Children of the Storm

(Laurie here again--and the title indicates that Northern California is being pounded away at the moment, with power outages all over, including the part of town where I was supposed to be doing a radio show. Not today, sorry.)

In the Comments section of my last post, Phili asked (and Roxanne seconded) a question I thought I’d make into a main post:

How do you enter into your historical research, how much time do you allow yourself for it (my experience is that once you start, it drags you in deeper and deeper, years after ...), and where do you dig around for the “daily life details”? Any favorite authors?

Especially--how do you choose your reading material? Do you allow yourself the time to go into archives and original sources for specific issues?

As a historian by training who spend wonderful hours in archives, such as the delightful UK Public Record Office, this is something I often think about when reading your historical books, which are so vivid on atmo and details.

As a historian by training, who has spent wonderful hours in archives, including the delightful UK Public Record Office, this is something I often think about when reading your historical books, which are so vivid on atmosphere and details.

As a recovering academic, I am possessed by the need to Get It Right. Unless I’m making something up (in which case I change the names of a place, person, or event), I hate to cheat on the details. If I have my San Francisco detective, Kate Martinelli, drive down a one-way street, I check to make sure the street is actually going in that direction. If I introduce T.E. Lawrence into a meeting in Palestine when he should be at the peace talks in Paris (as happens in O Jerusalem), I acknowledge that he should be there, and slipped away. As now, in the book I’m working on (the ninth Russell, The Language of Bees) I’m working my way through the English artists of the time, to see if Augustus John was actually living in England in the summer of 1924, and if--well, you get the point.

For place, there’s nothing like a good guide book written around the time--a Baedeker’s Palestine and Syria for O Jerusalem, Ward, Lock & Co.’s guide to London for several books, a Black’s Guide to Cornwall, you name it. And whenever I travel in Britain, I keep my eye out for those books, widely available throughout the country, that collect historical photographs of specific counties and towns.

As I get into writing the story, I collect notes of where I need to narrow my research. As you say, if I were to permit my desire for thorough research to take over, I would have written maybe two or three books in the past 15 years. So instead, I read and travel enough to give me a sense of the time, place, and key issues, and then write my first draft. After that I can go back and read more closely in whatever area I need. Occasionally I have to stop writing in order to hunt down some piece of information, but in general, it’s more like a watercolorist who lays down the larger areas of color and then goes back when it’s dry to add the crisper details.

It’s also great to have a research assistant, paid or volunteer. I have a car guy who helps me sabotage cars and repair them (hi Dick!) and offers me specific makes and models for my characters, which makes me look terribly knowledgeable about motorcars. Train questions are also tricky, especially in Britain, where the anorak factor looms large (for the Yanks: trainspotting isn’t just a noir movie in the UK), and I was relieved to locate an expert in the UK to help me figure out which train went where and what their configuration might have looked like. I generally put their names in the Acknowledgments pages of the books, and am continually on the outlook for other experts--to the extent that I posted a pre-edited version of Touchstone’s Cornish speech patterns for readers to have a bash at.

Having experts is also enormously helpful when I get it wrong: I can always claim that it’s not my fault.