Writing Historical Fiction: wise advice at the Historical Novel Society Conference 2024

Dartington Hall in Devon

Back in the spring, I reached the 17th to 19th century category shortlist of the Historical Novel Society’s First Chapters competition. It was the nudge that encouraged me to attend the HNS conference in early September. The HNS and I have history (ahem): I attended the conference in 2012 and in 2014, and was on the committee for the Oxford conference in 2016. I have history with the competitions too! I was on the shortlist for the Short Story Award in 2012 with ‘Reputation’ and won in 2014 with ‘Salt’: you can read both these stories in my ebook An Oxford Vengeance. In 2016 I was on the judging panel for that year’s short story award.

Other tempting reasons for going: the chance to meet up with friends I’d made at previous conferences and to make new ones. Plus, the location: Dartington Hall in Devon, which is set in beautiful countryside near Totnes and which has stunning gardens. I’d heard so much about it over the years and it didn’t disappoint. What did disappoint was the weather – lots of cloud and rain over the weekend, but on Monday morning , when virtually every other delegate had left, the sun came out at last and everything glowed.

The conference theme was page to screen, which is really apropos, given so many historical novels achieve fame through television and film productions. (As I write this I’m eagerly anticipating the start of the TV dramatization of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light). There were so many talks and presentations – it was impossible to attend them all, of course. But here’s a selection:

The HNS founder Richard Lee opened the conference on Saturday 7th September before Bernard Cornwell gave the keynote. Who better to kick off the weekend’s talks, given that his novels about Sharpe and Uhtred have transferred so successfully to the screen? He was sardonic and down to earth, with a great range of anecdotes. His first piece of advice was ‘Don’t get too excited’ if an offer for your work to be filmed comes your way: he only believes that the project will actually happen ‘when the credits roll.’ And if you’re invited to write the script? ‘For Godsake, say no!’ He expressed frustration with those who don’t portray history correctly on the screen, lambasting Ridley Scott’s film Napoleon for not knowing the difference between a mortar and a howitzer and for having an officer at the battle of Waterloo scream at his men to go ‘Over the top!’ He shared anecdotes about actor Sean Bean, saying that now when he writes the Sharpe novels, it’s Sean’s voice he hears. He came across as one who certainly does not suffer fools gladly, including the French, the ‘little darlings’ who make the films and writers who claim to have writer’s block, which is something he does not believe in. He said that he has ‘never done a structure in my life … Part of the joy of sitting down to write is to see what happens.’

In a discussion of writing medieval fiction afterwards, Elizabeth Chadwick reminded us that ‘A writer is a bridge between now and then’ and Matthew Harffy, talking about the difficulty of accessing the medieval mindset, asserted that ‘Authenticity is more important than accuracy.’

Ian Mortimer, author of the very popular Time Traveller’s Guides, used his platform to disagree most vigorously with the traditional way of teaching history, with its ‘God’s eye view of the past’. He called for ‘free history’ rather than neutral, formulaic history.

Kate Quinn highlighted something every historical writer can relate to when she said ‘You run into the danger that you never finish the research.’ Ain’t that the truth (I speak from experience …)

On Saturday evening, there was a gala dinner in the incredible Great Hall which dates back to the time of Richard II, with after dinner speeches and the announcement of the overall winner of the First Chapters competition, Lenore Hart, for ‘The Alchemy of Light’. Entertainment was by the Sea Gals, who sang sea shanties with great gusto.

On Sunday, Diana Gabaldon took a very different line from Bernard Cornwell. He had advocated not getting involved with the scriptwriting, but she has very much been part of the production of the scripts for the Outlander series. She gave us insights into the process: the writers’ room, the showrunner who produces the ‘beat sheets’, the way changes are made for political, gender or race reasons. She described how, if you are not writing within a recognised genre category, you need to ‘make it as good as you can so they don’t care whether it doesn’t fit in a box’. She wrote Outlander ‘as a practice novel to learn how to write a book’, having intended to write crime. And there was common ground with Bernard Cornwell when she said ‘I don’t write in a straight line … It comes to me in pieces.’ So anyone who worries about not having their book completely mapped out in advance can relax a little.

My friend Alison Morton chaired a lively panel discussion with authors Kate Quinn and Ruth Downie, all brilliantly costumed in Roman outfits, about how ancient Rome has been portrayed on the screen. They highlighted the eternal fascination we have with Rome and how it’s all about common humanity but also about the great differences between their outlook and ours. ‘What is it about blokes with swords?’ Alison asked, before describing how she came to write her Roma Nova series, about a part of the Roman Empire surviving into the modern age – a Roman Empire ruled by women.

Jane Johnson, in her vibrant talk, proved that ‘The most authentic writing comes from the depths of your experience’ when she described how she met her husband during a dramatic and romantic adventure in the Atlas mountains while she was researching The Tenth Gift. They now live in Cornwall and location clearly feeds into and sustains her novel-writing. Like many of us, it’s when she trips over an interesting historical fact that her imagination kicks into gear. ‘One of the reasons I write is to find those secrets in our history,’ she says, while adding that ‘It’s more difficult in many ways to write about history that’s within people’s memory.’ She has had an amazing career as publisher as well as writer and worked with Peter Jackson on the Lord of the Rings films in New Zealand; she published Tolkien’s books at George Allen and Unwin and she launched the Voyager imprint which published Stephen King and George RR Martin. I’ve read several of her books and am really looking forward to reading the latest, The Black Crescent.

Finally, Scottish author Shona MacLean discussed with her agent Lisa Highton how she never intended to be a novelist at all. She was all set for an academic career, but a job move for her husband led to her living in a small town in the north east of Scotland where she became interested in its history: what she learned turned into a novel, The Redemption of Alexander Seaton. Not only have I read this novel, but I went to school in Banff for three years so I was keen to hear what she had to say! What came across strongly was her passion for the period and more than that, the locality: even when she was under pressure from her publisher, what mattered most to her was a setting she could relate to. There was also a pressure to write books in a series – this seems to be particularly the case when your story involves a crime or two! She warned of ‘the marshes of research’ but her love for the history of Scotland and her respect for ‘the spirits of the folk’ really shone. Her latest book, The Bookseller of Inverness, is a standalone (I’ve read this one too!) and is set in the aftermath of Culloden. It powerfully depicts the trauma of defeat and the risks of staying loyal to a cause that’s been lost, as well as the corruption of faith and honour that fear and oppression may bring.

I said at the start of this blogpost that a major part of the appeal of a conference is the chance to meet and talk. I was delighted to enjoy meals at the White Hart at Dartington with my friends and to meet new writers and readers. Afterwards, I joined my friend Clare Flynn, multi-published historical novelist, in a beautiful old Devon cottage (well, it had to be old!) for a brief writing retreat. I was working on revisions for my new edition of The Chase, which counts as historical these days as it is set in 1989, (the ebook is now out in this edition with a new cover - paperback to be updated very soon), plus my forthcoming book of short stories, One Morning in Provence. More about these in a future blogpost!

Interested in writing or reading historical fiction? Find out more about the HNS here.

Find solace in creating your home writing retreat - 7 tips and an invitation

In ‘normal’ life – which with every passing day right now takes on the shape of a mirage – how often have you dreamt of going on a writing retreat? Now, we’re in a time of crisis and there’s no choice: we can’t get away to write. We may have extra time at home, but that is time we didn’t choose to allocate to writing. It’s time where we may be distracted by family concerns and commitments, such as home-schooling our children. It’s also time in which to fret about the future – and fretting isn’t good for the creative muse.

All the same, people are pursuing new interests and spheres of knowledge. We’re rediscovering the pleasures of crafting. We’re learning languages or doing online fitness workouts. It’s quite amazing.

And you? You want to write. So today’s post is all about seeing your home (which at times may be feeling like a prison or a cramped overcrowded madhouse) as a haven. A retreat, in fact.

Here’s 7 tips for setting up your writing retreat at home.

1.  Choose a time. Your commitments are not going away. The dog needs a walk. The elder child needs to be coaxed into doing some schoolwork. The toddler needs to be watched in case they blunder into a sharp corner or decide that shoving a clothes-peg up their nose is the greatest idea in the world. You need to review the shape of your day – a shape that may have changed radically since lockdown. You used to write when the kids were at school. Now you may have to opt to rise before they do, or stay up late after they’ve gone to bed. You may need to bargain: you will give the family time and attention on condition that they give you your ‘me’ time to write. The other thing that’s important in all this is to try to negotiate a time that suits them and suits you, which is about knowing your own ‘best’ times of day in terms of alertness and creative flow.

2.  Choose a place. When we dream of retreats we dream of cottages by the sea or high-ceilinged rooms with a view or serene libraries, hushed as a monastery. Well, not now. You are going to have to claim some territory in that over-crowded land you call home. It may not be ideal, but it is worth selecting a location within the house where you put a flag up saying ‘This is my writing territory’. You may have a loft, a shed, or a spare room. You may not: then you’re going to have to choose your bedroom, or a corner of the living-room or the end of the kitchen table. Once again, it’s clear you’ll need to negotiate because all these places have other claimants too. But I think it is time to be tough, especially if you allow other people in the household to mark out their special places as well. In your chosen location, put down some possessions associated with your writing: your notebook and pens, the book you’re taking notes from, the laptop. These are visual cues to you and to the family that you mean business.

3. Make the special place just that – special. It’s important to see your writing retreat as a pleasure. So make everything about it as joyous or as peaceful as possible. Work in natural or good lighting. Sit on a comfortable supportive seat. Play music in the background, if that helps you. Use scented oils in a diffuser. I use a Tisserand pulse-spot roll-on which has rosemary, mint and bergamot in it. Write in a beautiful notebook where even to touch the paper is a pleasure. Use your favourite pen. Wear a silk kimono if you want to, or your fleecy onesie.

4. Ring-fence your creativity. You need to put up an imaginary barrier to distractions or worries or guilt. This can take the form of an actual sign you put up: Keep Out, or Silence Please (I have a Bodleian Library Silence sign I hang on the doorknob). You can also have a notice or card propped up in front of you with a favourite quote or a few words saying ‘You can do it’ or ‘Stay with it’ or ‘You deserve time to write’ or ‘Your words matter’ or any other encouraging message you want to give yourself. Switch off the distractions of emails and social media notifications. Don’t listen to the news (I am rationing tuning into news bulletins these days). Ask your family members to write down any questions or requests and place them gently just outside your place of creativity: you’ll attend to them later. Wear headphones, not just to shut out extraneous noise but as a visual signal to the others that you are, literally, in your own head-space right now. Have a pad of post-its by you and if any distraction, reminder for your to-do list or anxious thought arises, jot it down there and push it aside, for later. Don’t break the now of your retreat.

5.  Have modest goals. If you’re feeling stressed, don’t add to that stress by being too ambitious. Set a reasonable time-limit and break the big creative task down into smaller, achievable goals. Write a poem. Write a scene or a flash fiction. Feel good about that. Don’t equate sheer volume with value. If you have found the perfect image for how you or your character feels, that writing session has been totally worth it.

6.  Give yourself breaks to rise and walk about the room, or do some stretches. (As I write this, I am actually chuckling at myself, because I am notorious for locking myself into a fixed, hunched position for hours on end. I need to take my own advice!)

7.  Find support and community if aloneness isn’t working for you. Move beyond the family who are on your side but who may not necessarily understand how you’re feeling. Join fellow creatives in co-working sessions. Just knowing that other people are quietly working with you can be a real encouragement and solace. It can also create a sense of accountability, if you have buddies to discuss the session with, before and after, sharing intentions and what was achieved. It’s a paradox that you need to create a kind of ‘bubble’ round yourself for flow to happen, but that bubble isn’t burst in the presence of other creatives.

UPDATE: I’ve now developed a self-study mini-course, Create your Home Writing Retreat. Find out more here.

Invitation: I’ve just run my second free online writing retreat (Sat 4th April), after the first went so well a couple of weeks ago. Attendees have reached out to me afterwards saying how valuable they’ve found these sessions so it’s likely I will host more! If you want to know when I arrange the next one, please sign up for the Fictionfire newsletter via the form below - you can unsubscribe at any time.

Moonstruck: meeting Buzz Aldrin

Three years ago, I met one of the men who walked on the moon. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Go out this evening and look up. The moon is a symbol of change: a few nights ago it glowed red as our planet cast its shadow on it during a lunar eclipse. It can glow pale silver, it can be dark grey. It can be a sphere, a semi-circle, a sliver – and it can disappear entirely. We cast it in the role of goddess of love and inspiration, haunter of our nightmares, presider over inspired madness. The moon visits us – but half a century ago, we visited it. Humankind, the lover of this mistress of our imaginations, came calling.

So, in honour of that, here’s the post I wrote about the time I met Buzz Aldrin (from my previous blog, Literascribe, in June 2016).

‘I’m sitting in the gallery of the Sheldonian Theatre, one of the most beautiful if not one of the most comfortable venues in Oxford. Looking down across the packed floor, I see a tanned face and a white beard through the glass of a side door. Moments later, in he comes, wearing a beige blouson jacket with embroidered badges on it. He waves like a king and air-punches like a prize-fighter as he makes his way through the applauding crowd.

He’s Buzz Aldrin.

His sassy, witty ‘Mission Director’ Christina Korb conducts the interview, trying to keep him on the straight and narrow, but she has trouble managing the blurted reminiscences and anecdotes. The man is bursting with things to tell us. He’s opinionated, forceful, waving be-ringed hands, talking about the Omega watch he wore on the outside of his spacesuit because it’s kinda hard to see the time otherwise.

I read Andrew Smith’s fascinating book Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth several years ago, struck by the poignant reason for its composition. At that time, only nine men were still alive who had walked on the surface of the moon, so he set about interviewing them while he could.

Well, there’s fewer than nine now. That is why several hundred people have queued in the chill rain outside and will later queue for the best part of an hour to get their books signed. I’m one of them. For a moment, we’re in contact with history, with what now seems a lost idealistic era. I grew up with the sense that space held all potential. I’d read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian and Venusian series. I’d read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. The stars, the planets and the dear old moon itself held out dreams of adventure and fulfilment.

So tonight we lap up the bombast and the showboating, enjoy the clearly oft-repeated wisecracks, the whole display of it all, because although this man is 86 now he is more alive than most we’ll ever meet and this man walked on the moon! He wears a t-shirt saying ‘Get your ass to Mars’ and is passionate about sending humans there, saying that a human can do in a week what took Spirit and Rover five years. He describes his spacewalk, saying he ‘wanted to putt putt putt around like George Clooney in Gravity.’ He says yes, the Russians put Sputnik up there but ‘if you put up a dumb satellite you don’t give it a parade and everybody loves a parade!’ What’s more, they put a dog in orbit and left it there – ‘at least we brought our monkey back.’ He expresses regret at the loss of Neil Armstrong. He talks of his family and his sense of destiny: his mother was Marion Moon and his father knew the Wright brothers. Yup, it was all meant.

When I eventually reach the head of the queue and he signs my copy of No Dream is Too High, I burble something about looking up at the moon from a Scottish garden when I was a little girl, amazed to think he was up there. ‘My mother came from Edinboro…’ he smiles and I pass on, past the selfie-taking crowd. Outside the Sheldonian I wish the clouds would part and I could see the old man’s stamping ground.

I remember another night, years ago, when I looked at the moon and it gave me an idea for a story of ‘something strange, spectacular and out of this world.’ This idea grew into a children’s book, Hinterland, which made it to the shortlist of a significant prize for unpublished novels. I remember the magic of writing that story, of describing grey dust and a terraced crater like an amphitheatre and ‘hanging like a jewel against the dense black void, with fat blue oceans and swirling white clouds’, our planet. And I think to myself, I need to rediscover what that story meant to me and maybe, just maybe, roll it out onto the launchpad once more and send it into the ether myself.

So thank you, Buzz.’

Three years on, after a week of TV programmes celebrating the moon landing mission, what are my thoughts on re-reading this post? The moon missions and the space programmes still speak to us of heroism, imagination, persistence, resilience, and all the power of human aspiration. We are in awe of the courage of the astronauts. We are in awe at the sight of the mighty and beautiful Saturn V thundering into the sky, fuel roaring and crackling as it burns its way into the heavens. This is wonderful. Fifty years on, it is still heart-stoppingly wonderful.

Yet we live on a riven planet, despairing as prejudice and the meaner aspects of human nature hold sway. Our planet is in more danger than ever before – and that is down to us. No stray asteroid or conquering alien race threatens us: we threaten ourselves.

Buzz and his like remind us that even in imperfection, in in-fighting and rivalry, in near-misses and tragic accidents, in times when it doesn’t seem worthwhile to believe in any ideal at all, that vision and a sense of human destiny still matter.

Keep going out there and looking up. Keep dreaming. Keep asking for the moon. And the stars. And everything we as humans are capable of. Keep trusting we can be the best we can be. (And by the way, that doesn’t mean going back to the moon simply to wrest the mineral riches out of it. I would rather we never went back than that we went back as raiders and exploiters. We have done enough of that on our own sublunary globe.)

As for Hinterland? Still waiting on the launchpad – but that doesn’t mean it won’t blast off sometime! In the meantime, the next book on my personal launchpad is The Unputdownable Writer’s Mindset. Because writers dream and take their own kind of risks; they need to believe those risks are worth taking. Even if they’re not flying to the moon.

Visit www.theunputdownablewriter.com to sign up for advance news and sneak peeks ahead of publication.

Paying tribute to Barbara Large

Many years ago, I arrived in the beautiful and ancient city of Winchester, carrying a novel I had nearly completed. I was wrestling with guilt because for the first time, I had left my two young children with their father, so that I could have a couple of days to myself. I had set off on a bold adventure: I was attending what was then known as the Winchester Writers’ Conference, an annual event attended by hundreds of writers from all over the world. 

Shortly after my arrival, a slender dark-haired woman with a Canadian accent came to chat with me. Back in the days when there was scarcely any internet and certainly no Facebook groups for writers, we were used to working in isolation. I had come seeking information but more than that, I was looking for connection. I didn’t really understand at the time just how significant those connections were going to be and that meeting Barbara Large MBE, the conference’s founder and Director, was going to change my life.  

Barbara, who died in March of this year, was an extraordinary person. Her will and energy were phenomenal. I was always in awe of her dedication and her genuine concern that no writer should feel alone or adrift in the literary world. She welcomed and encouraged every single delegate and she celebrated the success of conference attendees with as much pleasure as if that success was her own. Even when she retired in 2013 after 34 years of presiding over the conference, she kept on reaching out to writers and running her own Creative Words Matter courses, with the help of Adrienne Dines and Sarah Mussi. At last year’s conference she was physically frail but her will undaunted, her joy undimmed. Her indomitable spirit was still an example to us all. 

Barbara’s favourite expression, when she made her annual welcoming address and when she drew each conference to its close, was to call us her ‘family of writers’. She listened, sympathised, and encouraged. She drew us together, establishing connections both personal and professional. 

When I was at last a published author, I started a whole new relationship with Barbara. She first invited me to give a talk at the conference and then to run workshops and give one-to-ones. Winchester became an annual feature in my working calendar. I ran some weekend workshops for her in Shawford at other times of the year. Barbara opened up a whole new career for me as a creative writing teacher and editor, culminating in my setting up Fictionfire Literary Consultancy ten years ago. 

Over the more than two decades I have been attending what is now the Winchester Writers’ Festival I have made friends with so many fellow writers – a couple of whom I met that very first year. It all comes down to that first tentative visit, where Barbara made me welcome and made me feel seen and understood. 

This year’s Winchester Writers’ Festival starts on the 14th June and you have until the 10th to book your place. I won’t be teaching there this year but I will be raising a glass to Barbara and all she stood for: an unselfish commitment to sharing knowledge and experience, a dedication to being an encouraging voice, cheerleader and guide. I’ll be sending my good wishes to everyone there this year.

We writers are far less alone than we used to be, thanks to the internet. We know more about the world of publishing than we used to do. We are able to self-publish in a way we couldn’t before. We can research agents, attend events online and offline. We are connected. 

But still in the wee small hours we may be full of doubt about the value of our work. We may feel alone with those doubts and wonder if we will ever be able to complete that book or find a publisher. 

Barbara would say to you: ‘Yes, you can! You’re not alone! You are part of the wonderful family of writers – welcome!’ And she’d go on to regale you with the famous anecdotes of the delegate lost in the nearby cemetery and the pink nightdress on the bed of one male delegate’s room … 

I hope that in your writing life you find true guides and cheerleaders. Seize every opportunity to attend events where you may meet them – you never know where it may lead!

You can read some of my blogposts about the conference on Literascribe, my previous blog. Just follow the tags in the sidebar - Winchester Writers’ Conference and Winchester Writers’ Festival.

I will be teaching on Oxford University’s OUSSA summer school programme and the Creative Writing Summer School at Exeter College as usual this year.

I’m also working on my new book, The Unputdownable Writer’s Mindset - visit www.theunputdownablewriter.com to sign up for advance news and sneak peeks ahead of publication in the autumn.