Aly’s Comments (group member since Sep 26, 2011)

Aly’s comments from the The Role of History in the Making of Stories: A chat and Q&A with authors Andrew Williams and Aly Monroe group.

The beginnings of a story for me usually come from things stored up in my mind – loose images or voices remembered, that become characters if you place them in a setting, concentrate and let them grow. That probably sounds a bit like organic gardening! The point is that it is not entirely a conscious process. You have to let the characters react to each other and to their context and circumstances. The history and the research are the more conscious part of the process.

For the first book, coming to Scotland after many years in Spain gave me a kind of distance and allowed me to listen again to some of those voices of Spanish people who had talked to me. That eventually led to The Maze of Cadiz. One of the main starting points for Peter Cotton himself was looking at family photos from the forties and realising that the people looking back at me were the same age – or younger than my children. It gave me an almost maternal feeling – and that gave me my period. The first seeds for Icelight came from childhood memories of my own – a freezing winter, a quiet suburban road, a shard of glass in a tree trunk, smeared with blood.

Henry James said you can never really do a historical novel. You're always writing about your own time. Do you agree?

Where do the first seeds for your stories come from?

I’m interested in how people are moulded by the particular time and place that they inhabit, and how they react to it. Readers have their own backgrounds and have lived, or more likely know people who have lived, through the time described. It’s more Grandpa than Cleopatra’s handmaiden because I like that living link. Asps are fine, but women using pencils to draw a false stocking seam on their wartime legs is also interesting, as is the knicker elastic problem post war.
What about you?

My case is a little different. My parents weren’t history teachers (though my father started out as a university teacher), but my grandparents on both sides were immigrants, and I think this may have influenced me in a number of ways – not only my interest in the recent past but also in half belonging to other places.
My books are set just within living memory. So the history part of what I write often begins with things I have heard directly from people who had experience of the time and events I’m writing about. This provides a springboard for research. This was the case with The Maze of Cadiz, when people in Spain talked to me of their experiences under the Franco regime. It was also the case for the initial idea of the Peter Cotton series - and the character of Peter Cotton himself.

A bit of a history geek from an early age then?

Andrew and I will begin by chatting to each other about how we use history in our books, and other things. Over the next two or three weeks, we'd love you some of you to join us and give us your comments and questions.
Andrew's 'The Poison Tide' will be published in 2012. 'To Kill A Tsar' is published in paperback on September 29th 2011.
My new book,'Icelight', the 3rd in the Peter Cotton series, is published on October 13th 2011 and 'Black Bear' will be published late in 2012.



Hi Andrew.You told me your parents were history teachers. How much was history a part of your childhood, and how much does it give you your ideas?