12 Writing Process - History, Empathy and Intuition

Wendy’s NewsletterThe Writing Process

Newsletter 12 

Thursday May 7th 2015

Hello again. Thank you for returning to my Newsletter.If this is your first time, welcome. 

Another set of crucial decisions for you as a creative novelist are those involving the issue of timing within your narrative. These decisions need not be hard and fast: like the early creative stages, these too can have an improvisational, intuitive element to them.

In the early stages you eventually come to know just when your novel begins, in terms of time. If  you see your novel as  contemporary  - perhaps  now or in the last fifty years = you need to be just as precise with your research as you would be with a novel set in – say - the time of the Tudors, or any part of Victoria’s reign or,  the mid-Twentieth Century.

The purpose of a novelist’s research , in writing a story based at a certain point in history – contemporary or historical - is get caught up in a web of that time. This web is formed by threads of information emerging from the time context of your novel.  Details count.  In every decade during the last fifty years, the time-contexts - the politics, the fashions, and the social and cultural assumptions - have been changing year by year and surging on at an increasing pace.

The cultural and political contexts of the year 2000 are different to 2004, are different to 2006, and are different to 2008 and so on. An election year is different to a non-election year. An Olympic year is different to a non-Olympic year. A novel beginning on July 7^th in London in 2005   would be qualitatively different from a novel beginning the month before. Even if you don’t mention the bombings you need to know that this incident will be buried somewhere in your characters’ minds ever after. Even if such events are not mentioned in your narrative, your own essential awareness of them will filter through in your intuitive writing.

Although I lived through the 1960s I re-researched those times for my 1960s novel Sandie Shaw and the Millionth Marvel Cooker.  For this novel I reconsidered the very different aspects of work and leisure, travel and fashion, student life and home life which were part of the taken-for-granted life in those days.

I had not realised how I had embedded in this novel the social and interactive role of smoking cigarettes until I read one reviewer’s comment that, ‘I had forgotten how much we smoked in those days.’ Such things can strengthen the authenticity of the world view of the characters and the narrative set in a particular time.

I course, in researching the time-settings of your novel, you will only ever get to a partial truth in historical terms. One thing I tend to do, with fiction set in the Twentieth Century, is to build into my historically based time-web threads of – knowledge about - contemporaneous art.  films, novels, radio, documentaries, magazines, photographs and newspapers. Such sources are there for us to absorb a fruitful time-based feeling sufficiently strong to write freely and intuitively.

 I am currently researching a World War 2 novel. The conventional historical sources – so many of them – are easy to access, fascinating to read. But as well as that I am reading post-war memoirs of wartime exploits: William Moss’s  Ill Met By Moonlight the anecdotal memoir, the source of the eponymous, iconic film about wartime exploits on Crete; I am also reading Abducting a General, Patrick Liegh Fermor’s more poetic , possibly more informed, but equally gung-ho take on those same events.  The fact that these two young men were bosom buddies and shared these adventures makes it good to read them in tandem. As well as this the biography outlining the post-war Fitzrovian life of Elizabeth Frink is on my reading table.

As well as this I am reading Elizabeth Bowen’s novel. The Heat of the Day:  a beautifully written, highly personal novel reflecting her own high octane experiences in wartime Britain.  

Unexpected things can happen in this process of empathetic research. Once, researching for another wartime novel I checked the documented radio programming for 1941.  Radio was crucial during the war. I wondered what else my characters would be listening to, apart from news from the war front.

 On the pages of the Radio Times I discovered– around the time when I myself was born -   the very first broadcast performance of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.  My own mother would certainly have listened to that. The name Wendy had not existed before J.M.Barrie invented it.

 So, in my research for my novel Land of Your Possession - although she never told me - I discovered the reason why my mother decided on this odd name for me, her

third child. Lizza, the young pregnant mother in the story, lives through the Blitz on Coventry and the novel follows her adventures in surviving it. And Lizza, too, listens to the radio and hears the play.

All well and good, we creative writers will say. One writer friend, however, recently pointed out to me that there was a problem in using such sources as a key to empathising with the world contemporary to one’s novel. What, she said, if one looked at today’s art, novels, magazines and media to absorb true feeling to write a story set on present times? Think about the extravagant perfection of Interiors Magazines, the excesses and omissions of News media both in newspapers and on the Net. Consider the cloud cuckoo-land of celebrity magazines. Think of the rash of erotic novels, of slash moves.   How ‘real’ is all this for some future writer who bases her novel on the year 2015?

Would such sources give a true reflection of our age for a writer to build the time-web of her novel so she can reflect her characters’ lives in 2015? And then I have the thought that we need to remember that there would be a different time-web for each class, for each region, for each year.

(One thought. Perhaps writing future fiction - very popular now - is a much clearer, simpler project.)

Of course there comes a time when you must roar STOP! And go and sit in a quiet place for a week or so to let all this stuff sink in to the point of empathy and the level of intuition, before returning to the free-flowing  creative processes of writing your fiction that I proposed in my earlier Newsletters.

But this is an exciting point in your writing process, isn’t it? This is when the further development of your novel will be informed by truly empathetic creative intuition which will allow your novel to sit well in its historical frame and still be relevant to your readers in the present day. Wx.