Trust me, I'm telling stories

I've just realised that this is my hundredth blog post, so thank you to everyone who's dropped by, read, commented, linked, or just said something that got me intrigued and sent me over here to work out what I think. For example:

Poet Sheenagh Pugh has been blogging here about Linda Grant's piece in The Guardian that also set me off on Rogues and Vagabonds. It's apparently even harder to persuade readers of poetry that the persona in the poem is not the poet, than it is to persuade the readers of novels that the author made it up. And then on Friday I had a drink for the first time in ages with a short-story-writing friend. She has an extremely high-powered professional life and a large family, and she writes strange, dark stories which don't spring directly from her everyday life, and would completely change how people saw her if they read them. So she writes under a pseudonym, and I sympathise hugely with that, and not just because negotiating contracts is hard to do with someone who's read your stories of... well, that would be telling. No, not just because it's bad for business: consciousness of external scrutiny of what you're doing (as opposed to consciousness of the need to communicate what you want to say) is creative disaster.

Meanwhile, she was sympathising with me about the fact that the advance reading copies (bound proofs to you and me) of A Secret Alchemy should be going out any day now. I'm bracing myself, not just because the early reviews - the ones the book trade reads - won't be long behind, but as anyone must brace themselves who writes any fiction rooted in well-known facts. To hear some - many - readers of historical fiction, you'd think that accurate facts are what they're looking for, and in some ways it is. It's frightening how many lovers of historical fiction were completely turned of real history by bad teaching at school. They still want their history fix, though, so the history in a novel is what matters to them, not the fiction. Of course I have my professional pride, and I hope I haven't got any facts wrong that I meant to get right. But I hope more that people read A Secret Alchemy as I meant it to be: a story. It's not history, though it has its roots in history. It's fiction, and anyone who wants history should go and read a history book: I made this up.

And I suddenly realised that so many fiction-readers read not to be transported elsewhere, as we all were so easily in childhood, but to get a fix of non-fiction: history, geography, science or a dozen other subjects in easy-to-swallow form. No wonder they're so upset when they realise that something isn't true in the factual sense. As well as all the reasons I touched on in 'Rogues and Vagabonds', I find this attitude annoying because it ignores what fiction is for, and if the author gets it wrong, it takes their fiction to task for not being what it was never meant to be. To my mind, if you want history, read history, if you want geography, read travel books. They're stories too, of course - though they play by different rules - because humans are story-telling creatures and we have no other way of making sense of our experience.

I'm telling stories by fiction rules, and I make no promises about what's true and what isn't in what I write, but only that I'll make that call as seems best to me at the time. All I promise is that, of itself, the story will be whole, will make sense, will be true to human experience, will satisfy you, the reader, as real life - real history - so often doesn't. Trust me, I'm telling stories.

Comments

[ireneintheworld]

Two of my favourite writers of historical fiction are Wilbur Smith and Alan Massie; once you enter their pages you are captured and swept up in the story being told and the history plays the part of subtext, when it’s done right. Louis De Bernieres loses me somewhere in the middle; initially I am charmed and enjoy the history lesson but in the three books of his I’ve read I got bored. Why? What is he doing wrong? Or is it just me?

[Rachael King]

Emma, i was glad to read this post as there is something that has been weighing on my mind about my new novel. I have in it a port in New Zealand in the late 19th century where all kinds of dark and dangerous things go on. It's a fictional port, based on one from an earlier period in NZ's history. I have been worried that people will either a) take it as fact and go around believing that such a place existed or b) criticise the novel for not being "true". The point of it is that a contemporary character in the book is writing the historical story and SHE makes it up, although this isn't explicit.

How do people feel about a warped, heightened version of a real place being created in a book? Do I need to put an author's note explaining that I made it up? I hate this. It goes back to what we were saying earlier about how people should just read a book as fiction and we as authors shoudln't have to justify anything.

[Emma]

Irene, I agree about Alan Massie - I've only read one, but keep meaning to read more. And I'm the classic never-got-past-the-first-chapter of Captain Corelli (which made it a bit disconcerting when my publishers set about selling The Mathematics of Love as "Birdsong and Captain Corelli for the new Millenium" Thank goodness the other novel they name-checked was Atonement, which I knew and loved). I do think there's always a risk with hist fic that the history wins. It's not always the writer's fault - there are things you need the reader to know, and it's not always easy to slide them in discreetly, rather than as bleeding chunks of textbook. But equally, we writers are fascinated by history too, and our own historianly fascination can sometimes outweigh our fiction-writer's judgement.

Rachael, it's a classic hist fic manoeuvre to invent a place/person/situation which echoes but doesn't try to reproduce a 'real' place, precisely because it is liberating. The reader has plenty to orient them from what they know of the 'real' place, and from those roots you can do what you like within the bounds of a much more fundamental kind of 'truth'. The world you create has to be believable, but that doesn't mean it has to have existed, any more than Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet existed.

I don't see that you have to explain at all. At the moment I'm rather anti all such Author's Notes and things, telling readers how to read a book, but if you really want to, how about the way Jill Paton Walsh puts it at the beginning of Knowledge of Angels (as I remember the island isn't named in the book): "This story is based very remotely on the true story of the Maid of Chalons... It is set on an island somewhat like Mallorca, at a time somewhat like 1450, but not 1450..."

[Sheenagh Pugh]

Tanith Lee. who wrote the Piratica trilogy for children (though it's great fun for adults too), covered her back by saying the London in which the books are partly set is an alternative version of 17th-century London which is like the real thing but not necessarily identical or coterminous with it. Later on in those books, Alt History extends to the revolution taking place in England not France, and an equally alt version of Bonaparte. This seems fine to me - history is raw material for fiction just like anything else. Dumas certainly thought so, and would never have considered sticking to the facts if his story clearly wanted to go elsewhere. He thought of history as a good place to start.

[adele geras]

How exciting about the bound proofs of A Secret Alchemy! I will email my friend in a high place.....can't wait to read.

[Emma]

Adele, yes, do, and I do hope you approve of it. Though as you know 'any day now' in the book trade is a rather elastic term...

"History is raw material for fiction, just like anything else."

Sheenagh, I couldn't agree more, whether you go the whole fantastical Joan-Aiken-style hog, or merely fiddle a little bit with journey times.

[FlossieT]

Any chance of getting one of those advance review copies onto LibraryThing...?