Building 'The World'
I wrote in my last post about the three spheres of awareness I begin thinking about and crafting when I start an historical novel. These are: The World, The Voice, and The Event. These areas of awareness are overlapping, naturally, but each one requires slightly different approaches. I'll talk first about The World.
My goal is to create the historic world of the novel so that it lives and breathes in present time for my reader. I do this through detail. I work to weave fact-based details into my characters' experiences, their activities, their relationships, their conflicts, and their dialogues with each other. Where do you get the details? You can start by collecting photos, especially if you're a visual person. I keep mine in a private Pinterest file, or you may print them and put them on a board. But if you're going to create an entire world for your novel, you're going to need more than pictures. You will have to experience the world you're writing about, and you're going to need to experience it with all five senses.
For instance, before writing The Second Mrs. Hockaday, I spent years visiting Civil War battlefields, museums and historic sites. When I began in earnest on the novel I sought out specific sites in my region -- notably an antebellum manor house and an historic upstate farm -- which I visited on quiet week-days and in the off-seasons. This cut down on the number of people around me (and their cell-phones!) as well as mechanical intrusions, like landscapers using weed trimmers. On a quiet day, I found I could really get in touch with the special atmosphere of these places: the smell of the manor house (woodsmoke and bitter herbs), the sounds on the farm (clink of a harness, bullfrogs singing in a spring pond, someone hefting an ax at the edge of the woods) and the feel of things (the heft of coin silver, roughness of homespun, coarse texture of a collard leaf). I photographed all these things, but more importantly, I took notes of all my sensory impressions, knowing that my characters' senses would be engaged in the same manner.
As a novelist, I'm aware I'm only going to use a small percentage of what I write in my notebook, but that small percent is priceless. It is literally food for the imagination: it's how I spin fact into fiction.
Next time: The Voice.
My goal is to create the historic world of the novel so that it lives and breathes in present time for my reader. I do this through detail. I work to weave fact-based details into my characters' experiences, their activities, their relationships, their conflicts, and their dialogues with each other. Where do you get the details? You can start by collecting photos, especially if you're a visual person. I keep mine in a private Pinterest file, or you may print them and put them on a board. But if you're going to create an entire world for your novel, you're going to need more than pictures. You will have to experience the world you're writing about, and you're going to need to experience it with all five senses.
For instance, before writing The Second Mrs. Hockaday, I spent years visiting Civil War battlefields, museums and historic sites. When I began in earnest on the novel I sought out specific sites in my region -- notably an antebellum manor house and an historic upstate farm -- which I visited on quiet week-days and in the off-seasons. This cut down on the number of people around me (and their cell-phones!) as well as mechanical intrusions, like landscapers using weed trimmers. On a quiet day, I found I could really get in touch with the special atmosphere of these places: the smell of the manor house (woodsmoke and bitter herbs), the sounds on the farm (clink of a harness, bullfrogs singing in a spring pond, someone hefting an ax at the edge of the woods) and the feel of things (the heft of coin silver, roughness of homespun, coarse texture of a collard leaf). I photographed all these things, but more importantly, I took notes of all my sensory impressions, knowing that my characters' senses would be engaged in the same manner.
As a novelist, I'm aware I'm only going to use a small percentage of what I write in my notebook, but that small percent is priceless. It is literally food for the imagination: it's how I spin fact into fiction.
Next time: The Voice.
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