This Itch of Writing

The working kitchen and the critic

Do you remember the story about the woman who was stunned to discover that she'd been talking prose all her life? I'm feeling a bit like that. This morning I knuckled down to my PhD, which today meant trying to collect together and make sense of as many taxonomies of historical fiction as I can find. How do you define hist fic, from Scott and the predecessors he denied, to now? What are the different kinds? Is it different if you have real historical characters in it, about whom the reader might have an opinion already? Is it different if the author is trying to shed light on their own time, instead of that past time? And so on. The library books and papers from learned journals litter my desk.

There I was, interestedly but meekly making notes about Scott, Balzac, Renault, Tremain and the huge, huge row that blew up over William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, and trying not to get self-conscious about the new novel. How can I hold onto my conviction that what I write is worth writing, worth someone's £7.99 and several hours of their full attention, when Henry Esmond and A Tale of Two Cities are weighed and found wanting by Avrom Fleishmann? How do 'History as pastoral' vs. 'History as drama' (Harry E. Shaw) fit with fiction which 'invents a past,' vs. that which 'disguises a documented past'? (Joseph W. Turner). Should I be worrying about where the new novel - which has a form and a soul, though not yet a name - fits in these taxonomies? Too often it seems books are judged by how neatly they fit a theoretical structure, not the other way round. I'll forgive any academic who actually acknowledges, as Turner does, that, 'We should be wary... about confusing the value of a novel with the amount of analytical criticism that it requires, or the specifically theoretical issues that it raises.' But still, this isn't much to do with me trying to decide about tenses and first-versus-third person and voice, is it?

Working novelists are pragmatists. I don't plan and write a novel bearing in mind a critical field or recent developments in the genre, any more than I do to sell millions or win prizes. I write a novel because I have a story I can't bear not to tell, and almost all my craft and art, such as it is, goes into telling it as well as I can. Of course I enjoy the challenge of pinning down just a little of the zeitgeist of a time in history, conjuring up 'them' and 'then', as well as using that time, maybe obliquely, to say something about 'us' and 'now'. But in the end a story's a story: either the reader listens, or they wander off.

But when I get asked why I write historical fiction, once we've got past the undeniable fact that sex is more fun to write when corsets are involved, I usually find myself saying something about how I write historical fiction because history is how I see the world: it would be less natural to leave the history out. My sense of now and then always co-exist, so inevitably it creeps into my novels. And it's true that as I try to pin down that co-existence, in some way the novels change from being set in history, to being about history.

Still, that's bath-thinking, top-of-the-bus brooding, doing-the-washing-up contemplation, compared to the hands-dirty nuts and bolts of getting the words down and the plot straight (or crooked, according to genre). So you can imagine how disconcerted I was to read Turner saying this:

The best historical fiction, in my view, is ultimately about itself, about the meaning and making of history, about man's [sic] fate to live in history and his attempt to live in awareness of it.

Now that sounds much grander and more philosophical than I'll aspire to. Besides, if I worry too much about philosophy I might end up like the centipede, who walked perfectly well till someone asked him if he started with his right foot or his left. But it is encouraging to realise, after the event, that I am trying to do in a small way what other, greater writers have tried to do. Maybe all those critics sitting in their studies aren't so removed from the working kitchen of writing after all.

Not writing

Like many writers, I spent much of my childhood telling myself - sotto voce if no one was around, or in my head if I might be overheard - the story of what I was doing as I did it. It wasn't a commentary, exactly, at least not in the sense of commenting on my actions as someone else would: it was more that putting my life into words brought my existence into focus as nothing else did. I guess in a family which rated books and words and talking beyond almost anything else that ordinary life contains, it was hardly suprising.

On the MPhil in Writing at Glamorgan, four times a year, all the students and tutors travel down to spend a Friday and Saturday workshopping their work. Starting from the hours on the train, or in the motorway service station, when you read and mark up the thick booklet of everyone's writing, through the readings, workshops, tutorials and hours in the pub, you're living, breathing and thinking in words. On the Sunday, I used to get up early to drive up into the Brecon Beacons, clamber onto a horse, and spend a day riding. It was the perfect antidote, first of all because even if the riding isn't hard it uses a darn sight more muscles than writing does. Second, the Beacons are one of the most beautiful places in the whole of Britain and on a horse you're higher up and can go further than you can on foot. But there was more to it than that. I'm not a particularly good rider, but even at my level riding takes a kind of bodily intelligence, an alert relaxation, which is the complete opposite of the mental intelligence of writing that only engages your body incidentally.

One afternoon we were riding a path that ran high along the side of a valley. I looked down, and saw a heron flying along the rocky stream below us: I love herons but I hadn't known they have a white stripe across the upper side of their wings. Then I looked across to the far side of the valley. It was early spring, as I remember, the air quite warm, and patches of sunlight lay on the old rusts and browns and bronzes, and on the acid greens which were just coming through. From force of habit I started describing mentally what I was seeing, but it was a process of translation: my experience of that moment wasn't verbal at all, and words seemed inadequate to the experience, just as there will always be some things about a poem that no translation can capture. Nor was my experience an hour or so later verbal. We were in a field, relaxedly chatting, when I felt my horse suddenly tense, then gather herself to bolt. Before I could possibly have thought about what was happening I'd dug my bum down into the saddle, shortened the reins, and got her together under my control. Only then did I see what she - with her 360° vision - had seen: two cyclists were pedalling up behind us, and she didn't like the look of them at all. It occurred to me then that riding is an almost completely right-brained activity, because there isn't time to be anything else: it has to be visual not verbal, simultaneous not linear, a-logical not rational, perceptive and responsive not analytical. And after two days of workshopping that was exactly what I needed.

It's probably what I need more often than I get it, so next week will see me in the Peak District, doing a landscape photography course. Photography is less physical than riding but it is very right-brained. At one time I did a lot of it, as The Mathematics of Love testifies, but I've got out of the habit of seeing things, of thinking in images, of using visual intelligence. As writers we train ourselves in words, we work obsessively at technique, sensitivity, vocabulary and sound. If this blog is sporting its first-ever image at the end of next week you'll know why: it'll be because only by asking readers to become seers will I be able to transmit one important part of the writing life: not writing.

Cheap profundities and tramp steamers

When I'm commenting on someone's writing, one of the most common things I find myself saying is, 'I think you need either more of this, or less of it.' It might be some character who's characterised in such detail that they seem to be taking up an immoderate amount of space: readers expect the time they spend understanding and living alongside a character to be proportionate to their role in the plot, and can spend the whole book wondering when the person who took up the whole first chapter is actually going to return and blow up the bus. Which is fine, if they actually do... It might be a scene which goes on too long each side of the important moment: is its importance not written out fully enough, or is it actually not all that important and could go, its necessary elements distributed among other scenes? It might be some really painful, serious thing which just pops in for a bit: the death of a child, or holocaust survival, say, can seem crude, even callous, to have as a side-issue: a bit of instant angst, a plot device. Again it's a question of proportion: such things loom too large in us all to be used as a small piece of plot, and if such a big issue isn't given its due, at least subconsciously readers feel they're being manipulated by such a cheap effort at profundity.

When I say things like, 'Either more, or less,' I don't know which will turn out be right: the writer must decide for themselves. In fact I very rarely have the answer to what I think isn't working in someone's novel. What I have (I hope) is a good eye for what's not working and (I hope even more) a clear way of unpicking it to the point of pinning down the cause of the failure of tension/language/character or whatever. Another frequent phrase in my reports is, 'You've given yourself a built-in difficulty, here...'. When we're discussing it, the writer will say, 'What I was trying to do was...' That's usually the breakthrough point. Because then they can start seeing what to write and how to write it instead, to make what they were trying to do actually happen for the reader.

I often know what I would do, in my book, if I'd landed myself in such a problem. Occasionally I'll throw out some suggestions, though always as an illustration of my point more than a prescription. It's not my book, it's theirs, and their solution will be different. If the grand confrontational scene between Him and Her isn't working, I might shut them in a car together so they can't escape till they either fall in love or or drive over a cliff, Writer B might set it all in the middle of a hideous family dinner for twenty with uncles and cousins chipping in to make things worse and the turkey going up in flames, while Writer C might make Him (or Her) run out of the house and take the first tramp steamer for Buenos Aires.

What it comes down to is that even a cold, hard 3,000 word report is as much about process as it is about product, about problem-finding more than problem-solving, about why it's come out, not-quite-working, as it has. Compared to that, a few lines about whether agents and editors are likely to fall in love with this book, is the least of it. Once the writer understands why what they wanted to happen in the book isn't quite happening, they can see how to make it happen, and make it work. That's the book that agents and editors will fall in love with.

Any day now

Life has been full of small, perhaps ordinary things which between them seem to have shifted my horizons slightly.

First of all I dropped down to my new gym for the first time, and had a good session. It's really frightening just how unfit you can get when you're a writer. In a life where the most exercise that work gives you is going downstairs to put the kettle on, it can be really hard to persuade yourself that it's more important to go for a walk than it is to get another couple of hundred words down. But the trouble with exercise is that it's not just you who needs to get into shape, it's the exercise: it has to be the shape that fits the rest of life, and when life changes shape, what used to fit suddenly doesn't. The gym that's beyond the far end of the school run fits until you're no longer doing the school run, and the one that suits the dead afternoons when you've written yourself out by lunchtime is no good if your day is now full of work that you can do even when your brain's lightly fried. But - ah - that exercise high... I floated home, and believe me or believe me not, am shoving things aside to make a slot for the next session.

One of the products of that high has been a title and a synopsis for the new, nameless novel. My agent asked for them, and I was interested to realise that it felt possible. Usually I can't work out how to sum the novel up until it's written, and not easily then: 'What's it about?' is still the question I find hardest to answer, whether it's for an interested friend or a radio host. And usually I wait for a title to emerge as I write, only sometimes of course it doesn't. By the time I realise that, the dull working title has stuck and I can't think of any thing more. (For the same reason my children had many a soft toy who never got further than 'Bear' or 'Rabbit'). But I have planned this new novel - in pencil, admittedly - and I do know what I think happens. With earlier novels I resisted telling anyone, whereas now I'm happy to tell my agent, though I shan't be posting the synopsis publicly any time soon. I'm surprised that I am happy to do so, though. Perhaps it's because, while you could call The Mathematics of Love a double concerto, and A Secret Alchemy a triple one, and most of the time I didn't know where the soloists would go next, the new novel which is still publicly nameless is more of a chamber opera: in my head it looks a bit like one of those models of an atom, with all the electrons orbiting round a central point, their paths intricately interwoven.

Then it was the last teaching day at Goldsmiths, and a definite sense of demob-happiness in the corridors, though I still have a pile of essays to mark. Not only is it the holidays, in that sense if no other, but I've decided not to teach the literature seminars next year. It's time to concentrate on the PhD and get it finished, on editorial reports, on the new writing-mentoring scheme that a novelist friend is setting up, on the production process for A Secret Alchemy here, and with a time delay like a satellite connection, the same in the US... and there's the little matter of Easter eggs to buy, and my cameras to dig out and dust off, because I'm going on a photography course.

But above all there's the new novel. I feared that writing a synopsis would put me off, because it's very much biased towards the bones of the plot rather than the interweaving of all the elements which the actual novel will be. If the success of a novel isn't in what the author does but how they do it, synopses are still crudely about what they're doing: in that way they say everything and nothing, and are terrifying in how they can make your work seem the merest formulaic rubbish. But not this time: at some moments I want to write it so badly that everything else in front of me is slightly faded-looking. I dare say my desire won't last. When I get down to it the material will be a lot more recalcitrant, I'll do more research and discover that my most brilliant idea founders on stagecoach timetables or gender roles, and so on. But it's a long time since I started a novel, and just now I feel as excited as a child setting off to go round the world: any day now I'll look down and see the gap appearing between the ship and the land, and know that we're off.

Did anyone say obsessive-compulsive?

A writing friend has just finished the main work on her second novel, in the week that her first has been published. Yes, there'll be more work to do, but it is the beginning of the end. And yet, she says, she doesn't feel elated but very low indeed at the prospect of starting novel number Three.

It's obvious that after the long haul of a novel you'll need a break, a rest, some refuelling, and so the obvious answer is, 'Well don't start it yet.' Even if the next book's under contract it's better to have some breathing space. But that's not all it is. Finishing the book may have been your great goal of the last few weeks and months, you may have a list of jobs and treats as long as your arm for the great day when it's done, but when you actually get there, there can be a huge sense of loss, as blank and draughty as a field when the circus has left town. Now there's a writing-struggling-swearing-sticking-obsessive-compulsive shaped hole in your life, where the old novel was. Filling it with a new book isn't the answer: what you're missing is the old one. It is, if you like, a period of mourning. And, as many people know, when you're mourning something the last thing you want to do is replace it.

There's something else going on, though, I think. Having your first novel published is the moment when you realise that perhaps you are an author: until now you've been a writer, since a writer is someone who writes. Even if you're nowhere near earning your living by it, even if you haven't got a contract to fulfil, an author is a professional, and writing is your job: you've just proved it by finishing Two. And now you'll be writing Three, won't you. Everyone, from your agent to your mother, assumes that you will. Dammit, you assume that you will: isn't that what you spent so many years, so many evenings, so much angst and so many SAE-clad rejections, trying to make happen? All that only makes sense if you get on with Three. It may not be a contract with a publisher, but it is a kind of contract with yourself and your world.

Only you don't have to: nobody's making you do it. You don't have to write another word ever again. If you don't, the world will keep turning, the stars will hold to their courses, and the traffic jams on the M25 won't alter by so much as a car. More to the point, you will still be you. If you'd rather, you can go and get a job in the supermarket to pay the bills, and never have to re-write Chapter Seventeen ever again. Even if you're under contract for the next book you can pay back the advance, and you're free forever.

No? Didn't think so. Did anyone say 'obsessive compulsive?'... 

I'll not be back, I think

One of the questions that was asked on Monday, at the Stoke Newington Bookshop, was why I don't stick to writing the same period as so many historical writers do. I've been asked, 'What period do you write?' before, and been surprised at my inquirer's surprise when I say, 'Whatever takes my fancy next.' But this time, maybe because I'd been talking about my work and had some really insightful questions, or maybe because the inquirer was Charles Palliser, the question has made me think.

Why don't I write the same period? But why would I write the same period? Historical period in fiction isn't just wallpaper, set dressing, an excuse for nice frocks and fancy words. At least, it may be all those things, but in the historical fiction I read and want to write, it's so much more as well. We don't need the physicists to tell us that time is the same as space: every place in history has its own nature, just as Rebus' Edinburgh or Pratchett's Discworld do. For me Edward IV's England or Suffolk in the 1970s are environments but also, like Edinburgh and Discworld, characters - or at least entities - in their own right. Not just a certain set of hills and rivers and road names, but part of what people are: these places in time/space have formed what they fear, hope, believe, how they fight and love, how they live and die.

I certainly don't pick a period to write for any of the reasons you might think - not ease of research or easy marketing. It's not even entirely a matter of my choosing - or not choosing - when/where to write about next.  It arrives as characters sometimes arrive and sometimes before any of them do: hazy but recognisable, demanding to be written. It's like a cloud in my head which, like some child's fantasy, bears inside it a whole world in all its exact and individual detail, which I must write my way into. And when I have, I've done with it. I've often been asked if I'd write a sequel to The Mathematics of Love, and I can't imagine doing so, just as I can't imagine setting a new novel in a old world. I've told the story that wanted to be told, said what I want to say, and unless those same characters - or that same world - somehow began to insist again, with some absolutely new story to tell, I don't think I'll be back.

Once upon a time...

I've been tackling the commentary on A Secret Alchemy, which is thirty percent of the PhD, and it's all gone rather postmodern. It starts routinely enough, if a form - the PhD thesis - which was originally designed for physicists, and only with difficult fitted to the humanities, can be called routine as it deforms itself to fit artists and artistic practice. The interesting thing is, does it in turn deform us?

I'm supposed to be writing 30,000 words on the use of narrative technique in A Secret Alchemy, and also 'its relation to other literary works, and an exposition of the aims and concerns that lay behind its composition... [it] shall make it clear that the candidate is well-acquainted with the history and contemporary developments of the genre in which he or she is working... and the critical field associated with it, and is able independently to analyse, interpret and evaluate debates and theoretical positions associated with it.'

Still with me? No, me neither, much of the time. Maybe it would be easier if I'd kept a diary while I was writing the novel, but I'm not a diary keeper. Maybe it would be easier if I thought about my novels in terms of 'I want to write Ackroyd crossed with Heyer', or if I had Ricoeuring fantasies, or enjoyed having my mind Foucaulted (all right, I'll stop now). Quite often I don't even take notes when I'm researching, let alone anything I could turn into a proper reference (MLA bibliographic style, since you ask). So in fact what I'm doing is not stating the facts about writing a novel and then analysing them, I'm trying to make a coherent product, with beginning, middle and end (plus footnotes) from a process - writing a novel - whose beginning is misty, whose middle is usually muddle, and whose end hasn't happened yet. I'm telling a story.

And, yes, A Secret Alchemy is about storytelling. Since two of the three narrators really existed, I was always going to have to decide for myself how to un-tether the world I wanted to write about - how to make a novel - from the history that made me want to write it. And then I realised that not only did Thomas Malory have a walk-on part, but that... No, it'll take too long to explain, you'll have to read the book. While I was writing it I started to read things for the commentary about how storytelling works, and of course they did end up in the novel, not because I set out to put them there, but because whatever's going on in my head tends to end up in the novel of the moment: after a few years under the bed they read like the diaries I don't write.

So though I hope that no one reading A Secret Alchemy will notice, because they'll be too busy wondering what really happened to Ned and Dickon, it pleases my more postmodern self that my commentary is really a story about how storytelling works in a novel which is all about storytelling. After all, another true way to tell the story would be, 'Once upon a time, I went to see a Shakespeare play about Henry VI...'

Get over it?

In Sailing ships and heavy gold I was thinking about why we bother to research facts that no one will notice, and in Carracks, kerseymere and other last straws I was thinking about how you deploy and write those facts so that they're at once new and interesting, and not so baffling that the reader trips up or, worse still, gives up. But in many ways the facts of shoes and ships and sealing way - and even cabbages and kings - are the easy bit. What's much harder is pinning down how people think, and how that makes them act.

Fiction of the time helps if you're setting a novel when contemporary narratives portrayed life naturalistically. But of course it's not that simple, because so much of what we know must have been going on wasn't written about. We intuit or research that many sixteenth-century women, for example, did go beyond our vague, erroneous, post-Victorian idea of their confinement to home and hearth, but who and how far and in what way is hard to pin down. Even if we discover the medieval church's writing of women not as the weakly angel on the hearth but as a frighteningly powerful source of evil, again it's hard to know how that plays out in real life: real men and real women did fall in love, after all, and it's hard to believe that all men thought of their sisters and mothers like that. So how did they think of them, and treat them?

Not long ago Harry Bingham of Writers' Workshop asked me for a little piece on writing historical fiction, for their 'Free Advice' section of the website. Harry writes hist. fic. himself, and I found his piece very interesting:

...you do need to be careful about the attitudes of your characters. A bloke born in the nineteenth century would almost certainly have been a racist, misogynist, homophobic bigot by our own 21st century standards. In maintaining the empathy of contemporary readers, you will need to finesse these issues.

This is very true. Harry's talking about commercial fiction, but I was aware, for instance, that in The Mathematics of Love only some of Stephen's attitudes would sit comfortably with ours. For example, so hyper-sensitive are we to anti-Semitism that I couldn't have given him even the least uncomfortable aspects of the average contemporary attitude to Jews. I sacrificed this interesting bit of historical insight because for modern readers I simply couldn't have it and know they'd still read Stephen as the decent, trying-his-best officer, squire and husband-to-be that he needed to be for my plot to work, and for readers to care about him. I made up for this by giving him a less challenging prejudice: the automatic anti-Catholicism which pervaded English society well into the 19th or even 20th centuries.

Is this cowardly? Certainly there's plenty of historical fiction in the bookshops where the manners and morals are so relentlessly modern that you wonder why the writer's bothered with corsets and carriages: no finessing there at all. But if you make them too unsympathetic, however heroically uncompromising you may feel you're being as a writer, you have to realise that many readers will simply switch off, and in tossing the book aside miss all the other things you're trying to say. The opposite problem is that you're also dealing with the reader's idea - however wrong - of How Things Were. Not every reader was convinced by Lucy's independence in TMoL, but you can actually find everything she does somewhere in the historical record. The post-Victorian point is important: we still have a Tennysonian image of medieval noblewomen locked in their towers, embroidering the Bayeux tapestry and waiting for their lord to come home. Never mind that they actually ran estates, businesses and workshops, or that Eleanor of Acquitaine crossed the Pyrenees and then the Alps, in the winter, at the age of sixty-seven.

And never mind that my beloved Anthony Woodville in A Secret Alchemy - clever, thoughtful, humane, a man even whose enemies admitted was both honest and honourable - could be propelled by his intense faith to undertake what at that date was simply one kind of holy pilgrimage: murdering Moors in Portugal. He did, though, and any readers who are shocked are just going to have to get over it.

99% boredom, 1% Barbra Streisand

I got home yesterday evening, after a day spent doing things other than writing, and switched on the computer. When at last it was ready to chunter off and pick up the day's email, one that came in was from my publisher. Now they don't bombard me with stuff, and I'm not expecting anything this week, so was this big news or small, good news or bad? Either way, it and a whole lot of other online stuff would need dealing with, so I had an excuse for not sitting down at the computer straight away.

I changed out of my funeral-going outfit, got the supper out of the freezer, went to the loo, made a cup of tea, opened the post, tickled the top of my maths-homework-doing daughter's head, went upstairs to the study, drew the curtains, adjusted the lights, sat down and tackled the spam, approved the blog comments, checked the stats... But of course I couldn't help wondering all the time what Headline was emailing about. Since my chief professional skill is to take a small piece of reality and imagine outwards as far as it will go, I'm quite capable of imagining just about anything, though at first I kept within the bounds of likelihood. The proofs on their way? A big step forwards towards publication but dealing with them is a real chore. The cover? A bit early, and very, very nerve-racking, but also very, very exciting. Cover copy? Earlier still, and (some might be surprised to know) a slightly lower pitch of nerves. Some problem with the copy-edit or the proofs which would be work and/or worry? A new assistant introducing herself? Always nice to meet someone new. A hugely delayed publication date for A Secret Alchemy? My editor leaving? (Help! Oh, please, no!) The Prince Maurice Prize has been cancelled? Surely not, but my imagination's really out of hand now, and since writing my new novel's proscribed I can't stop myself getting fictional here instead: all the other long-listees have scratched and The Mathematics of Love has won now by default (would that be better, or worse, than winning - eventually - by competition?). It was all a mistake and TMOL's not on the list at all? Some creationist has planted a bomb which they'll detonate if Headline don't strike this particular spawn of the anti-Christ off their list. Barbra Streisand has offered hundreds of thousands for the movie rights to TMOL, but only if she can write the songs and star...

Sometimes I think that being an author, too, is ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent... not terror, exactly, but certainly stomach-churning emotions of one sort or another, from stage-fright to the pre-mouse-click shakes. Fortunately once I'd cast Yentl as Lucy from TMOL, or worse still Anna, I got the giggles, and clicked on the email from Headline without even really noticing I'd decided to. Just as well. Could I confirm, again, it said, that I'd checked A Secret Alchemy, and there were no outstanding copyright or libel issues. Copy of Headline's advice sheet attached, for my further information. Maybe the one percent is anti-climax.

Sailing ships and heavy gold

A fellow writer has spent quite a lot of the day trying to find out how long it would take an eighteenth century sailing ship to travel from England to India. Of all the everyday details of life in the past, travel times are one of the most infuriatingly hard to find out about. I chipped in with what I could (having tackled a similar problem for The Mathematics of Love) and others did too, including two who have naval-romance-writing friends who then responded to email pleas for help. And still the phones of the National Maritime Museum's library will be ringing in the morning.  'All this,' said the original querier, 'for half a sentence!'

Cost-benefit analysis of the writing life is a funny business. Is it worth spending a precious writing day on perhaps six words? Certainly if novelists refused to write except at freelance rates the Booker list would be almost totally empty: even a 'good' advance doesn't divide well across - what? - an average of four or six hours a day (very few of us can work at full mental pitch for longer, day after day) for a year or two? And if it isn't profitable in money terms, is it in others?

The cost is obvious: that day could have written a thousand other words, or visited somewhere inspiring (no, I will not say 'inspirational' - such a disgusting word) or useful, or even let go of writing altogether. Who, after all, will notice if you just make your best guess (probably no worse than most readers', after all) and leave it at that? It's true that you can't be sure an expert won't pick your book up, and I'm told the naval history buffs are particularly ferocious, but unless you see yourself as a latter-day C S Forrester, who cares? I love Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton, *plot spoiler* and the fact that Ackroyd obviously never discovered in his research that a 'grain', when buying and consuming arsenic, is an apothecary's measure of weight, not a lump you can pick up in your fingers, doesn't spoil the book at all. It's only my own nerdy historical-novelist's wiring that notices.

And yet, we care, and we spend that day. It's partly sheer scholarly conscience, I guess: we may be writing fiction but we still don't like knowingly putting a wrong material fact out there. It's partly - let's be honest - because there are days when any amount of badgering museum libraries is better than trying to think up What Happens Next. And it's also because after a book or two you discover that (just as when you dig down the side of the sofa for the remote control or the toddler's irreplaceable panda) when you set out to find one thing you always find something else much more interesting that you didn't know was there.

But there's also a more intangible reason for research, I think. The usual refuge when you can't find something out exactly isn't barefaced invention, it's vagueness. Ackroyd's mistake at least has a solid, physical specificity about it: Chatterton picks up those grains. But if you're nervous of getting something wrong, you play safe. Stone is grey, no? And castles have high walls. If I hadn't gone to Pontefract to research A Secret Alchemy I might - thanks to Google Image - have got it right, but I might not: scale and perspective and light are funny things. Pontefract castle does loom high above you when you cross the Aire at Ferrybridge and start up the hill, but it's not tall and grey, it's broad and squat-towered, thick with power with its stones like heavy gold. I needed to know that, and to live and breathe the end of A Secret Alchemy readers need to know that too.