I'm pleased to welcome Jane Davis to the blog today with some highlights from the Historical Fiction panel at this year's Triskele Litfest. In this extract, the panellists discuss creating characters in historical fiction...
At this year’s Triskele Litfest, author Jane Davis chaired a
fascinating discussion on historical fiction. The panellists were Jane
Dixon-Smith (The Better of Two Men, third-century Syria); Orna Ross (Her Secret Rose, the first in a trilogy
about the poet WB Yeats); Radhika Swarup (Where the River Parts, the Partition of
India and Pakistan in 1947); and Alison Morton (Aurelia, a Roman-themed
alternative history thriller). The panellists revealed why they had chosen to write
about their particular eras, and discussed issues around defining historical
fiction, language and setting.
In this extract from Jane’s
transcript of the debate they talk about characterisation:-
Chair:
I want to ask how you go about blending real-life characters with fictional
characters. I’m told that the key advantage of including fictional characters
in a novel that includes real-life figures is the ability to bump them off
without altering history. Would you agree, or do they serve another purpose?
Orna, can I ask you first because I know you’ve done this in Her Secret
Rose.
Orna: Actually, Rosie’s an invented
character but she’s based on a real person. I tried to tell the story in lots
of different ways but because it’s W B Yeats for God’s sake! I was in awe of W
B Yeats, was intimidated until I got Rosie’s voice. I based her on the letters
of a woman who was imprisoned with Maud Gonne for her revolutionary activities,
and her irreverent thoughts, the way that she spoke, allowed me to say what I
liked.
Radhika: My main characters are all
invented and I think they are so key because it allows you to paint such big
key events in Indian and Pakistan history from an intimacy. There’s no other
way to take that canvas and reduce it.
Jane D-S: My narrator was initially
fictional until I realised that he could actually be a character who existed,
so I changed his name to Zabdas, tweaked him a bit, and then carried on from
there. In the books, he is actually meant to be Zenobia’s half-brother, but he
wasn’t Zenobia’s half-brother as far as we know.
Chair:
One of the interesting things about writing historical fiction is that, if the
reader has knowledge of the era, they have the benefit of hindsight, while the
characters in the book don’t. How do you use this to your advantage?
Radhika: A lot of my research comes
from accounts from family members who are approaching their nineties, so I
don’t know with what vividness they remember, but I also used archives and
third party accounts. What I have is evidence from afterwards, whether
Partition was justified or not, so while I will never have the immediacy of
people who lived through Partition, I have the benefit of hindsight.
 |
| From left to right: Jane Davis, Orna Ross, Radhika Swarup, Jane Dixon-Smith and Alison Morton |
Jane D-S: Not a lot of people know
about Zenobia so I tend to find that people pick up the books look on-line to
see if she was real and are surprised.
Alison: Historical fiction can
often spark interest in history. Although mine is alternate history, I try to
keep it very Roman in terms of culture and values, but I have had readers come
back to me and say, ‘It’s actually made me go back and re-look at Rome.’
Orna: When you’re interested you do
want other people to share your interest, but I wish I had thought about your
question before I wrote these books because writing about someone who ‘s as
loved and revered as W B Yeats is actually dangerous. I’ve had hate mail. I
stepped into a nest of academics. They own Yeats and they definitely didn’t
like my take on him.
Chair:
I was criticised for a historical novel I wrote where I allowed a main
character to leave her son without showing enough regret, the difficulty being
that it was out of step with the modern mind-set. Today we expect a mother to
put her child before partners, husbands, etc. I wonder how you perceive the
temptation to superimpose contemporary values on historical characters.
Alison: One thing if you’re writing a pure historical novel
is to read the letters and diaries of people, not the historical account, but
what people actually did. I would always go to a source if I could find one
about people and their lives.
Chair: Letters and diaries were your source material, Orna.
Orna: A lot of private writing that has only recently become
public and a lot of writing that only came out of copyright. It’s just seventy
years gone, so I was able to use it.
Radhika: But struggled when I came to the writing. My
protagonist is, for her generation, an extremely feisty woman. She chooses for
her lover, she chooses her husband, but she still has constraints placed on her
by societal conventions. So she has to be courted, she has to be proposed to.
In fact, she doesn’t have to be proposed to. Her father has to be approached by
her suitor.
Jane D-S: Fortunately writing Roman history, it’s turned on
its head from a female point of view. I had the advantage of Zenobia doing
things we would want women to do today. She rode with the men, she did all of
those things that appeals to readers these days. I didn’t have any trouble
trying to pull the story into the modern. It already felt modern anyway.
Orna: When I went back to the writings of women in Ireland
in the 1910s and1920s, I felt like I was meeting myself and my friends on the
page. They had written and done exactly the kind of work that we were doing in
the 1970s and 80s, then it had gone onto a shelf and no one had looked at it
for fifty years. Our generation had to come along as if they had never existed.
The feminists of our time have reclaimed their work and put it out there, but
we have this idea that women’s advancement is up, up, up, that leads to today
when we are supposedly equal. Actually, if you look back you’ll see it’s more up
and down. I’m hoping digital will put an end to that.
Alison: Even when putting women in men’s roles, you still
have to keep within the convention of your story. Like with Zenobia, there are
some things she couldn’t do and some things she could do but didn’t want to do.
You can read a complete transcript or watch a video of the Triskele Litfest Historical Fiction Panel on Jane Davis’sblog
Or view it on YouTube. (The other videos can be found on
the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmAu5JFBh8aQCQqTvmpvVmg)
Find out more about the panellists:-
About Jane Davis
Jane Davis is the author of seven
thought-provoking novels. Her debut, Half-truths and White Lies, won the Daily
Mail First Novel Award and was described by Joanne Harris as ‘A story of
secrets, lies, grief and, ultimately, redemption, charmingly handled by this
very promising new writer.’ The Bookseller featured her in their ‘One to Watch’
section. Six further novels have earned her a loyal fan base and comparisons to
more seasoned authors such as Kate Atkinson and Maggie O’Farrell. An Unknown
Woman has been named Self-Published Book of the Year 2016 by Writing Magazine
and the DSJT Charitable Trust. Jane’s favourite description of fiction is
‘made-up truth’. Her historical novels include I Stopped Time and My
Counterfeit Self. She can be also be hired as a tutor, mentor and professional
speaker.
Website: www.jane-davis.co.uk
Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/JaneDavisAuthorPage
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/janedavisauthor
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