Is There a Novel in Your Family?

As everybody tells you ideas for novels can come from just about anywhere – news items, magazine articles, films, music, other books, conversations overheard – and crucially from families. A story from my own family gave me the inspiration for the novel I’m currently writing.

My parents met when my mother was sixteen and my father two years older. They both lived in London, my mother in Acton and my father next door in Ealing. They met at a local dance hall which was not unusual at the time. I suppose they must have known each other four years or so before my father, who had joined the Royal Artillery as a fifteen year old boy, was posted with his regiment to India. He was stationed on the plains at Allahabad. The two of them wrote to each other - I’m not sure how often - but over the next six years my dad gradually climbed the army ranks to become a sergeant at the age of twenty-eight. At last he could afford a wife and he asked my mum to come out to India and marry him.

To our 21^st century minds, that sounds simple. But my mother was a highly nervous woman and had never travelled further from London than Southend or on anything more exciting than a train. The fact that she found her way to Southampton, boarded a troop ship there, and sailed the seas for three weeks to a country that could only have been a word to her, still amazes me. And don’t forget she hadn’t seen her new husband for six years! My father met her in Bombay/Mumbai and they were married on the 18^th April, 1937, at St John’s Afghan Church in the leafy suburb of Colaba with two soldiers as witnesses. I have their marriage certificate in my desk drawer.

 

These are photographs of St John’s. The church fell into disrepair, I believe, after Indian independence but has now been restored to its former glory. It gave me a thrill to see how beautiful it was and to imagine my mum and dad walking down that aisle together. It was a story I couldn’t resist.

My heroine, Daisy Driscoll, is a working class girl – as my mother was. She embarks on the same journey to Bombay and she marries a soldier in the same church in 1938. But that’s when the similarities end. I can’t allow Daisy to enjoy the forty-seven years of happy marriage that my mother did - that wouldn’t make a good mystery/crime novel!

An exciting week

This week has been an exciting one. I've sold two Regency romances, one to Harlequin, Mills and Boon who have published four other titles of mine and one to a US digital publisher, The Wild Rose Press which is a whole new venture for me. I've no definite titles or publication dates as yet but it's great to know that the books have found good homes!

Writing is always a solitary pursuit and often angst inducing, so validation is always welcome whether it comes from a publisher, editor, agent, or best of all, a reader. But I've a particular joy in seeing my last two Regencies sailing off into the sunset and that's because I'm taking a break from the period and the genre. It may turn out to be a short break - I really don't know at the moment - but I'm currently embarked on a whole new path and 40,000 words into a novel set in 1938 in the British Raj. The working title is An Inconvenient Marriage. I'll probably need to think again about that title since it could suggest to an unwary reader that the novel is a romance. Sure, there's a little romance in it (when isn't there?) but it's primarily a mystery, crime fiction even, though not a thriller or police procedural. As always, when I'm enjoying myself, the book doesn't quite fit any set category. It's a novel about finding one's feet, gaining confidence in a strange world as well as battling that mystery, and a book that includes quite a bit of social and political detail too. Ambitious, in fact, but I'm loving writing it. And if it's successful, then I'll commit to that trilogy I've already talked about. Yes, really! 

Crimefest

Over the last couple of years, I've been lucky enough to attend conferences held by the Romantic Novelists' Association and the Historical Novel Society and they've been buzzy and very interesting. Helpful too, though sometimes you don't realise how helpful until weeks later.

But since I'm about to jump genre from historical romance to historical mystery/crime, I thought it might be sensible at some point to immerse myself in all things criminal. So I've signed up for CRIMEFEST, described on their website as 'a convention for people who like to read an occasional crime novel as well as for die-hard fanatics.'

And it's not just for readers - there's an awful lot going on: interviews, panels, workshops and a chance to pitch your ideas to an agent or publisher. So at the end of May I'm off to Bristol, manuscript in hand (more likely part manuscript) to take a look at yet another different writing conference. If you fancy it too, you'll find details at http://www.crimefest.com/

How many pen names should you have?

Or should you have one at all? I know that many people write under their own name so why would you choose not to? Perhaps because you feel your real name is too long, too difficult to pronounce or doesn’t fit the genre you’ve chosen. Maybe you don’t want your employer knowing that you write erotic fiction in your lunch hour or maybe you simply fancy adopting a completely different persona. I decided not to write under my own name for some of those reasons and chose Isabelle Goddard for the six Regency romances I’ve published. I have a website under that name, a facebook page and a twitter account.

So why not continue with the same name when I jump genre? Giving myself a second writing name could be hard work and create problems. I might confuse, even annoy, readers who know me as a writer of historical romance and who might buy the new book under that impression. At the same time, I am only just getting known in the writing world so is it sensible to begin again with a new name? Wouldn’t it be better to build on the audience I’ve so far managed to create? The consensus seems to be that if your new genre is similar to what you’ve been doing, stick with the same writing name. If it’s radically different, choose a different one.

But how similar are we talking? I’m still writing historical but I’ve jumped a few hundred years to a very different period – the 1930s instead of early 19^th century. There will a small amount of romance but it’s not central and what novel doesn’t have a little romance? The new book will set up a mystery, threaten my heroine’s safety, and hopefully make some thoughtful social comment in the process. That’s quite a long way from the feel-good escapism of Regency romance.

And if I do decide to go for a different writing name, the first problem I’m going to face is What? Isabelle was one of my mother’s names and Goddard my paternal grandmother’s maiden name. Because of the family connection, I felt comfortable with it and it sounded right for a romance author, though I could be wrong. The point is that it took me an age to decide on it. Finding another name that has meaning for me will be difficult enough, but finding one that sounds right for a mystery series could take longer than the books themselves!

Have You Ever Written a Trilogy?

I’m asking because that’s what I’m thinking of doing and already I’m realising some of the questions, problems even, that it raises. It’s obvious that a trilogy needs to be planned differently from a single title, but writing it will also differ from writing a series. In a series, the same central characters appear in each novel but are presented with a set of different circumstances. Characters may develop over the series, their back stories become more familiar, but essentially each story is complete in itself and as a reader you experience its full force within that one book. I imagine that’s why most series have their home in crime fiction, with each book offering a new crime for the central character to solve. 

To my mind, a trilogy is different. It has much more of a defined shape – an introduction, a middle, and a finale. Each novel tells a different story as in series writing, but there’s another story, too, which slowly unwinds itself from novel to novel, allowing the central character to develop, gradually raising and resolving whatever problems he or she may have, uncovering whatever mysteries lie behind their lives. In that way, the structure resembles a tryptich in painting, which tells its story in three distinct movements.

That being so, the plotting has to be on two levels: each novel must have its own resolution, complete for that particular book, but it will also have unanswered questions, loose ends as it were, from the wider ranging story – until, of course, the final pages of novel number three. The writer will need to know exactly where they’re going in order to raise the right issues, drop the right clues, in the right places as each book proceeds. They will also need to pace their main character’s development very carefully, so that the reader has more to learn of them with each book, but not everything until the final pages. And there will have to be a plan for secondary characters too: where they appear, where they disappear, how they link with each book. 

Did I just say I wanted to write a trilogy?!

 How Important is Setting?




This is the ghoulish entrance to the graveyard of St Olave’s, one of the smallest in the City and one of only a handful of medieval City churches that escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666.  The skulls commemorate the 300 plus victims of The Great Plague who are buried in the churchyard, including the woman who was widely blamed for bringing the disease to the capital. Charles Dickens was so taken with the entrance that he included the place in an article he wrote for his journal "All the Year Round" calling it ‘My best beloved churchyard’, and renaming it ‘Saint Ghastly Grim’.

I’ve just done a Dickens walk in the City of London and it didn’t take much imagination to think myself back to that era. All Dickens’ books are pervaded by their time and their setting - the hope and despair of Victorian London, the wealth and the squalor, the comfort of home and the  menace of the streets. He knew those streets inside out, he felt them through every one of his senses, and it set me wondering how important it is for any writer to feel as well as to know their setting.

When I thought about my own books I could see that feeling the setting has become increasingly important to me. The first two Regency novels I wrote took place in London and Bath. I know both cities reasonably well, though not in the same depth as I know my own county of Sussex. The third book was set in Brighton and in Lewes, my home town, and writing it felt different. I could experience my characters and their surroundings more sharply: the shape of the Downs, the sound of the sea, the calling of the gulls. The latest Regency is set in Rye to the east of the county. I’ve never lived in the town but I’ve visited a good deal and something of its atmosphere - the river and the sea and above all, the surrounding marshland - has seeped into my consciousness. Writing this novel, I still had to take an imaginative leap (and some writerly liberties) because I found few early 19^th century maps of the area and its topography has changed considerably over the years. The river now follows a different course, for instance, and the sea is more distant. The imaginative leap was even greater for Walking Through Glass, set in the mid Victorian era, where I had only accounts of the destroyed Crystal Palace to go on, although an abundance of vivid images.

So is it important to have a deep sense of the place you write about? Is it important even to have visited? Or can you write just as convincingly out of your imagination? Hearing Ian Rankin talk recently, I was struck by the fact that he felt it necessary to drive the length of the A9 in Scotland, the road along which the missing girls in his novel had disappeared, in order to ‘feel’ the landscape. Very strangely, the place where he had imagined the first body would be found was exactly how he had written it! So what does that say about authenticity and the writer’s imagination?

I've just been sent the cover art for my latest Regency romance, Unmasking Miss Lacey, which is due out next March.

The girl is a reasonable lookalike for Lucinda, but Jack!  Oh dear.  He would NEVER sport a moustache and beard.  And the long hair!  I wonder sometimes if the Art Department ever read the books they illustrate.