So what did I learn? I learned that I can write academic prose and fiction in the same month, though not at the same time. It doesn’t matter if I have “free time” to write the other in while I am writing the first. If my headspace is occupied with one project, it can’t divide itself in two for another.

I have a good seven chapters begun on the new novel, and I feel like it is solid stuff. Many of the things I learned were things relearned from previous NaNos. Writing 2 000 words per day does not mean you have to sacrifice quality. It does mean your story will live in your head 24-7 and will generate connections and developments seemingly without your involvement. That is always fun. Characters will grow before your eyes.

I think I do my best writing under this regime. I think 2,000/day is too much for me to sustain for longer than a month, every day with no break. But I know that when i get in a rhythm of writing, say 1,000 a day, the work stays fresh.

I already can’t wait for next year.

I’ve been doing this since 2005, with more, or mostly less, success. The first year I cracked 50,000, and the second year I finished a novel. Since then, other deadlines have got in the way and though the discipline of the month got me moving, I wasn’t able to go full out. That’s not the case this month. I’m beginning a new project one I am really excited about — medieval historical fiction as usual, but with a great fantasy twist — and the discipline of daily writing will be perfect for starting me on my way.
Good luck to all fellow WriMos!

The events of 1938 and 1939 unfold through the eyes of Marta, the governess, a woman uncertain of her own origins.  Why did you decide to make her the viewpoint character?

Good question. Truthfully I can almost never remember why I did anything in a particular way, beyond the fact that it felt intuitively right. But the idea of an unreliable narrator was appealing. I often turn to Jack Hodgins’ ‘A Passion for Narrative,’ – my novelists’ bible – and I think it was his suggestion to view the main characters, in my case Pavel and Anneliese, through outside eyes. That said, through the process of writing Marta grew to become a main character herself. She is a liminal character, not Jewish but close with Jews (and, as you point out, unsure of her origins, so with the possibility of being one); not the mother of a child sent away but close enough to understand a mother’s perspective. She is both on the Bauers’ side and, if only accidentally, against them. I wanted this tension to work in concert with the plot so the reader wouldn’t be certain what they could trust. The desire to keep reading would be to discover how the story turns out but also how Marta—who is still young and naïve—resolves as a person.

Once being Jewish starts to become a problem in Czechoslovakia, Marta spends a good deal of time thinking about what it means to be Jewish, what makes a Jew, a Jew, and what it means that her employers are Jewish.  Have you figured out what makes a Jew, a Jew?

The short answer is that no, I have not. Every attempt I make – that it’s a religion, that it’s a race, a faith, a way of being in the world, an ethnicity—seems to come up short. And the other obvious answer–that it’s a combination of all of the above – seems somehow too easy. To further complicate matters, I know from my own experience that feeling Jewish and being accepted as Jewish by other Jews are two different things. After connecting with my own patrilineal Judaism and with a Jewish community in Toronto, it was still made clear to me in ways both subtle and overt that I was not actually Jewish and wouldn’t be without a formal ritual (and even then, of course, there are those who still wouldn’t accept me).  My own self-identification, in other words, wasn’t enough. I hasten to add that this is different between countries, and even cities. If I’d been a New Yorker with a Jewish father my experience would have been totally different. I would have had many more options available to me.

Long before I knew anything about Shabbat, my husband Degan and I were practicing what we called “24 hours unplugged” in our home – we’d pick a day on the weekend, turn off the computers, unplug the phones, make a nice meal, go for a long walk, spend quality time together. So what is that? Is it something in my genes that remembers a ritual not practiced in our family for generations? Is it a lucky coincidence? Happily for me, asking questions is central to Judaism so this is one that I will continue to ask and to wrestle with as my experience as a Jew grows and as I feel my way through raising my daughter in the tradition.

Your novel connects the past to the present in an unexpected way.  What was it like living and travelling in Czechoslovakia so many years after our family was forced to flee?  Did you perceive echoes and remnants of our family’s past there?  Or has that world vanished completely and for good?

I was searching for echoes, longing for them even, but I don’t think I was honestly able to hear them. More than anything I wish I’d been older, or maybe more mature, when we traveled there with Granny before she died. I’d love another chance to hear (and remember) what she had to say about where and how she lived. At this point the best I was able to do was soak in the little details: the food, the language, the landscape.

When I read novels by people I know well, I am always struck by the little bits of their lives that I find within the story.  How do you as an author decide what of your own life can become grist for a novel?  What is tabu?

Anything goes, as far as I’m concerned, with the proviso that it be in service to the overall narrative. In fiction, the author has the liberty to include whatever “truths” they want with the knowledge that it will be taken as fiction (versus with poetry, where everything is assumed to be autobiographical, especially if written in the first person). That said, I have friends and colleagues who have seriously offended family members who recognized themselves disguised in novels and short stories, and who have vowed to write differently the next time around. When I was writing my first novel, The Sweet Edge, I drew heavily on an old friend from my teenaged years for the character of Ellen. What still amazes me is that I did so entirely unconsciously. When my friend confronted me with it (she was flattered, thankfully, rather than offended) I was blown away that my psyche had acted thus without my knowing it.

It looks like my next book will be a memoir, very confessional in nature, and I think these questions will come more into play for me in that genre. There’s a gut instinct to censor out the most personal and revealing details, which, paradoxically, are often the ones to which a reader can most relate, and which make the book most compelling. Before having started to actually write I’m already coddling myself along, telling myself if I write the “truth” (or my version of it) I can always change names and details at a later date.

I loved the way you built up the layers of historical detail in the book, not just the facts about the political forces that were shaping your characters’ lives, but the depiction of things like what they ate and what kinds of spaces they moved through.  How were you able to do that?

Plagiarism! But really, I read as widely as possible on the time and place and reminded myself of the notion that there are only really seven main plots in the world and the famous saying, “‘Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.” I was lucky to come into several unpublished memoirs by people who had grown up in Czechoslovakia, so they were incredibly helpful to that end, as were books by writers like Alan Furst who write about the Old World as I was doing. I did also draw on the memories I do have of our grandparents—what they wore, what they smoked, how they spoke—especially of Granny who was alive into my adult years.

Everyone I know who has read this novel has said that they read it almost compulsively, scarcely able to put it down.  But as the narrator tells us, it is not a happy story.  Were there some parts that were especially difficult to write, either because of the motions and events they described, or because of their technical challenges?  How do you write those scenes?

First: thank you. To hear that someone read the book compulsively is one of the best compliments, almost as nice as hearing that it made them cry! Which might sound odd, but I take it to mean that the book is working as it’s meant to, and that the reader is, even momentarily, invested in the fiction as in reality.

In terms of the writing, the whole thing was a challenge for me, and I wrote many drafts (of course), but the section from Pepik’s perspective was especially so. The perspective changes abruptly, from female to male, adult to child, and I didn’t want that to feel jarring for the reader. I wanted the voice of the child to seem authentic, and not having spent much time around small boys, I worked hard at that. I wonder, actually, if I would have written it differently now that I have a child of my own. I’m already looking forward to starting my next novel—down the road—and to the new perspective that parenthood will bring.

We will all be looking forward to reading the next thing you write. Thanks so much for participating in this interview, Alison!

A staple of contemporary historical fiction is the novel about the famous man or woman, and a staple of those novels is some speculation about said famous person’s love life. Why not? That’s exactly the kind of information the academic historian is in a poor position to discuss, and it allows the author to reveal the personal, emotional side of a character, which is the reason many come to historical fiction.

But how far can you go? How far should you go? One answer to that question is that you can write whatever you like and speculate as much as you want as long as you do it well. But what if, as an author, you really want to stay close to historical fact, or at least plausible legend and contemporary rumour? The fact is, we can’t prove who loved whom in the past about anyone. We can’t even prove who was whose father if we go too deep in time.

There is a good deal of discussion about this question out there on the intertubes. Susan Higginbotham has been fighting the good fight to save Margaret of Anjou’s reputation. Kathryn Warner is fighting the good fight over on her blog to defend Edward II against the most outrageous attacks. And a really interesting discussion over on Historical Fiction Online about who Alison Weir’s recent Captive Queen and who Eleanor of Aquitaine may or may not have slept with is what started my interest in this whole thing. I can’t speak to most of the rumours used by Weir in her book because they cover Eleanor’s later career and I just don’t know enough about the sources. But in a future post (soon!) I want to discuss the original charge against Eleanor, that she had an affair with her uncle while on the Second Crusade. Today, I want to talk in a general way about how an author might deal with what counts as evidence about a medieval person’s romantic dalliances. An author is of course free to do what he or she likes, as long as it works. But what can an author use, and still claim that she or he is following history?

Rumours that emerge after, say, 1500 are extremely suspect. They usually come from academic circles, not really the best places for buried oral tradition to surface. Stories that are contemporary with a given person’s life are obviously the most deserving of credence. But that doesn’t mean they are true. Historians in the Middle Ages didn’t write because they wanted to get the facts down, and we make a mistake when we treat their works as simple unfiltred repositories of information. The wrote to make an argument and they used standard tropes and moral lessons, one of which was the wayward queen whose lust/greed/jealousy brought down the kingdom. So ideally we will have more than one piece of independent evidence that will confirm what we say.

But, to argue for the other side for a moment, how often do we have more than one piece of evidence about anything that happened in the Middle Ages? Often the chronicler who is the only one to tell us the queen was a bit naughty, is also the only one to tell us exactly what went wrong at the battle of Damascus. Does it make sense to dismiss the rumour, while taking the Damascus account unquestioningly as gospel truth? Not really. We must constantly ask why our sources write down everything they tell us , whose agenda did it serve, how the different stories support each other, and how credible we find their tales. Well, this is why writing history, fictional or non-, is difficult. But also why it is fun!

Next post: Eleanor and her uncle as a case study of how to read our sources.

With the queen came “many other ladies of quality,” Sybille , Countess of Flanders, whose half brother was King of Jerusalem, Mamille of Roucy, Florine of Bourgogne, Torqueri of Bouillon, Faydide of Toulouse, and scores of others whom the chroniclers could not afford the parchment to enumerate.

Do a google search for a few of those names. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You’ll find that scores of other writers, both in published non-fiction and fiction, as well as web-based sources have taken those words as gospel truth and have published that list of names almost word for word — Allison Weir, Norman Cantor, Antonia Fraser, etc.
Problem. Not one name on that list actually accompanied Eleanor to the Holy Land — and as it happens, Michaud mentions none of them. Let’s take a look at them one by one:

• Sybille of Anjou, countess of Flanders: She did eventually make it to the Holy Land, travelling with her husband on his third pilgrimage there, at which point she refused to return home and spent the rest of her days as a nun in the convent of Bethany. But during the Second Crusade she stayed in Flanders to run the county, leaving her husband to go to Jerusalem alone.
• Mamille of Roucy: Died around 1122.  The Second Crusade began in 1147
• Florine of Bourgogne: There is a Florine of Bourgogne who was married to Prince Sweyn of Denmark and apparently they both went on the First Crusade where both of them died in 1097.  One source suggests she remarried and died in the Holy Land in 1102.
• Faydide of Toulouse:  She, at first, seemed the most promising because her husband, Alfonso Jordan of Toulouse did go on the Second Crusade.  But it seems Faydide died long enough before the crusade that Alfonso was able to marry and then separate from Ermengard of Narbonne before he left for the east.
• Torqueri of Bouillon:  Not only can I find no evidence of anyone of this name, “Torqueri” does not even seem to be a woman’s name.  Or a man’s name.

So, frankly, shame on all these authors for simply accepting Kelly’s words as fact, especially the ones who claim to be writing non-fiction. But the lie has been repeated so many times, it has become a commonplace. Faced with that, what does the historical novelist do? Work the myth into the story — or change it?

The book closest to me is actually the section of Livy’s Histories that deal with the Roman wars with Hannibal. It has a very nice elephant on the cover and page 56, sentence 5 begins:

From the Druentia, Hannibal advanced towards the Alps mainly through open country, and reached the foothills without encountering any opposition from the local tribes. The nature of the mountains was not, of course, unknown to his men by rumour and report — and rumour commonly exaggerates the truth; yet in this case all tales were eclipsed by the reality. The dreadful vision was now before their eyes: the towering peaks, the snow-clad pinnacles soaring to the sky, the rude huts clinging to the rocks, beasts and cattle shrivelled and parched with cold, the people with their wild and ragged hair, all nature, animate and inanimate, stiff with frost.

And then I’m supposed to go to the 56th page of the book I am working on and post the fifth sentence from there. This bit comes from the end of a chapter:

After some time she grew concerned. Surely she and Liisa should have reached the high street by now. She was certain she’d recognize it from the noise. She noticed a new smell, replacing the former stench of animal parts and hides. It was burnt wood, but not from a householder’s hearth fire, more like a whole building that had burnt down and had been left to sit in the weather for a long time, a big building from the magnitude of the odour. If she had passed it on her way to the shop, she knew she would have noticed it before. There was no question about it, she was lost.

And now I tag five people:

Nan Hawthorne

ChristaCarol

Dr. B. who can do it when she gets back.

Lady Tess

and

C.W. Gortner

What’s NaNoWriMo you ask? Why, it is National Novel Writing Month. Actually, it should be called International Novel Writing Month because thousands and thousands of people all over the world take it into their heads every year to write a novel of 50,000 words in the month of November, but InNaNoWriMo sounds silly. Okay, more silly.

I usually do this pretty much under the radar, but I decided to come out of the closet on my NaNo habit because of all the hostility to the idea of NaNo I found over in the comments to this thread at Jonathan Lyons’s blog. Look, if I were an agent or an editor, I’d pretty annoyed to get fifteen thousand poorly spelled 50,000 word NaNo novels postmarked December 1 on my doorstep. And it is no secret that some NaNoers can be annoying. But the critics should reconsider. First of all not everyone is even interested in publishing what they write. What’s wrong with writing a 50,000 word novel in a month, just to prove you can? And for someone who does want to get published some day, NaNo is a great tool if you are having trouble getting in the habit of regular writing. Yes of course you are a perfectionist who wants every word to be polished to gemlike perfection. And if at a page or a paragraph a day, you have managed to finish a novel to your satisfaction, then NaNo probably isn’t for you. But if you have worked and reworked your first chapter more times than you could count but never felt able to make that big move to chapter 2, maybe give NaNo a try some time. Your novel can’t be perfect if it isn’t finished.

Here’s a secret: the novel that got me an agent was a NaNo novel. I wrote 50,000 words one year and then finished it up the following November. And no, it wasn’t crap when I was done. Sure, I had to revise, but there is no reason a decent writer can’t write 4 to 5 pages a day of good writing, which is what the NaNo pace is. And my agent doesn’t know this because I saw no reason to tell her. So agents who fear NaNo, relax. The last book you sold at auction may have had its start in those 50,000 words.

So while I’m procrastinating, I will offer you this interesting factoid I just learned.  Did you know that our word “tournament” comes from the fact that, after the two jousting knight had made their initial charges towards each other on horseback, they had to quickly turn around, the “tournament,” to face each other and charge again?  Imagine the challenge of halting the momentum of a galloping horse, heavy with armor-laden rider, and turning the animal in the opposite direction.  The one who could do this with the most speed and skill had a definite advantage.

Now, I angst over it.  Will readers care about my heroine if they only encounter her in the third person?  Will they be bored of her yapping half way through if I tell the tale in first? Do I have a strong enough narrative voice to write omniscient?  Will I get everything in if I stay limited?

And if any of these terms confuse you, Dear Reader (note rarely attempted second person POV),  and you want to know what I am talking about, I highly recommend Ursula LeGuin’s Steering the Craft on this question and so many more relating to questions of more advanced writing style and technique.