sarah eve kelly

I’m a coward, I admit it.

If you look at the vital stats of my life right now, you might not think so, but it’s true. Not only being unemployed, but having guaranteed unemployment for the next two years might seem brave. It isn’t really. A lot of people hide in grad school during a recession.

I’m a cautious reader, a cautious viewer, and a cautious writer. For a disorganized procrastinator (does anyone else think ‘procrastinate’ should be a noun, like ‘advocate’?), I’m very cagey about my time. I follow the same authors, the same actors, the same directors, and I will by no means follow them anywhere. This is why writers blow me away.

Yes, I’m going to ‘other’ writers for the moment, because Jesus, look at them. They’ll try anything.

Fantasy writers especially scare the shit out of me. In a good way, mind, for the most part. They are world-builders. Imagine building a world. Some of the more philosophical amongst you will say that all fiction writers build worlds, but these people actually build worlds. I can’t even build a bathroom shelf.

I write historical fiction, and tonight I experienced one of the singular joys of writing what I do: meeting someone you thought you knew, on as viable a social networking website as the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Tonight I met Eustace Chapuys, Imperial ambassador to the English court from 1529 to 1545, canon lawyer and renowned defender of Katherine of Aragon. His name is one that I’ve tripped past hundreds of times, but tonight I sat and actually read about him for the first time.

Chapuys is a minor character in The Fidelity Trial. It was enough, I thought once upon a time, to know where he came from, what he was doing, and what side he was on. Right now I’m doing battle with Structural Issues on about nine thousand fronts (by the way this post is going, I’m sure you’ll be staggered to know that my writing has structural problems), all patiently pointed out to me by my very kind agent and her very kind assistants. Today, in order to tackle them, I thought the best course was to learn a little something about hawking.

Yeah, I know.

In the course of my hunt-and-peck research about hawking, I learned the following things about Eustace Chapuys. First: I spent fifteen years thinking this dude was Spanish. Why? ‘Cause I never looked it up. Bad Sarah. The man is actually French (not French-French - 16th-century Savoy French). He enjoyed hawking. He doesn’t seem, in fact, ever to have lived in the Strand.

These facts helped me resolve a square half-dozen of my Structural Problems. Turns out looking up hawking was a good idea.

My point is this: you can do that in historical fiction. You can look things up in any genre, sure, but in historical fiction you’re not building a world; you’re recreating one from scraps. If the facts about Chapuys hadn’t been there, I’d like to think that I would have made them up, or something similar. But they were there, waiting for me on the trusty ODNB.

I didn’t come to historical fiction because it has corners. (I actually woke up one night with an image in my head of a woman with long, black hair who had fallen asleep at a desk on which a candle was about to gutter and go out. Conjuring that image, to date, has been the easiest part of this novel.) By ‘corners’ I mean rules, a governing system, dates and traits and silver plates that keep you on your path. A lot is still left to the brainbox, but the facts can give you ideas.

That Eustace Chapuys was a hawking enthusiast, for example, gave me a very good idea.

I’ve been stalled on this novel more times than I care to count. When I’m working on it full-time I have a score of tiny stalls in a day. I have to do everything that a novelist does - digging through characters, braiding subplots, perfecting prose, tension-on-every-goddamned-page - but I can’t help the feeling that I have a bit more help than others.

This is where I come back to the borrowed wisdom of a few posts back, because I’m very tempted to say that the work I’m doing on my PhD has more corners, even, than my novel. Facts are facts, after all, and when you’re researching a dissertation you can’t bend facts to make them more interesting (luckily, in my line of work, you rarely have to). I’ve now gotten the same advice from two different people on these two different things, The Fidelity Trial and my dissertation: embrace the anarchy; make things a little crazy. If you don’t have a bit of the crazy, what are you doing? Why are you bothering? Bring the chaos!

Still, you gotta know what you’re talking about if you want to put in a scene about hawking.

Anyway. I tip my top hat to fantasy writers, I really do. The more I read history books and the ODNB, the more I think, ‘You couldn’t make this shit up.’ And then I think, ‘No, you couldn’t, so it’s a good thing it happened.’ (Most of it, anyway.)

This ridiculous post is dedicated to the crazy folks at Absolute Write Water Cooler, who helped me stick my neck out and be a little less cowardly.

Back to it.

Till next time, &c &c.

Related posts:

1. drawing a line for historical fiction
2. history for art’s sake
3. moving, and the best historical fiction
4. on fanfiction
5. ‘congratulating the present’