Hello Margaret, thank you so much for agreeing to answer some of my questions for the site.
1. I’ve just finished reading, The Silver Locket and enjoyed it very much (I can heartily recommend it too). Could you tell us where you begin when writing a new historical novel? Do you start with the characters, or the period the story is set in, or something else entirely?
I start with the characters, always with the characters. I don’t quite know how it happens, but I suppose it’s a bit like having someone coming up to you in the street (or wandering into your mind) and saying: hey, write about me!
So then I want to know a bit more about my characters, and I start asking them a few questions. Rose Courtenay turned out to be a nicely-brought-up young lady living in Dorset in the early years of the 20th century. What was I going to do with Rose, I wondered. The obvious answer was to send her off to have adventures, and with a world war looming it seemed likely she would want to take part in some way.
Once I’ve got my main characters sorted out, I start planning. I’m a great planner, and I like to have an outline to follow, even if I don’t follow it to the letter. I couldn’t write a novel without planning it first.
2. I’ve spent the last eighteen months researching and writing the first draft for an historical novel, which is set, coincidentally, during WW1, and although I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the research, I’m finding it a little difficult to ensure that I keep the story fluid whilst including the important historical facts. In your novel The Silver Locket you interweave the information so well that it’s absorbed without the reader somehow realizing it. I was wondering if you have any advice as to how you go about this?
I did some research into the sequence of events on the Western Front, which is where a lot of my story is set. I made a time line so that I knew when the key campaigns and battles took place. I read memoirs and biographies, Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry, and Robert Graves’s autobiography, Goodbye To All That. I chanced on a fascinating book by Paul Fussell called The Great War and Modern Memory, which really helped me to understand the mindset of people at the time.
Since this is a novel, not a history book, I didn’t tie myself too closely to historical facts, especially if they didn’t fit my story. My hero Alex Denham is in an imaginary regiment, some of the place names in France are invented, and I moved Alex and Rose around to suit my story line.
3. People of Rose Courtenay and Alex Denham’s class and era had upbringings and speak/act differently to how people of this present time conduct themselves. Was it difficult to write their stories so that the reader is inadvertently held in that period at all times?
I don’t think people in 1914 spoke very differently, although of course their slang was not the same. I didn’t make my characters sound old-fashioned, because I wanted them to be accessible to people today. Social etiquette was different, of course – I can’t imagine a young man of today addressing a woman of the same age as Miss Whatever until she told him he could use her first name!
4. Rose joins the VADs and Alex is in the infantry. How difficult was it to ensure all the details of, for example, where they could be stationed, how their uniforms looked, or how the hospital wards/trenches were run?
It wasn’t difficult at all, because there is plenty of documentary evidence available, and of course you can check almost anything on Wikipedia. I recommend a wonderful book called The Roses of No Man’s Land, a compilation of nurses’ and doctors’ memoirs made by the journalist Lyn MacDonald. I also read Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, which is full of information about how the medical care of troops was organised, and how the medical staff themselves managed to work effectively under such difficult circumstances.
I read some military manuals on the mechanics of warfare at the time, and now I feel I could probably conduct a trench raid myself! There are millions of photographs of nurses and soldiers which show us exactly how they looked. I spent lots of time in the Imperial War Museum just looking, and consciously (and subconsciously, I’m sure) absorbing masses of information.
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