I’ve probably mentioned that I’ve finished writing The Three Stages trilogy. Whilst writing TRANSCEND, the third and final book, all I could think of was finishing it. All I wanted was for it to be over. I was sick of the characters and they wouldn’t leave my head. The moment my trilogy was finished, I was like “This is so sad, I miss my characters. Never again will I write their names on paper” (I have this minor obsession with the “name shapes” and the loops of the letters and how the characters’ names are to write), but I wasn’t too sad. The day after I finished my trilogy, I started writing another book. I wrote about 113 handwritten pages. At first I thought that the reason I couldn’t get into the book was because it was in the first person, a style that I have some trouble writing. It was only a little while later that I realized the problem: I didn’t have characters, I had shadows. They weren’t formed, they weren’t real, and they weren’t the sort of characters that I myself would read about. And I quit. I have quit a lot of books in my time, but in some ways I haven’t. To quit means to give up, and I wasn’t giving up. I wrote as much as I could before I wore out all possible storylines and realized that the characters were just paper cut-outs that didn’t have a strong enough backbone for an entire story. The morning after I “quit” I woke up with a smile on my face. I never wake up smiling because when I wake up all I want to do is go back to sleep, but this was different. For the first time in nearly eight months, I wasn’t writing something. I had no obligations to what I was writing, I was free. The side effect was that I developed a mini-phobia of writing. I just couldn’t write, I couldn’t create, and I couldn’t make anything worthwhile. Then I decided to read through the first book I ever completed. I was twelve when I started it, thirteen when I finished it. I remember writing it; I remember all the songs I listened to at the time which reminded me of it, I remembered the characters. I hadn’t read through this book for a very long time, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. What I found was historical inaccuracy, storylines which didn’t add up, too much dialogue, not enough description, not enough fact about the time, and writing which was so bad it made me cringe. The one thing it did have was potential. The characters weren’t shadows or paper dolls, they were people. I also noticed a few stereotype similarities to CONSEQUENCE. For example: a beautiful slightly naïve female main character in her late teens with light coloured hair. A man in his early twenties with brown hair and blue eyes who is desperately in love with the main character despite her flaws. A second female main character who was quite short, rather feisty, and was most of the time my favourite. Then there was a man who was rather powerful and wanted to marry the main character. In the sequel, he became obsessed with her. So there’s kind of a Persephone Drew Phoenix and the Tsar vibe going on here. Also, my inspiration came from a Roman and Greek myth. That was only vague inspiration; the rest came from a china doll. But as I said, my characters were a little similar in stereotype to those of CONSEQUENCE. This book was also historical fantasy, and none of the storylines added up, and most of the stuff would never ever happen within that era. I paid little attention to historical detail, and the book sucks. When I first wrote that book, I thought it was quite good. Clearly, I had very bad taste. CONSEQUENCE was about five hundred times better, though it took me a long time to accept that that wasn’t also complete crap.
Last night, I started to “rewrite” my first ever novel. It’s now a straight historical, as opposed to historical fantasy, and most elements have completely changed. In fact the only things the same are the names of some of the characters, and their basic appearance. It is, in every sense, a completely different book. I have realized, though, just how hard it is to write a historical. I mean, every word a character says makes me think “would they have said this?”
Also, the other problem when writing a historical novel is that my local library never seems to have history books on the era I need. Once, when writing the sequel to my first book, I needed a book on actresses in the restoration era. I asked one of the librarians if they had any books on restoration actresses and she was like “do you mean restoration architecture?”
Seriously? But hey! At least librarians still exist, though they do seem to be an endangered species right now, as are books. But my rant on how the government is trying to eradicate books and libraries is a rant for another day.
What I was saying before I got distracted was that this book that I’m currently writing/rewriting has “real” characters, not shadows. I was a bit iffy about rewriting it at first, but now I’m glad I am. They were the first “real” characters that I ever created, and I’m happy that I’m coming back to them and writing the book that they deserve.
People say that the best advice for writers is “write what you know”. Well, I am human, I’ve never married the Tsar of Western Russia, I don’t know anything about science, and that’s only a small list of things I’ve written about that I don’t know. I think I made a rather large point of writing things I had never experienced when I wrote CONSEQUENCE. I don’t know the things I write about, but I can imagine them. I put myself into the characters’ shoes, and see through their eyes, I live their lives, and that’s how I write. And it works with futuristic science-fantasy, but not with historical. Because with historical, I have to write from the past. And what is the past? It is other people’s experiences which have been written down, then rewritten by people centuries later. No-one alive today can say what happened, because they weren’t there. They can say what historians say about it, but the historians weren’t there either. And how do we know that most history isn’t just malicious lies? For example when Marie Antoinette purportedly said “let them eat cake”, she didn’t say that. That was a lie that people at the time started because they didn’t like her. In all fairness, I don’t actually know whether she said it or not, because I’m not Marie Antoinette, I don’t know what she said. But I don’t think she would have said that. She may have been naïve, and she was certainly manipulated and kept in the dark about a lot of things, but she wasn’t cruel. But that’s the thing, history’s just guess work. No matter how good people’s intentions are, they’ll never be completely historically correct, because no-one can be. I like to always be right, so that fact greatly annoys me. I know that there will be historical inaccuracies in my book. For example, my main character’s name is Naara. It’s a combination of the Hebrew name Naarah, and the Latin Nara, neither of which would have been used in seventeenth century England
