The Role of History in the Making of Stories: A chat and Q&A with authors Andrew Williams and Aly Monroe discussion

Andrew and I will begin by chatting to each other about how we use history in our books, and other things. Over the next two or three weeks, we'd love you some of you to join us and give us your comments and questions.
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 in the Peter Cotton series, is published on October 13th 2011 and 'Black Bear' will be published late in 2012.



Hi Andrew.You told me your parents were history teachers. How much was history a part of your childhood, and how much does it give you your ideas?

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.

A bit of a history geek from an early age then?

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.

My case is a little different. My parents weren’t history teachers (though my father started out as a university teacher), but my grandparents on both sides were immigrants, and I think this may have influenced me in a number of ways – not only my interest in the recent past but also in half belonging to other places.
My books are set just within living memory. So the history part of what I write often begins with things I have heard directly from people who had experience of the time and events I’m writing about. This provides a springboard for research. This was the case with The Maze of Cadiz, when people in Spain talked to me of their experiences under the Franco regime. It was also the case for the initial idea of the Peter Cotton series - and the character of Peter Cotton himself.

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

I’m interested in how people are moulded by the particular time and place that they inhabit, and how they react to it. Readers have their own backgrounds and have lived, or more likely know people who have lived, through the time described. It’s more Grandpa than Cleopatra’s handmaiden because I like that living link. Asps are fine, but women using pencils to draw a false stocking seam on their wartime legs is also interesting, as is the knicker elastic problem post war.
What about you?

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?

Where do the first seeds for your stories come from?

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?

The beginnings of a story for me usually come from things stored up in my mind – loose images or voices remembered, that become characters if you place them in a setting, concentrate and let them grow. That probably sounds a bit like organic gardening! The point is that it is not entirely a conscious process. You have to let the characters react to each other and to their context and circumstances. The history and the research are the more conscious part of the process.

For the first book, coming to Scotland after many years in Spain gave me a kind of distance and allowed me to listen again to some of those voices of Spanish people who had talked to me. That eventually led to The Maze of Cadiz. One of the main starting points for Peter Cotton himself was looking at family photos from the forties and realising that the people looking back at me were the same age – or younger than my children. It gave me an almost maternal feeling – and that gave me my period. The first seeds for Icelight came from childhood memories of my own – a freezing winter, a quiet suburban road, a shard of glass in a tree trunk, smeared with blood.

Henry James said you can never really do a historical novel. You're always writing about your own time. Do you agree?

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?

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.

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

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

Hi Aly and Andrew,

I'm coming at this from an interesting angle, as I had been writing in the near-future, and I'm now writing something new set in the 1850s-1870s.

The Strange Trilogy, though nominally set in the future, was really informed by totalitarian movements in the 20th: the Rapture by Stalin's Terror, and the Children's Crusade by Mao's Cultural Revolution. I used them as guides to understand how mass movements developed, and also as borders, to make sure I wasn't writing something ridiculous. After researching them my mind was put at ease, as I was confident I couldn't dream up anything half as crazy as what had happened then.

The new book I'm working on uses actual people and events, and the anxieties about accuracy you've been talking about were a new adjustment. With the trilogy almost all my research was for inspiration; now I am making what amounts to historical assertions. I was really paranoid at the beginning, trying to hold my work against some absolute standard of historical accuracy that we all know doesn't exist.

Hi all,

I think this is a very interesting area for discussion. In particular the notion of picking sides, or trying to stay away from "sides" as a way of reflecting the past. The problem is, IMO, that our opinions as writers are reflected in our take on a scene, whether we want to describe the horror of war (War and Peace), the suffering of the poor (The Grapes of Wrath) or the lavish lives of the wealthy (The Great Gatsby).

Do each of you take a position, to sick with story, to let "facts" speak for themselves, to avoid contentious issues, or to embrace them? And if "contentious issues" are to be avoided does writing lose its power?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, like your Mahjongg example Andrew, but I think those kinds of things aren't the problem.

One of the real people I plan to use in my new book is a financier called Jay Gould. He was known as 'The Mephistopheles of Wall Street' to give you an idea of his reputation, and was later grouped with Carnegie, Rockefeller and others as one of the 'Robber Barons.'

In the last twenty years or so there has been an attempt to rehabilitate Gould, a new biography arguing he was not nearly as corrupt as first alleged, that he didn't steal from the railways he managed among other things. I think this rehabilitation is as much about the present as it is a man of the 19th century. Some want to see 'creative' financiers like Gould as great businessmen, the way society treated senior bankers as masters of the universe until they blew up the world economy.

So in trying to not only use him to move the story along, but create a version of Gould as a character, I walk right into the middle of this fight. How can I be accurate, when some fundamental aspects of the man's character are in active dispute?

I think the dispute gives us the alibi we need. When plotting something out I don't ask 'did this happen?' but 'could this have happened?' which is the real question.

Interesting point Elliott.

How we view bankers is almost a touchstone of our views of the world, and what happens in the next ten years will color it even more, darker or lighter. I see all of us coloring our novels to suit our opinions. Can we name one historical character there isn't opposite views on?

Laurence,

You're right that that there's probably no person who has no defenders or no detractors, even Gandhi.

I don't think you could get away from colouring novels with your own impressions. What we choose to talk about is as important as what we say, and that selective editing makes a huge difference in how a event is seen by a reader.

It's another easy way to tie yourself in knots, but I think worrying about accuracy is more productive than worrying about 'balance.' The former is thinking things through properly, while the latter is just making sure two sides are presented, even when both don't deserve an equal hearing. I don't think that works in literature any more than journalism.

Interesting point, but I would say balance is a more important than accuracy esp for minor matters. Getting the color and texture of the clothes from the civil war era IMO is not as important as the true words that key players spoke, and the reasons for their views.

Balance/weighting is also the critical thought in your remark "when both don't deserve an equal hearing".

Looking forward to adding some thoughts and questions. This looks great. Must read comments to date and hope to join with something worthwhile. Mark

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 integral part of literature (it's not like Shakespeare was mates with half of English royalty) and it needs to be approached with care, but not anxiety. Using real people from the 19th century is something I feel I can get away with more easily than someone who is still within living memory. I think that would place a far greater burden making sure the small details of that person was right.

The question I wanted to ask you both is how often do you find your own narratives being hijacked by the historical one? I'm trying to blend a series of historical events -- the second opium war, the Taiping rebellion and American railway speculation, among others -- and I've found myself drowning interesting things. There have already been several times where I tried to shoehorn some part of history in my novel because it's so interesting, not necessarily because it fits with what I'm trying to do.

Have you both had similar experiences?

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!

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: "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.

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

Hi Aly,

My historical characters aren't on the page for very long but are very important in story terms. I am less focused on getting their words right rather than their essential character. If they were major characters I think I'd feel different, and would spend a lot more time reading primary sources.

I do agree tangents are half the fun, but I think it's a larger problem for me than it normally would be because of the variety of topics I'm trying to knit together. To take an example from Jay Gould, he is involved in one of the great corporate struggles of all time, the Erie War, which pitted him against Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railway, a vital transport link for New York. It's one of those great stories that no one would believe if it weren't true, involving duelling corrupt judges, bribing and the re-bribing pretty much everyone in government, and Gould living for a time in exile in New Jersey to avoid a contempt of court warrant.

The problem is, it doesn't work in chronological times with most of what I'm doing, except for some important events at the end. I'll refer to some of it, but I don't think I can afford to portray them directly without derailing my relevant.

I'm really starting to understand why Victorian books end up being so long...

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

As a reader who enjoys accurate historic fiction I most value the works that blend colorful historic detail, color, even and place with an imaginative

Sorry for incomplete post... It is this I Pad keyboard at work.... I value accurate events, color, etc., blended

Will resume this on laptop... But to get to bottom line point...this reader does not want fictional words in mouths of historic figures ... No more I pad posts, I promise.

Hi Andrew,

Sorry for the typo-fest above, this thing really needs a preview button. I lost internet for a while so this has been bouncing around for a few hours.

Getting the chronology right is so far the most difficult thing about plotting out historical fiction. I think it's pretty normal to plot the way you're describing Andrew; I'm doing something similar, winding everything around a few fixed points. The historical record of some of the people I'm using is actually helpful in this: there are long gaps where history doesn't really know where they are, and then suddenly they pop up again.

The problem I'm having is that history is too slow sometimes. The Erie War I mentioned in the last post actually takes place over several years. There are long stretches where nothing happens, and then a Board election or a court ruling causes the whole thing to flare up again. I don't think readers expect or particularly like that kind of dead time, even if it's skipped over and referred to. Real people have long periods of inactivity, from a dramatic standpoint, and it's an interesting challenge to make the reader realise that.

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