The Mystical World of Historical Fiction by novelist Stephanie Cowell

Stephanie Cowell is a very old friend. For those of you who’ve been in my classes before, she’s the “Stephanie” I mention enviously (in the most generous of ways) when she got her first book contract so many years ago. She’s a novelist of inestimable talent and beauty who inspired me when I was struggling with my very first words of fiction. I’m thrilled that Stephanie’s agreed to share her thoughts on the mysterious and mystical world of the historical novelist. I also hope you’ll join us, along with Michelle Cameron and Susanne Dunlap, for our June 10 event, Literary Time Travel: Adventures in Writing Historical Fiction. And I’m utterly honored that Stephanie has agreed to share her wisdom with The Writers Circle as one of our newest private editors. Learn more about working with her at our One-on-One Sessions page. But first, Stephanie Cowell…

“…the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”
- Albert Einstein, 1955

When I was a child, I wrote in secret hours, making sure no one could see the words which formed my world. Mostly, my setting was elsewhere. I never felt I entirely belonged in my own life, but that I was constantly being called back to another one.

Often when meeting other historical fiction writers, I have been struck by the mystical quality of their experience in writing of the past; they speak of it reticently yet it is often this deep and most personal experience which first compels them to undertake a novel.

It begins with a feeling, a dream… you read something, you encounter an old street in Italy or a graveyard or a song and you are there suddenly. You have a strong feeling you have to go someplace and meet someone, but that place is hundreds of years before you were born. You listen and begin to hear people speaking. After a while you wake in the middle of the night, turn on a lamp, and begin to write what you hear. Page after page gets filled as you write about people who seem to call you. They wake you up and say, “Write me…” Before you know it, you are writing a historical novel.

In my writing world, snow is falling on London houses near the old cathedral of St. Paul’s 1662 and on the stalls of the booksellers which cluster in the churchyard. In my real life, it is spring 2012. I am writing on a computer and drinking brewed coffee. I am writing a historical novel and living two lives. I date my letters in the wrong season. I travel through centuries in a moment.

Novelist C.W. Gortner grew up in Spain and his third novel about a Spanish queen, The Queen’s Vow, debuts this June. He writes, “I do feel as if I have a connection with the past; certain places, sights, even smells, can evoke strong emotions in me. I’m very attracted to the Renaissance; I’m drawn to the 16th century in specific and my interest spans several countries. I’ve had a few eerie moments during research trips where I’ve visited a certain place and I’ve known something instinctual about it, as if I’d been there before.”

One of my most haunting experiences occurred in Canterbury, England where I went to research my first novel. Christopher Marlowe, a character in the novel who had been born there, had been murdered young in 1593. I was finishing my dinner in a restaurant when I had the odd sensation that he was standing behind me. The hairs on the back of my neck rose but when I turned, he was not there. The streets were rather empty when I left; the great Cathedral rising above me into the sky. As I walked under the medieval gateway to my room, I felt him a few steps behind me. I again turned and saw no one. Was it an over-excited imagination at being there? I don’t know. I jumped into bed and hid there, rather shaken.

But writing a historical novel only begins with a passionate interest in another place and time. Between that and the finished work are often hundreds of research books and, if the writer is fortunate, journeys to where the character lived. Susan Vreeland wrote, “There’s nothing like walking where your character walked to discover uneven pavements, mosquitoes, river stench, the smell of plaster frescoes and old wood in a convent. For Artemisia, I climbed the 400 steps of Giotto’s bell tower in Florence not only to see what my characters would have seen (which I had imagined incorrectly), but to be able to describe the steps.”

A sense of place also drew Cathy Buchanan, author of The Day the Falls Stood Still. She wrote, “I have stood at the brink of the falls, filling with wonder, filling with awe, and I think I strove in writing my novel to pass along a bit of that feeling to my readers.”

Sometimes you know a great deal about a character; sometimes you know little or less no matter how many history books you read. “When research doesn’t provide answers, imagination gets to step in,” says Michelle Cameron, author of The Fruit of Her Hands. “We knew Meir must have had a wife, for example – but because the medieval record didn’t tell us anything about her, I got to invent her completely, from her desire to be a scholar right down to her name.” Sheramy Bundrick created her main female character from a one sentence reference for Sunflowers: a novel of Van Gogh.

A Vermeer painting, again of an anonymous girl, “spoke” to Tracy Chevalier. She wrote, “I was lying in bed one morning, worrying about what I was going to write next. A poster of the Vermeer painting Girl with a Pearl Earring hung in my bedroom, as it had done since I was 19 and first discovered the painting. I lay there idly contemplating the girl’s face, and thought suddenly, ‘I wonder what Vermeer did to her to make her look like that. Now there’s a story worth writing.’ Within three days I had the whole story worked out.”

Judith Lindbergh, author of The Thrall’s Tale, wrote, “For me, it’s more than simply breathing life into the dry facts of history books. It’s trying to slip back into another time. I love going to museums or, better still, visiting historic sites. When I stand in a place where my characters would have been, I start to see the world as they might have seen it. From dusty stone ruins, the spirits of those who once enlivened them begin to emerge. I try to listen for those spirits, to let them enter my body and my mind.”

We also use what we know in this life. Susanne Dunlap (The Musician’s Daughter) was a concert pianist before she became a writer; I called on my years as a Mozart singer when I wrote Marrying Mozart. One writer whose novels are of historical England drives by a ruined medieval castle there to reach the supermarket for her weekly groceries. Mary Sharratt rode her beloved horse all over the Pendle Forest area in Lancashire which made her novel Daughters of the Witching Hill seem to grow out of the woods and earth where those women once lived long ago.

To sustain the journey of writing a historical novel requires passionate interest, research, many rewrites, great skill, and the patience of a saint. Lives often do not come with plots; we have to create a plot to take the reader down the path of the story. We have to say, “Come with us. We will show you something wonderful.”

Is the past calling us? Are we calling the past? Or when we write and read historical fiction, is it somewhere in between? As Shakespeare says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dwelt of in your philosophy.”

Historical novelist Stephanie Cowell grew up in New York City adoring the past, reading Shakespeare and historical fiction, and longing for Europe and England. She published her first short stories in her teens. She was a classical singer for many years and produced a singing ensemble, a concert series and a small opera company before returning full-time to writing. Stephanie is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart and Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet. She is the recipient of an American Book Award. Her work has been translated into nine languages. She still lives in New York City with her husband and has two grown sons. Her website is http://www.stephaniecowell.com.

How One Paragraph Can Take Four Days

by author and TWC Associate Teacher, Michelle Cameron

I love research.

To me, there’s nothing more inspiring than discovering how my characters might have lived their lives – what they wore, what they ate, how world events might have affected them.

All of my writing tends to start with a single scene in my head. When I wrote The Fruit of Her Hands, the picture of twenty-four cartloads loaded with volumes of Talmud being driven to a fiery death in a market square in Paris inspired me. With my next book – the story of Judean exile during the Babylonian epoch – it was imagining what those captives must have felt, mourning their lost homeland by the twin rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates. And in the series I’m writing today, the scene of Napoleon’s Jewish soldiers breaking down the ghetto gates of Ancona both astonished and bemused me.

Once that scene persists in tickling my imagination, I embark upon roughly three months of intense research. I try, in that short period of time, to read and peruse as much as I can related to my time period. Not just history books – artwork, architecture, and maps all inform the work. I try to get to museums – the Met is my favorite – several times when I’m doing my research.

My notes take several forms. The central document is a timeline that I usually divide into three columns: one for general historical events, one for historical events that I will incorporate into the novel, and one for fictional events so I can keep track of what needs to happen when. Then I have separate documents for major topics. What happened in the French court when the Jews tried in vain to defend their Talmud? What gods did the ancient Babylonians pray to? What did Ancona look like during the Napoleonic era?

In addition, I use the closet doors behind my head to pin up images – portraits of real-life characters and objects that will find their way into the work, as well as maps, street scenes, and renderings of what people in that time period wore.

What’s incredible about all this research are the story elements that grow out of it. Real life characters are woven into the fictitious story. Scenes suggest themselves. Slowly, the plot and arc of the novel take shape.
And then I start writing. But the research doesn’t stop there. In fact, the research never stops. The writing is often put on pause as I discover more I don’t know and need to. Which returns us to the title of this blog post.

Scene: a printer’s press in Paris during the French Revolution. I know why I need the printing shop, but I don’t know anything about what one would be like during that time period. Where is it located? What type of presses were used? What’s the process for turning out the pamphlets, the broadsheets? What time of day did the printers do their work? Since this is during a time of great turmoil, did they have to do their work in secret? What would happen if the King’s police raided them? What was the social structure like in the shop? How did the printed pieces get from the press into the hands of the revolutionaries, inflaming loud and passionate debates in the coffee shops?

It began with a single paragraph, all the questions above, and the need to do a lot of digging. Four days later – spent online and in various books – I have a full picture. Now I can keep writing – being very careful not to “dump” the history I’ve just gleaned into my work wholesale, instead using it just to flavor the work as needed.

Preserving the Stacks of Treasures

These days the face of literature and learning are changing so rapidly, it’s hard to know much of the time what we’re even looking at or why we bother to write.

I came across a rather interesting video that says it all both forward and backward:

It’s thrilling and terrifying. A truly brave new world. But my quandary goes beyond the welfare and future of publishing to something more essential: the preservation and accessibility of information and knowledge itself.

In many ways, information seems more accessible than ever. Certainly when my son has to write a report for elementary school, he can google everything he needs to know right from the computer on my desk. He looks at me in astonishment when I tell him that, in my day, that same report would’ve taken hours of research at the library.

I remember losing myself in the stacks – the long dim, slightly dusty corridors where spines lured me like whispered promises. As a child, my mother used to take me and my siblings for afternoons at the local children’s room where I would lie in a quiet corner surrounded by a carefully selected tower of books, musing for hours about worlds of imagination and possibility I’d never dreamed.

In high school I discovered that I could ask the librarian for the yellowed pages of newspapers published nearly a hundred years before. Not microfiche (which used to give me motion sickness if I scanned too quickly), but actual pages carefully preserved in an acid-free box kept somewhere in the library’s bowels.

It was in the hallowed Reading Room at the New York Public Library that my odd passion for dry academic tomes and archaeological reports bloomed. Their humble Pandoran pages opened like a treasure chest, filled with stories nothing else could have revealed. It was exhilarating simply to hear the subtle crack of a volume that only I and probably a half-dozen others had requested in the last half century.

I could have discovered none of this without the library. Unlike the elite halls of wisdom of ages gone, public libraries in America are an incomparable symbol of freedom and equality. The concept of free public libraries is inherently tied to a free public education, a right that I pray no one can argue against, except perhaps in the hope to making the definition of “free” include “highest quality”.

But in this era where it seems everything is migrating online, libraries are under threat. Here in New Jersey, Governor Christie’s proposed budget includes a 74% decrease in funding for library services. According to a recent Legislative Alert posted on the New Jersey Library Association’s website, this cut will eliminate all statewide library programs and services. It will affect all types of libraries in the state and, once state funding is eliminated, New Jersey will lose $4.5 million in federal funding.

I don’t often take a public political stance, but loss of our libraries is more than a personal affront. It goes to the very heart of the American tenets of freedom and equal opportunity.

As a novelist, I could not do my work without the library. Even today, access to expensive research databases and obscure texts that I often obtain through interlibrary loan are the backbone of my research. The Internet is simply not enough. (And please don’t talk to me about the Devil – I mean Wikipedia.) With all the posting and scanning – legal or otherwise – going on online, there are simply some things that will never make their way into the digital world.

But the issue goes beyond my personal and peculiar penchant for the obscure. Libraries provide essential services to people without internet access (and yes, there are still quite a few!), people who long to learn what they do not know, who need jobs in this crisis economy, who are applying to schools or starting new businesses, who want to introduce their children or themselves to a body of literature that is otherwise out of reach – accessible and free to all.

When so many core values in America have simply slipped away in recent years, this one is simple, affordable, and more than worthy of saving.

Go to http://capwiz.com/ala/nj/issues/alert/?alertid=14842591 to let your legislators know if you agree. The library you save may be your own.

Guest Blogging for Christina Baker Kline

I’m pleased and honored to be this week’s guest blogger on Christina Baker Kline‘s terrific blog, A Writing Year. Check out my piece about researching a historical novel: Judith Lindbergh on Raising the Dead.

And also be sure to check out Christina’s latest novel, Bird in Hand, coming out next week!