it might not be such a bad idea. Interestingly, Chris Powling also picked up the theme when he reviewed some books on Classic FM, which I listened to on the way home.

It is clear we have a few battles to fight to preserve the book and therefore our livelihood. We also need to look forward. The e-book and e-book reader are well on their way, and we need to take care that we do not face the same problems which crippled the music industry. Alan Gibbons has started a “Charter for the Book” campaign, and naturally my name is on it, though I do also welcome the new technology. And do note, I came back with more books than I had intended to buy.

The conference ended with Michael Rosen, our children’s laureate. He was a joy. However, it is clear that the fragmentation caused by the Literacy Strategy and SATs still exists. Children seem to be being processed, rather than being allowed to develop naturally. Reading is taught thorough phonics now. Well they used that when I learnt to read. But they also read stories to us. Ah, I’d better not get into that too much – that is a whole article, a letter to the minister, a letter to Michael Rosen and comments on Wordpool, SCBWI and NIBWEB.

A great conference, despite the worries, and there were also several causes for optimism.