Don’t Get Hung Up on Your Beginning – Again

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Bring Up the Bodies, Joyce Carol Oates, the importance of a first page, Wolf Hall, Writing Historical Fiction

 

I have just started reading Hilary Mantel’s long-awaited third book and am not disappointed – though it highlights my own insecurities about trying to write quality historical fiction. 

After collecting The Mirror & the Light from Waterstones, I referred back to something I posted on this blog back in March 2015 about learning from the opening pages of a masterpiece like Wolf Hall. Thoughts triggered by a quote from Joyce Carol Oates: ‘The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written‘. She was talking about not getting hung-up on your beginning.

I hope you will agree that the post quoted below still has relevance:

                                                        ******

Recently I read Wolf Hall for the second time. I didn’t mean to, not quite so soon after my initial head-long rush through its pages, but I casually opened the book and Hilary Mantel hooked me in once again. But at least the second time around I was able to look at it with more of a writer’s eye.

‘So now get up.’

Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard… One blow, properly placed, could kill him now…his left eye is blinded, but if he squints sideways with his right eye he can see the stitching of his father’s boot is unravelling. The twine has sprung clear of the leather and a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut.

What an opening. Our hero is in jeopardy. And from his own father. Hilary Mantel has drawn a vivid picture of that cobbled yard and the battered leather boot. The reader can imagine how easily that rough knot would lacerate tender flesh.

Three paragraphs later Hilary Mantel continues:

Inch by inch. Inch by inch forward. Never mind if he calls you an eel, or a worm, or a snake. Head down, don’t provoke him.

When digesting this the second time around it dawned on me that not only is the prose powerful, not only does it push the story urgently forward, but that here on the first two pages Hilary Mantel is foretelling Cromwell’s progress at the Court of Henry VIII. The tortuous, careful advance. The need to ignore hurtful insults. The danger inherent in provoking a man with total power.

Those first pages were surely the last that she penned – and the lesson to us must be to soldier on, to finish one’s book and then go back to craft that vital opening. So, no more delays trying to find that elusive opening sentence. It’s almost certainly too soon. Finish your book, then perfect the opening. Another Wolf Hall is too much to aim for – but one can dream.

Maggie

Another Book For Your Christmas List

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Books for Christmas, Francis Spufford, Golden Hill, The Miniaturist, Waterstones, Wolf Hall, Writing Historical Fiction

On one of my frequent trawls through the treasures in our local Waterstones I noticed that the wonderful Golden Hill by Francis Spufford is out in paperback. For anyone who enjoys a classy historical novel, this would make a perfect Christmas gift.

Having loved the book in hardback, and enthused about it on this site when it first came out, I thought I’d reproduce those earlier thoughts here. Since that time I’ve re-read Golden Hill several times, seeking pointers on how to write a top-flight historical novel. Francis Spufford makes it look easy, but sadly that isn’t so…

With apologies for repeating myself, here, again, are my thoughts on this outstanding book. I’m still waiting for him to write a sequel, or Hollywood to come up with the film. It’s a cracking tale.

An impatient, personable young man from London has himself rowed from the brig Henrietta to the New York shore of 1746, carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. It’s for the vast amount of one thousand pounds – and must be honoured within sixty days by trader Master Lovell, who owes this sum to the London company who issued the bill.

Deeply suspicious of this ‘strip of a boy who comes demanding payment of an awk’ard-sized fortune, on no surety‘ – and with London a six-week sail across the ocean, meaning a fraud couldn’t be uncovered before the money falls due – Lovell and his fellow merchants have a decision to take which could ruin them. Is the mysterious Richard Smith genuine? A bold-faced crook? Up to devious political mischief? Or attempting something much darker?

For everyone agrees he’s up to something. He openly admits to it. Yet despite hints and red herrings, nothing will get the truth out of him – not offers of violence, rooftop chases, a duel, a branding, nor the threat of the hangman’s noose. Smith keeps his surprising secret to the final page.

Francis Spufford’s novel is a fine plum pudding of a book, rich with spice and full of silver-sixpence-like surprises. I gobbled it up, swallowing (along with envy of an author who can create such a clever game of pass-the-parcel) layer-upon-layer of story from which the reader must tease out clues to the secret at its core.

The language is gloriously dense in places. But if it is occasionally purple, it’s the colour of a Georgian brocade waistcoat, the texture of the cloth opulent under one’s exploring fingers, yet not necessarily giving helpful information about the wearer’s identity. This is arguably necessary, since modern language would struggle to convey the landscape of a city where church spires look down on a display of trophy human scalps; where the reality of a duel of honour is a blundering struggle through deep snow, with spurting blood and unexpected consequences; where one of the great cities of the world is in the bold process of creating itself.

Then there are Spufford’s wonderful characters: the feline Tabitha, who hates novels yet quotes Shakespeare; the voluptuous Mrs Tomlinson, who makes Smith a saucy but generous offer he cannot, for politeness, refuse; the intriguingly erudite Achilles, ‘a tall African of about Smith’s age, wearing livery, with long limbs and a tight knob of a head like the bole of a dark tree‘ who has a complex and surprising relationship with Septimus Oakeshott, the Governor’s young aide. My heart still breaks over Septimus.

Historical novels don’t have to be bodice-rippers. They can be Wolf Hall. They can be The Miniaturist. They can be Golden Hill. Those of us trying to write about the distant past can only see such mastery, and gnash our teeth with envy.

 

Does Historical Fiction Require Purple Prose?

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crime writing, Dame Hilary Mantel, Georgette Heyer, Good Housekeeping Novel Competition, Jessie Burton, Margaret Kirk, Shadow Man, The Miniaturist, Writing Historical Fiction

Here’s a question – should I use ‘colourful’ language to convey life in the eighteenth century?

The prologue of Jessie Burton‘s debut novel, The Miniaturist, about to hit our TV screens on Boxing Day, is as rich as an embroidered sleeve and transports you to the affluence and dissipation of her chosen time and place:

‘words are water in Amsterdam, they flood your ears and set the rot and the church’s east corner is crowded…guildsmen and their wives approach the gaping grave like ants toward honey… The church’s painted roof…rises above them like the tipped-up hull of a magnificent ship. It is a mirror to the city’s soul; inked on its ancient beams, Christ in judgement holds his sword and lily, a golden cargo breaks the waves, the Virgin rests on a crescent moon.’

Okay, I can’t hope to match that, so would I be safer sticking to plain. twenty-first-century English, which can be equally gripping?

A world away from eighteenth-century Holland is the taut opening of Margaret Kirk‘s psychological thriller, Shadow Man, which won the Good Housekeeping Debut Novel Competition in 2016 and is set in contemporary Inverness.

‘By midnight there are bodies everywhere. Her tiny flat is crammed to bursting, but people are still stumbling through the door, waving packs of Stella or Strongbow and wrapping her in Cheerful beery hugs.
She doesn’t remember inviting them all – doesn’t recognise half of them, when she stops to think about it – but so what. For the last four years, she’s been juggling coursework with her shifts at the all-night garage, slogging away at her degree while it felt like the rest of the world was out getting laid, or legless. Or both.’

Using minimal description, this writing convincingly evokes a student party. There’s also that clever ‘bodies everywhere’, hinting at further – dead – bodies to come.* No wonder the novel grabbed the judges’ attention.

Yet few of us are familiar with Georgian London, so how am I to write my own book, The Maid’s List, without sounding like a pastiche of Georgette Heyer? Dame Hilary Mantel has written of ‘the need to broker a compromise between then and now’. Easier said than done, if you’re neither Mantel nor Burton.

On this blog we write about books, about reading and about writing, but never share our own draft efforts. Perhaps we should, since I believe it helps to see how others struggle to get their stories onto the computer screen. I’m therefore giving you an extract from The Maid’s List, complete with a touch of purple that I’m still working to eradicate.

‘I’m convinced these men are no better than my master, and wonder afresh what they do gathered around that table, with voices that seem to haggle like those of market traders. Silk-stockinged men, with gold-topped canes, sprawled in the worn leather chairs, with their knees spread wide and lace frothing at their cuffs. I rattle the glasses on my tray, to warn them I’m at the door. One of them has taken the pot from the cabinet and is pissing into it. He glances up from the yellow stream and grins as if to say, you’ll have the privilege of emptying this. Which, indeed, I will. Probably while it is still warm.’

As always, I suppose it’s down to the individual write to do the best she/he can. After all, the more variety there is in books, the richer the reader experience.

 

 

*Spoiler alert: having recently started Shadow Man, I could be jumping to conclusions here!