Aly’s Comments (group member since Sep 26, 2011)

Aly’s comments from the The Role of History in the Making of Stories: A chat and Q&A with authors Andrew Williams and Aly Monroe group.

Nick - that sounds really interesting. I like the idea of including the wartime recipe. And personal memoirs like the one you describe are a wonderful source for what you're doing. I have used some similar personal memoirs from relatives and their friends as part of my research. Keeping the place names the same is fine - people will enjoy recognising the places you describe as they are reading your book,
As for wishing you could have read better at school - you are more than making up for it now!

Andrew - It depends on the book you're writing and how you choose to tell the story. Obviously, if your protagonist is someone who really existed, then it would be strange not to let him talk. The characters that really existed in my books tend to be off stage or on the periphery.
All my characters are real to me too - and I hope to other people. But, surely, creating an entirely fictional character is not the same writing experience as fictionalizing someone who existed. Not better or worse, just different.
Your book, by the way sounds really interesting.

Hi Nick
It's great to have you in the group - and to hear that you're progressing with your book. Go ahead and adapt things you have have found.!Not just the big things, but the small details. It will give the book authenticity. Are you enjoying the research?

Elliott - Chronology is tricky - particularly when you come across something that seems to fit the bill perfectly for your story - but you can't use it. but I agree with you entirely about not telescoping events to fit your construct.

Another of the interesting things I had to deal with was the fact that now well-known spies, who were in respectable, prominent positions at the time - were not unmasked until well after the action of my books takes place. Some of them are there, or at least mentioned in the books. It is the readers' knowledge of hindsight that makes these mentions significant.

Mark - Thanks for your input so far - Looking forward to your comments from your laptop!

And before we go any further - a big congratulations to Andrew on paperback publication day for To Kill a Tsar!!

Elliott wrote: "Hi Aly and Andrew,

It was a bit weird using rela people at first, as if I'd dug them up and was making them dance for my amusement. I came to a similar conclusion, Andrew, that this is an integra..."

Yes, I recognise that feeling, Elliott. My books are all within living memory. So yes, that does make me a bit more squeamish - (though not that much!). what I really want is for the voices to sound credible - and that is often more problematic with real characters than fictional ones.

As for being hijacked along the way - Yes, of course I have had similar experiences. I love being hijacked! It's one of the pleasures of doing this. And I sometimes allow that hijacking in to let it reshape part of what I'm doing. You then have to stand back of course, and be ruthless about cutting things you have grown attached to if they're not right in the bigger picture. But - I wonder if you know what I mean - having included them gives more depth, even if you just leave a sentence, a phrase, or a passing comment in the end.

Andrew – Walter Scott’s ‘real’ characters are as unconvincing as his romances. Scott was a great myth maker – but that’s not exactly history. He remade history for the purposes of his fiction – which is what, in one way or another, we are all doing. His skill in The Heart of Midlothian, for example, is introducing new characters that convince in the setting, which I think is one of the challenges Elliott was talking about.
In my books, the famous historical characters are not the protagonists. They are there as part of the context and atmosphere. In this respect, similar to To Kill a Tsar. In Washington Shadow, we hear some of the things they have said – but off stage as it were, not as speaking parts on stage.
It’s a different canvas, Andrew. But definitely not a smaller one.

Elliott wrote: "The thing I was alluding to earlier is that this whole idea of accuracy is based on having an absolute standard of history to measure against. There are definitely certain facts you can get wrong,..."

Really, this conversation could become interesting. So here goes.
Can you tell us more, Elliott? I’d be interested to hear how you’re going about it. Have you endeavoured to ‘be’ Jay Gould for a while? Did you put yourself aside? How do you justice to a man who is supposed to have said “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half”?
Now, of course, I don’t know yet how you have tackled (are tackling) this. But on the writers’ side, how ruthless are we in placing ‘real’ people in a pattern we devise? We use words instead of ‘creative finance’. But surely we are responsible for them too. When I consulted about using the real people I have in ‘Icelight’, I was told not to worry. The dead can’t bring charges.
Lastly - have you thought of the ‘Gordon Gecko’ effect (see the film Wall Street) in which a harsh portrait of the protagonist (played by Michael Douglas) acted as a highly effective recruitment drive!

Elliott - How are you feeling about placing words into the mouths of real people in your new book? As I mentioned above, I don't find this comfortable, and in the first two books, the real people did not have speaking parts. In Icelight, some do, but I have changed their names.

Welcome to the new members! Thanks for joining. It's great to have good mix of writers and readers in the group. Looking forward to hearing any of your thoughts/ questions about the discussion so far.

Hello Mark! Nice to have you in the group. - Looking forward to your thoughts and questions - always worthwhile!

Hi Laurence – An interesting point - but I didn’t call my first book The Maze of Cadiz for nothing! And yet that time in Spain (1944) is generally and accurately regarded as ‘bad’. That seems simple enough but the fear, confusion and strange fruit dictatorships impose is not that simple.
That would be my point – that it’s not that simple. In other words. I let the ‘facts’ influence the development of the story. Yes, these facts are selected, but I select them to surprise or at least expand received opinion. This is not so grand. For example, I know that large numbers of Spanish school children are taught that the American Civil War was fought on a single issue – slavery. It’s easy to see why – time constraints, some information is better than none etc.
But in a novel we personalise clashes. The contentious issues occupy characters - with their ambitions, talents and failings. Opinions are rarely consistent. I want history to press on characters, but to let the characters react very much as people do now – without hindsight or tranquility.

Hi Elliott - Worries about historical accuracy are extraordinarily difficult to shake off. It may be a character defect! I have heard Ian Rankin say something like ‘You’re a writer. Invent.’ Yet I was very relieved when my sister corrected me on an Italian dessert Cotton eats in 1945 – the one I had chosen didn’t exist then, so I changed it for the paperback.
At one level, I wonder if this attention to accurate historical detail is of such importance to us because we want readers to trust us on the detail – and then, by extension, on the assertions we make?
It’s not really that convincing a strategy – in other words, I wonder if we need it more than the reader.

Just a reminder to everyone -

Andrew's 'The Poison Tide' will be published in 2012. ' To Kill A Tsar' is published in paperback on September 29th 2011.

My new book 'Icelight', the 3rd Peter Cotton book, is published on October 13th 2011 and 'Black Bear' will be published late in 2012.

Andrew and I will be here to answer any questions and chat with you over the next few weeks.

It’s an interesting question. Why not? It’s a different kind of challenge. But I don’t feel that as a novelist I am necessarily the best commentator on current events, so it would be a different kind of novel. I do have some other books in store that have nothing to do with Peter Cotton, although when I look at them, they are also set in the recent past. But before that for me, the task is to finish Black Bear, which will take Peter Cotton back to the US. It’s a very different kind of book – and Cotton will find himself plunged in a situation experienced by the ‘real’ Peter Cotton (see ‘Beyond the Books’ on my website) – or at least that is what he told me.

Can you imagine yourself writing a novel set in the present day?

Actually, a lot. As I was writing and researching Washington Shadow, the sheer lack of comprehension on the part of the British government of what the negotiations for an American loan really involved and the desperation of the Keynes delegation, handling both London and Washington, as victors with a begging bowl struggling to remain players in the new world order, gradually came home to me and set the atmosphere of the book. And in plot terms, Tibbets’ role in the story did not come to me until I was some way into the writing.

And there was a real change in Icelight. In the first two books, I did not give speaking parts to real people. They were there, but as part of the setting. But when I was writing Icelight, some of the ghastly actions I discovered taken by certain people at the time made me decide to include them as speaking characters in the book, under different names. These things definitely influenced the push of the story.

One of the most enjoyable experiences of both writing and reading for me are the unexpected doors that open along the way. I don’t want to know everything I’m going to discover or exactly where the book is going before I begin.

I don’t begin with chapter by chapter plans. My plans are more in terms of key events or scenes that form the inner structure of the book – and that’s not only to do with the historical story. The final division into chapters is usually one of the last things I do – and it’s partly about the rhythm of the story. I also have different sections in each chapter – for the same reason.

So I do plan in broad terms, but as I’m working, I’m delighted when I discover or think of something I didn’t count on to begin with. Sometimes it’s a character who might have seemed insignificant at the first planning stage but grows and becomes more important. Some of these characters then go on to become significant characters in following books. This is the case with Ed Lowell, a Boston Brahmin in Icelight – he will have a significant role in Black Bear, the fourth Cotton book. And also Herbert Butterworth, the Chancery’s ‘archivist’ - in Washington Shadow. He will appear again in a much larger way in Black Bear.

What about you?

Absolutely. James was talking about doing justice to past. The longer the time, the less possibility of justice and the greater the impositions of a modern mind-set. It’s one of the reasons I write in the period I do. The underpinning of the Peter Cotton series is an examination of the post-war decline of Britain’s importance in the world as a colonial power, and a portrait of the time and place of each story. The chaotic and often incompetent or accidental nature of how things actually work that is shown in the books, is equally true today. Of course, in both Washington Shadow and Icelight there are evident chimes with the present economic crisis, but more importantly, the books show a version of how we got here.