In this course aspiring writers will be introduced to the techniques that masters of fiction use to ground a story in a concrete world. From the most realist settings to the most fantastical, writers will learn how to describe the physical world in sharp, sensory detail. We will also learn how to build credibility through research, and to use creative meditation exercises to deepen our own understanding of our story worlds, so that our readers can see all that we imagine.
Visiting Writer: Historical Fiction with Valerie Martin
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Creative Writing: The Craft of Setting and Description
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Setting and description works in realist and non-realist fiction, as well as across literary genres. Consider how to write about your own "primal landscape".
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Amity GaigeVisiting Scholar in Creative Writing
So by way of comparison, let's talk about another genre, historical fiction.
I had a wonderful talk with Valerie Martin.
A writer I really admire, and a long time friend and mentor.
In this interview, Valerie defines what the genre of historical fiction is, and
how to write it persuasively.
And how to research it.
Let's listen.
Hi, Valerie.
>> Hello. >> Nice to see you.
>> Nice to be here.
>> Define for us what is historical fiction.
>> Well it depends if you're a writer or reader.
If you're a writer, it's writing fiction that takes place before you were born.
If you're a reader, you're just looking for books that take place in
the past and particularly a past that is rich in detail, and
it's set in a recognizable and distant place.
>> So how does historical fiction treat setting and description?
That's what our course is about, what we're studying right now.
Is it important to historical fiction, the sense of place?
>> It's very important and I think one of the things young writers sometimes don't
think about is they'll do the research for the setting and they're getting the world
down and then they put sort of contemporary people in there, right?
The thing about the past is that it was not just different,
it was people were different.
The buildings were different, what you ate and what you wore,
what you were allowed to do and what you weren't allowed to do were different.
But actually the imagination and
the apprehension of the future that people had was different.
I think of it this way, your characters can't see the future coming.
>> Well, so can we talk about outside of the time period?
Are there qualities to the genre of historical fiction that market
I don't really think it, I mean if you think in terms of literary fiction,
that there's anything particularly different about historical fiction
because the range of what we call historical fiction is so wide.
>> I'm thinking of somebody like Francisco Goldman who,
when he talks about history he says, the more he looked into history,
the more he became convinced that it was a fantastical place.
And, you know, you couldn't make this stuff up, is essentially, you know,
one way of looking at historical fiction.
And then there's historical fiction that has only imaginary characters in it, and
it's set in a past,
recognizably place and time, which right now property would be in that.
But there's no reference to any particular historical moment or personage.
And then there's a lot of historical fiction these days, and
I've done it myself, which has some characters who we know were living.
>> Did exist.
>> And might have entered into some relationship with an imaginary character.
I mean I think in a general way,
the genre of historical fiction embraces a lot of different kinds of fiction but
the one thing they all have in common is that it's set in a recognizable past.
>> Okay.
All right.
Great. So when you are writing historical
fiction, or something set in the past, what are the challenges?
What are the joys and sorrows of setting your work in the past?
>> I mean it's just hell.
You have to do enormous amount of research even to go a little ways into the past.
I wrote a book recently that's not really historical fiction.
It's about actors in New York in the 70's and I can remember that period but
I still wound up having to do a great deal of research just about the everyday life
of a young and ambitious actor during that period, and
also about the history of Manhattan and theatre and all of that.
There's always research.
But when I do historical fiction it really,
once I've decided where and when the story is set
then I usually try to do the research as I go along but I'll do some before I start.
But I dislike historical fiction that's very informative about details like
a person picks up a cup and thinks this cup was made by such and
such manufacturer in such and such a town in Britain in 1814 and
here it is and I 20 years later and I'm drinking from it.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Or every time that somebody has a piece of a jacket or something on,
we get to find out what exactly what the material is or where it came from.
>> Because in that, you hear the author wanting to use his research.
>> Yeah. >> And just push it into the book.
>> Right, airing your research.
>> Okay, sort of showing off a little bit?
>> Yeah. >> [LAUGH] Okay.
>> And some people are good at doing that.
>> Yeah.
I think Hilary Mantel is very good at doing informative details and
just kind of slipping them to you without you feeling like you have to open
the book that she read.
But my way of working is very different from
that I'm really more interested in the psychology of the characters so
I have to do research into sort of the daily life,
what would be in a room, or what it would take to get dressed.
But I don't like to point at that a lot when I'm writing and
that's one of the challenges for me.
>> So, give me an example of a source that you would use for
one of your books set in a historical setting to find out what their
breakfast routine is, how do you learn that very important information?
>> One of the most useful sources is going to be diaries or letters of the period.
It's also useful to read novels written in the period because,
a novelist who are writing about the world they live in now, you know,
there business is to give you the details of it.
So, especially novels that were popular during the period.
Some of these may not be very great novels, but they're what people
believed to be true about the world they lived in, so those are useful.
Diaries are hard to find and the Internet makes it somewhat less difficult,
but it still occasionally the business of going to the library and walking among
the shelves and just pulling things out is the way that I do my best research.
>> So, say you're a student who's interested in setting a story during
the Civil War, the American Civil War.
What might you need to do before you write your story?
Valerie, can you give us some ideas of how we would practically go about that?
>> Well, there are many books available about the Civil War.
It's the most written about war, probably in the history of the world.
And the story from both sides.
Interestingly, the Civil War was one of the few wars that was recounted and
examined by the losers more than the winners for a while.
But I think if I were trying to write a book that takes place in the Civil War,
well I have a student who actually is doing that now.
Wonderful writer, and she's writing about her family because she knows that,
she's from Kentucky, that there were two brothers and one fought for
the North and one fought for the South and they encountered each other in a battle.
>> Wow.
>> Yeah, so she's got a specific incident.
And so that will definitely narrow the research.
And that would be my advice, is you don't want to just write about the Civil War,
and what people thought they were doing,
or why they made the choices that they made.
You really have to find an incident that's going to be the provocative
incident that you want to do your research around.
Otherwise, you can do research for 100 years before you start.
>> Okay.
So focusing your story on some particular event is really important when you're
setting it in a historical perspective.
Because otherwise, you will be overwhelmed by how much you have to learn.
So let's take your example.
Let's say that your writer wants to write about two brothers, one from the North and
one from the South, encountering each other in a battle in the Civil War.
You want to write this story, where do you start your research?
>> Letters would be the first place and there are a lot of letters.
And they've been collected.
So you could probably even find letters in families where two brothers fought on both
sides, because it wasn't that uncommon, especially states like Missouri and
Kentucky that were really kind of on the Mason-Dixon line.
There would have been divisions of that kind.
The other thing would be photographs,
and that war and all that period were much photographed.
They're the original daguerreotypes.
But there are volumes of collections of photographs which would tell you
really more than almost anything can about what the world looked like.
>> Looked like.
And can you find those in a library, a college library, a public library?
>> Yeah, you can probably find them in most college libraries.
And you can find some photographs online just by looking at images.
I suspect you could Google Gettysburg and get images
of actual photographs that were taken in and around that period.
So, that's always very useful.
And then,
a thing I like to do is look at things like cook books, books of etiquette.
Especially, because I write about women a lot.
You know, what people were eating and thinking about.
What was polite, what was considered not polite.
I did a lot of research about slavery and
I came across a few diaries of slave owners.
Those were enormously helpful.
>> What I was going to ask you about your novel Property,
which has been called a classic of historical fiction genre.
And it's told from the point of view of a woman of a slave owner,
a wife of a slave owner, excuse me.
>> She's >> She's an owner.
[LAUGH] >> She's an owner.
And she of course, it's fascinating to take this perspective.
She engages in incredibly cruel behavior, and she's so
different from you in place and time.
So how do you enter the character, the mind of a character like that?
>> She was a tough one.
I knew I wanted to write about a white woman slave holder,
because I grew up in New Orleans.
So the territory is very familiar to me.
I know where the slave auction house was.
When I was in college, that was a bar, it was called the old auction house.
>> Okay.
And most of the houses in the French Quarter have little buildings in the back
that were the slave quarters, so slavery's really built that city,
and, for a long time, it was, sort of,
the hub of the slave trading industry.
When Scarlett O'Hara tells Missy I'll sell you South,
she means i'll sell you to New Orleans, so my familiarity with the world,
physical world, of the place was a big help and that got me started.
But her character,
I thought of her in a real simple way because I know people like this.
She was someone who was never satisfied with the service.
And I have a little bit of this myself you know sometime you're in a restaurant and
you see someone that's the impulse except she feels it all the time and
she's always angry, because she's never getting the attention and
service that she thinks she should.
>> So, it sounds like you take something that you can relate to yourself,
whether it's anger, dissatisfaction, and
you give it in this entirely different situation to your invented character?
>> Yeah.
>> And then you do this research that would
explore that character in that time and place.
>> Yeah, it often happens to me that way that a character comes
to me from some little quality about myself that I don't like.
And so I just get it all out, have a good look at it.
Learn to live with it.
[LAUGH] >> So
we're interested in the genre of historical fiction.
What do we read to learn some of the great works, whether they're contemporary or
classic, what should we read?
War and Peace.
Tolstoy.
That'd be the first.
And it's long.
And it may take you, you may stop there.
[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]
>> But if you go on, Barry Unsworth,
a British writer who died a few years ago,
was a wonderful writer of historical fiction.
There are two young writers now one is named
a young man named Kent Wascom W-A-S-C-O-M.
Nobody knows about this guy.
The book is called Secessia, which is what the Southerners called themselves.
They called the country that they believed they were living in when they left
the union, Secessia, the succession.
Has got a brilliant style and
is very wild, take no prisoners attitude towards history.
And the last one would be Sabina Murray, my former student
who writes wonderful historical fiction and collections of short stories.
And that's one thing that's hard to find,
historical fiction that's told in short stories.
And then of course famously these days, Hilary Mantel who's is just the queen.
>> Thank you so much, Valerie Martin, for
coming and talking to us about historical fiction.
We really appreciate it.
>> It's been a pleasure, thank you.
>> Thank you.
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