by admin | Sep 13, 2014 | A Good Liar, Authenticity, Explicit details, Fallout, historical fiction, research, Windscale fire
In the great scheme of things, few people really care about absolute authenticity, but I’m one of them. We notice the glaring anomalies, like the plastic water bottle on a recent photo of the Downton Abbey set, but to appreciate much of we see or read in historical fiction we would need to be extraordinarily expert in the details of the period. If hardly anyone will notice or appreciate the details, why do I spend so much time and effort trying to get it right? I do it because I love it; it gives me a smug satisfaction that I can defend the things I’ve portrayed and the words I’ve used. Earlier this week I was reading from ‘A Good Liar’ a conversation between my heroine and her mother about the respectability of the father of Jessie’s unborn child. ‘They live in Mikasa Street,’ Jessie pleaded, ‘They’ve got a bathroom!’. I couldn’t help myself, breaking off from the reading to assure my listeners that the houses in Mikasa Street (built by Vickers in Vickerstown on Walney Island, named after a battleship in the Japanese navy) did indeed have bathrooms befitting the status of the workers to whom they were allocated. I beamed at them, they stared back. I’m sure none of them cared, but I did.
For more distant historical settings, the problem may be less acute, but many readers will have lived through my twentieth century settings themselves and will spot anachronism immediately. I was talking recently about the setting of my third book ‘Fallout’, in Seascale in 1957 at the time of the Windscale nuclear reactor fire. A lady in the audience told me cheerfully ‘Oh, yes, I was there that day’ and told me about watching the smoke streaming from the stack above the reactor building as she walked across the compound towards her office. ‘Which way was the wind blowing?’ I asked, but she couldn’t remember.
The setting for my next book will be around 1970 in the Furness area of what was then Lancashire and is now Cumbria. I’ve already spoken to people who worked in the newsroom of the Barrow-in-Furness newspaper at the time and next week I have a date with an ex-policeman from the same era. He laughed when I told him I was interested in the details of how it was to work in the force at that time: when the details are part of your own life you never think of them as important. But the details in my contact’s memory are gold-dust to me, and I shall listen hard, noting and remembering everything I can. How did the average copper think, talk and act at that time, before all the technological changes we have seen in the past 40 years? How did they relate to each other and to other ranks and parts of the service? Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh detectives call the men in uniform ‘woolly suits’: what were they called by their Barrow counterparts in 1970?
I know already that a large proportion of this authentic detail will never end up in the book. I’m writing a story, not a social history of the police force, and the pace can’t be bogged down by too much unnecessary information. I also know that the little nuggets of truth that emerge fresh and glinting into the text may delight only me and the few others who recognise their veracity. For most readers a few authentic details just add flavour to the image that springs from the words on the page. It could be the smell of something, a phrase or dialect word, a joke, a reference; anything can enhance the picture, like salt in food, taking it from the bland to the memorable. That’s what I’m after when I interview my bemused ex-policeman next week. By the way, all I did was send an exploratory email to Barrow police station: somehow, my request ended up on the desk of a Superintendent whose request for someone to respond carried sufficient authority that I heard back within days.
A year or two back, investigating the disaster in one of the Whitehaven pits in 1947 I came across the actual verbatim record of the enquiry into the disaster held by the National Coal Board at the time. It was tucked away in the archive of the Durham Mining Museum. Reading it was like there being there, and I managed to use just a word or two in the voice of one of the survivors. When the underground explosion happened, he said, they were some way from it but ‘the air fluttered’. What a wonderful phrase. Into the text it went and I love it still. Listening to my ex-policeman on Wednesday will give me the same delight, and hopefully the same treasure trove of authentic detail to mix into the story.
by admin | Jul 13, 2014 | A Good Liar, Authenticity, character, crime fiction, Cumbria, ethical questions, Explicit details, fact-based fiction, Fallout, research, Windscale fire
After finishing the trilogy based on the life of feisty but difficult Jessie Whelan, ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’, I’ve been thinking about the next book, or possibly the next series, having realised the commercial advantages of a series when each book encourages sales of the others. I’d like to set the series in a location dear to my heart, the west coast of Cumbria, and move towards crime fiction. It’s a well-worn genre, and difficult to do anything entirely new, but that doesn’t bother me: the range is so diverse, and the variables so many that my goal of something suspenseful and fresh will be achievable if I try really hard and use what I’ve learned so far.
Part of the freshness I want would be in the location, a neglected part of the country which has wonderful potential – beautiful, complex, layered, with the inwardness that stems from geographical isolation. It’s also where I live, and that could be the source of dilemmas to come. There can’t be a crime story without bad things happening, caused by people behaving badly. They may not be evil people, but they do evil things, for whatever reasons. I will be setting these evil matters within a community that I’m part of and that I’m very fond of. Do I have the ‘detachment’ that may be necessary, and will I care if what I write upsets those who would rather not have the region’s dirty linen, even the fictional dirty linen, exposed in public?
Hasn’t this been a problem all along? In the three stories so far, bad things have happened, and so far my neighbours are still speaking to me. But the bad things so far have all been external, an explosion in a pit, a fire in a nuclear reactor, neither of them caused by the wanton action of bad people. Blame, if we wish to allocate it, could be placed at the door of a process of cutting corners, or even human error, or the impact of political haste or a flu epidemic, not stemming from from deliberate acts by malevolent individuals.
If it’s crime fiction there will have to be a crime, and probably a series of crimes, and the criminals will probably be local. Not every baddie could be an ‘offcomer’ newly arrived from the distant iniquitous dens of London or even Leeds. Of course some of the evil-doers will be local: even a cursory scan of the local papers reveals plenty of evidence of local wrong-doing, and occasional acts of startling ferocity such as the recent multiple killings by a deranged taxi driver, Cumbria born and bred, who shot his victims both deliberately and then randomly before turning the gun on himself.
What I will need to do is use all the geographical details of my chosen setting but find the crime details elsewhere, to avoid crossing the line between crime fiction and ‘true crime’. As with most local fiction, authenticity will derive from the details of place and time, not from the characters, who remain fictional. The exception to this rule I made myself in ‘Fallout’ – part 3 of the trilogy – in placing known people from the Windscale nuclear plant in 1957 into the story as part of the backdrop. I took legal advice about doing so and was assured that it was acceptable, so long as nothing any of these people were given to do or say was at odds with the known facts, or in any way detrimental to their characters or reputation. It would be a different matter if any of these ‘known’ characters had been given criminal things to do.
In the first part of the trilogy I grappled with these choices, and decided to anonymise the village where most of the action takes place, which was loosely based on the village where I live. I changed its name and tweaked the neighbouring locations too, although more distant locations were left alone, visible on the map and in life. All the characters were fictional, although one – the vicar at the time – did possess some of the characteristics of the actual vicar at the time when the story was set. Even so, some of my neighbours were convinced that some of the characters in the story were real people. ‘You got so-and-so off to a tee,’ someone said to me, although ‘so-and-so’ was entirely a product of my imagination and – as far as I knew – bore no resemblance to any real person, living or dead. When I protested, my neighbour smiled, putting a finger to the side of the nose in the time-honoured gesture of ‘You can’t fool me’.
So, known setting and unknown characters and events will be required to make this work without doing insult or injury to my home turf. That decision helps. For a start I won’t have to spend many hours combing through back numbers of the North-West Evening Mail or the Westmorland Gazette and can let my dark imagination roam a little more freely. Now I have to get on with it.
by admin | May 25, 2014 | A Good Liar, Authenticity, cover, Cumbria, fact-based fiction, Fallout, Forgiven, Lake District, promotion, readers, Windscale fire
A couple of years ago, when my first novel was in production, my ‘book designer’ asked me to go to a bookshop and look at covers. ‘See what you like,’ he said, ‘and what will make people want to buy your book. Then we can give Kevin the cover designer some direction and criteria.’ So I looked, and felt that most of them were anodyne and boring. Nothing about many of the covers made me want to take the book off the shelf, never mind hand over any money for it. I wanted to be struck by the cover image, engaged, intrigued – some reaction. It wasn’t about liking or not liking, more about curiosity.
The first book ‘A Good Liar’ played safe: it combined three images, all of them aesthetically attractive, which collectively gave the reader a sense of what lay within. The second book ‘Forgiven’, looking back on it now, played even safer. It was a beautiful image of a green valley and distant a distant snow-capped ridge, and in the foreground a gorgeous granite stone wall which epitomises the area where the books are set. We had tried to create a cover image using photos of pit wheels and women with children, but it was too fussy and nothing was working. The running theme of the book was ‘forgiveness’, and in the end I felt that the distant peek of light in the sky symbolised that feeling, but it was a bit of a stretch. Basically it was just a beautiful image.
Now we’ve had to make a decision about the cover of book three, ‘Fallout’, which is set against the calamitous event of the world’s first nuclear reactor fire, in Cumberland in 1957. It’s a tough time for my heroine Jessie Whelan too – no more details! – and I wanted a sense of anxiety in the cover, nothing too soft or bland. A beach scene this time, I decided, to complement the view of fells (that’s a Norse word meaning ‘hills’ that’s commonly used in Cumbria): one of the wonderful west-facing beaches that we enjoy in this region. But it had to be a special beach scene, and we found one, with a red sky, beautiful but threatening too. Still I wanted more: among the photographs I’d found of the reactor fire was one of a group of workers in their anti-contamination suits and helmets, looking like spacemen. The clever cover designer imposed this image on the beach below the red sky and the cover of ‘Fallout’ stared out at me. I loved it: as intriguing as I had hoped for and authentic too.
I made a poster and took it round the local bookshops to alert them to the forthcoming publication. One buyer at a local attraction flinched and literally stepped away from the image. ‘We can’t sell that here,’ she said. ‘It’s too frightening. Not the kind of thing for this shop.’ It’s not a proper bookshop, granted, but other crime fiction books on the shelf have quite graphic images. I was surprised by her reaction and I should have asked her to explain it, but I didn’t. Later she confirmed to the books’ distributor that she wouldn’t be carrying copies, even though the first two books in the trilogy sell well there. Nothing I can do about it, I suppose. It was never my intention to upset anyone, but then the line between curiosity and aversion is notoriously thin. I wanted the ‘Fallout’ cover to convey the danger that threatened my heroine and her community, and clearly it does that effectively. But I think there’s more to it: most people’s impression of the Lake District and Cumbria is green hills, sparkling lakes and Beatrix Potter. For those of us who love the wild west coast, that image needs a challenge, and I think – I hope – that my three novels portray real life here, not some romanticised idyll. If people’s reaction to the ‘Fallout’ cover starts some conversation about this dichotomy, that’s a good thing. It may cost me some sales, but maybe not. I’ll have to wait and see.
By the way, you can see all the covers on the books page of my website www.ruthsutton.co.uk. Have a look and see what you think.
by admin | Mar 28, 2014 | Authenticity, character, dialogue, Fallout, research, Sellafield, speech, Windscale fire, writing
Writing dialogue is really difficult. I realised this on the very first ‘writing’ course I went on. One of our tutors was Louise Doughty, a skilled teacher as well as a great writer. She gave us the transcript of an actual overheard conversation to look at, and made her point quite easily that the authentic spoken word is often unintelligible in the written form. The transcript was littered with repetitions, unfinished phrases, interruptions, and other distractions that made it almost impossible to read or make sense of. It illustrated the jerky, random thought process which underpinned the articulation we were reading on the page, which was authentic but unhelpful to the reader. Our task was to take this original transcript and edit it so that the meaning was sustained but the speech was still digestible: it was a difficult but very useful lesson to learn, and if I were teaching anyone to write dialogue I would do the same.
In my own writing I use speech and dialogue extensively and for a variety of purposes; to drive the narrative, to illustrate relationship, and to add to our understanding of a character and their state of mind. That’s a big ask. The structure of a person’s speech can illuminate what we know about them: think of Jane Austen’s characters and how much we learn about them by the way they speak and the words and phrases they use. In fact, almost all we know about Austen’s people we gather through speech rather than description. I try to see and hear my characters speaking and build what I see and hear into the words on the page. Some of the nuances of what is meant as well as what is said are hard to capture without use of adverbs or more explicit ‘speech verbs’ such as ‘murmured’ or ‘explained’ that sound clunky and used sparingly.
When it comes to the second draft, I have to speak the text out loud, and frequently change the dialogue at that stage, to make it sound more more like the spoken rather than the written word. The two are quite different, and I notice in my reading that some authors don’t seem to recognise this. Their characters speak with too much complexity, in sentences that are too finely crafted to sound authentic. Of course it’s a struggle. Sometime you sacrifice narrative clarity to authenticity and hope that the reader will not notice, or forgive you.
In the third part of my trilogy, ‘Fallout’, some of the action takes place inside the nuclear plant at Windscale (as Sellafield was known then) during the reactor fire of October 1957. All the characters we see and hear in those scenes are male, with a science or engineering background and intensely focussed on the task at hand. Their patterns of speech must be – and are – completely different than conversations taking place in the home or the shop or at the Friday night dance at the club. You should be able to hear in their voices the tension they are feeling and their intense concentration on the crisis they face. What they don’t say is as important as what they do. I enjoyed writing those chapters after weeks of detailed research and thought about what it would have been like in that place at that time. I rolled it past someone with a similar background and experience to see if he felt it sounded authentic, and took his advice. I think it’s not bad: you’ll have to judge for yourself when the book appears in June. In the meantime I’ll keep working on dialogue, hoping to improve with practice and experience.
by admin | Jan 31, 2014 | Authenticity, ethical questions, fact-based fiction, Fallout, Forgiven, historical fiction, point of view, research, Sellafield, Windscale fire
I’m writing historical fiction set in the region where I live, in the mid-twentieth century and therefore within living memory. I have also chosen to incorporate real events as the backdrop for my characters’ lives. I don’t regret this choice: it has added authenticity and genuine excitement to the story, but it has generated ethical as well as technical questions.
Here’s the first example. In August 1947 104 men and boys were killed in an underground explosion at the William pit in Whitehaven. This event was part of the ‘backdrop’ of my second novel ‘Forgiven’ in which a mining family, the McSherrys from Kells, played a leading part. Violet McSherry and her daughter Maggie Lowery were both screen lasses at the Haig pit, and Frank McSherry was confined to a wheelchair by a previous mining accident. Violet’s brother Tom worked at the William Pit, on the shift that was below ground when the explosion occurred. I wanted one of my characters to be involved, but could Tom be one of the men who was killed? No, I decided, he could not. The families of those killed still live in the area. A book called ‘104 men’ chronicled the lives of each of the victims. I could not ‘borrow’ the identity of any of these people, or add Tom to the list as the 105th victim, without risking offence. Instead, I added Tom to the small group who managed to escape the explosion and walked out of the pit unharmed 20 hours later. This device gave me the opportunity to tell the story from the POV of a survivor, and the story of the men’s survival was fascinating in itself. This story has been widely read and enjoyed locally, and to date no one has questioned my decision to blend fact and fiction in this way.
In Part 3 of the trilogy ‘Fallout’, a similar issue has arisen, and I am still pondering the best course of action before the book is complete and published. This time the setting is the Windscale nuclear plant in Cumbria where the world’s first nuclear fire occurred in October 1957. The events have been exhaustively documented in recent years, although many of the details were not published at the time for political reasons. One of the principal characters is a fictional physicist Lawrence Finer, seconded to Windscale from Harwell, the nuclear research establishment near Oxford. Finer is present as the fire in the reactor starts, threatens to destroy the reactor and is finally extinguished. He is spoken to by men who were ‘really’ there, including Tom Tuohy the Deputy Works manager at the time who was instrumental in ‘saving the day’. I have put words into his mouth, and into the mouths of three other ‘real’ people, based on my detailed research into exactly what was said and done at the time. It makes for an exciting blend of fact and fiction, but is it acceptable?
My editor Charlotte Rolfe is on the case, and has already consulted a publishing lawyer, who has read the relevant chapters and believes that they are OK: the ‘real’ characters are in the background, not the foreground; nothing that they say or do is detrimental to their reputations – in fact quite the opposite; what they say is consistent with the known and documented facts. He also, by the way, said that the chapter describing the fire was ‘rivetting’ which I was chuffed about.
I wonder if other historical novelists struggle with these questions? I wonder if I should give first sight of the ms before publication to the relatives of the four men named in my story, out of respect and politeness, even though technically and legally the ms is not a problem. I want to do the right thing, and I also believe that a fictional account of what happened at that momentous time is worth telling.
Ironically, on this very day, Sellafield nuclear plant is partly closed due to an apparent radiation leak, and the issue of nuclear safety is on our minds yet again.
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