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

Andrew’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 wrote: "Hi Aly and Andrew,

This is a very interesting group, as I have not that long ago got interested in writing myself.
I have just started writing a story about three boys that are growing up in Worl..."

I don't see why not Nick. If I was drawing on the life of someone still alive or with close family, I would change name and quite a lot of details - I would probably to do this anyway. If someone's still alive there are legal and other sensitivities regardless of whether you've changed the name, but there are ways round these things.
I have a story I want to tell set in Bosnian civil war and one of the peripheral characters would be BASED on a very well known BBC journalist - it isn't an entirely flattering portrayal. If I get around to writing it, I will be changing quite a bit, as you can imagine.

Aly wrote: "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 – whi..."
I think in his best books, Old Mortality, Red Gauntlet, Waverley to name three, he captures brilliantly the religious and political tensions of the mid eighteenth and seventeenth centuries. Was General Tam in Old Mortality really as bloody as he is portrayed, probably not. I'm not sure I understand the distinction you draw between real people and characters - my characters are all real to me. I feel a responsibility to represent the views of 'real people' in my books accurately, but I have no qualms about putting words in their mouths. In To Kill, my two chief characters are in a small band of terrorists with particular leaders, meeting in small smoked filled rooms. Those leaders must have a voice. They are largely unknown in the UK, but they used to be heroes of the Soviet Union, and to this day, well known in Russia. Not Richard Nixon or David Frost in Nixon and Frost, not Bonnie Prince Charlie in Waverley or Himmler in Fatherland, but well known in Russia. In my next book Sir Roger Casement is a character because my spy has to gets close to him. So, yes, I think in certain situations giving real people a voice opens the canvass.

YOu know, I'm glad to hear you've jiggered with the chronology - because I'm doing the same thing with my new book - set in Berlin and New York. There are one or two fixed points I can't change, but am slipping people and events around within three or four poles...but I do feel a bit uncomfortable...old habits die hard

Aly wrote: "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 d..."

Historical novelists have done this since days the of Walter Scott - Waverley, Old Mortality...if you don't, how can you bring real people to life? If the stuff of your novel is high and low politics but your real people never open their mouths, the canvass is surely rather a small one.

Elliott - agree - could this happen or have happened is the question, undoubtedly. Of course, the tsar was assassinated, it was an international event, it did happen, the details are well known - that is something one can't change. BUT witnessed it, who helped the tsar while he was dying, those who were complicit, and many more things that could have happened but didn't, well that is the stuff of the story. I like the sound of your financier. Of course, there were strong moral voices against the excesses of capital at the time you are writing - there was no consensus. The range of opinions on caring capitalism, greed, selfishness - they were as varied in 19th century as they are now - Dickens and Thackery to name two - Marx to name another.

I think it depends on the reader Aly, and the ambition of the writer. Some readers don't give a monkey's; nor do some writers. I expect the reason why I read and enjoyed Wolff Hall was because Hilary Mantel took me into the life of Thomas Cromwell - and she worked to present the large and the small that filled his life. But it isn't so different from any other genre - some writers present us with characters and situations we believe, and some don't. I was with David Mitchell at the Borders Book Festival this summer and he was still disappointed with himself for making in a mistake in the text of 'The Thousand Autumns' - introducing Mahjongg to Japan 50 years before he should have, I think. That's the contract with his readers - he cared about the small things, and they believe him.

Agree that our opinions are reflected in scenes, Laurence. That would be just as true of Scott writing about Jacobites 60 years after the 1745. But his interpretation of the changes happening in Highland Society at the time was a good one and is lived by his characters. I have a sense of a few themes that I want to tease out through the story, so selection of scenes, characters, historical events I include in the narrative, are coloured by that. But I hope I have a sense too of how real people viewed those events at the time. If the story is set against a backdrop of conflict, it's hard not to deal with contentious issues. I embrace them and want some of my key characters to have views on the society they belong to. Ordinary people making sense of extraordinary times. In my experience, at such times almost everyone has view.

I would like to. I have an idea for a novel set in the 1990’s during the war in the former Yugoslavia. I made a couple of programmes on the conflict, and have been nurturing an idea for a story for almost ten years. The war in Bosnia is still the past, but edging closer to the present. First a spy thriller, The Poison Tide, telling the story of a secret service operation in Berlin and New York in 1915-16.
What about you?

For me, the themes remain pretty much the same, but how I tease them out through the story changes a good deal. Some characters come to the fore, some fall off the page. I wasn’t entirely sure how To Kill would end until I got there. One strand of the story might have ended a number of different ways. A couple of friends felt the ending of The Interrogator should have been darker; I considered that very carefully at the time. I’m still not sure they aren’t right.

I plan it very carefully. I used to write documentary scripts for the BBC. It was important to keep things tight because shooting and editing days cost a lot of money, so I always structured the story very carefully first. Old habits die hard and I do the same with a book – chapter by chapter. But once I begin to write, it changes; chapters, characters and storylines appear and disappear. Everyone has their own way of going about things. Some people write almost nothing down first – perhaps they don’t write history thrillers.
How much do things you discover along the way influence the direction of the story?

Do you plan the story before beginning a book? Do you stick to it?

Up to a point, yes. It is an easy trap to fall into. All of us have read ‘historical’ novels that make almost no effort to capture the spirit of the time, and some are best sellers, so their authors must be giving their readers what they want. I do research the feelings and thoughts of my characters pretty exhaustively. I think it’s a little easier for me than the Tudor and Viking lot because I’m not excavating too deeply.
Some of the real people in To Kill A Tsar left their own accounts of the events I relate in my story. Actually, the historian faces the same dilemma of interpreting the past with the benefit of hindsight. But with the greatest of respect to Mr. Henry James, I think the best historians and novelists just about manage to pull it off: I do my best to learn from them.
Do you agree with James?

A line in a book, an interview on the radio, a name on a website; something that captures my imagination and transports me back through history. With To Kill A Tsar it was an engraving on a friend’s wall of his Scots-Russian ancestor; it was a fascination with terrorist violence born of many years covering Northern Ireland; and it was a question: what would a comfortable British liberal do in an autocracy like tsarist Russia where peaceful protest for democracy might earn a summary sentence of twenty years in a Siberian camp? Can terrorist violence be justified in such a place and what would happen if, like the doctor hero of my story, those you are close to are planning to commit murder in the name of freedom?

I am interested in ordinary people’s lives in extraordinary times; in wars, periods of political upheaval or revolution, above all in conflict.
I have only a passing academic interest in the swords and sandals history of the distant past. I understand my characters because the world they inhabit isn’t so very different from mine. I can imagine my Great-Great Grandfather Jesse Williams following events in Russia in his newspaper. He might have read the reports of The Times’ correspondent in Petersburg, George Dobson. Well, when I was researching To Kill, I read Dobson’s dispatches too. All the sources necessary to flesh out the bones of the history are there. I have the context for the love, friendship, hope, despair, betrayal and grief that are common to all lives, and those are the things that interest me most. The recent past of my stories doesn’t seem such a foreign country. Not so foreign I can’t ask of myself and the reader: what would you do if you were hunted by the tsar’s secret police?

So what especially attracts you about the past rather than the present day for your stories?

I did like football too. But all my stories draw on real people and events. Sometimes I change names, sometimes I don’t. Of course, I’m telling a story so I tinker with the facts, but I hate making mistakes with the history. I mean, I’m happy to repaint people and events just as long as I know why I’m doing it. If I am economical with the actualité you’ll find the reason in the historical note at the back of the book. I feel a responsibility to the history, and so do the writers I admire most. It’s a shocking cliché, I know, but truth is often – I would say ‘usually’ – stranger and more compelling that pure fiction, at least as a big backdrop.
By the way, I’m not sure I think of myself as a historical novelist, just a thriller writer who sets his stories in the recent past.

Lots and lots. I’ve always been fascinated by the past. Yes, my parents were history teachers and I think I could name the buildings of a medieval monastery by the time I was ten.