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Edward Charles Novels In History |
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Writing ‘In the Shadow of Lady Jane’ |
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Had you written anything before In the Shadow of Lady Jane?
Under a different name, I had written two business finance textbooks and numerous articles in accountancy magazines, Trout & Salmon and the Shooting Times. Ten years ago I also wrote a thriller called ‘Market Meltdown’, about money laundering in the international financial markets but it was not published, despite a number of agents reading it. Looking back, it was nothing like good enough; the plot was good but the characterization was very thin. But then I did write it on a laptop, whilst commuting from near Basingstoke into London and managed to write 160,000 words that way, a few paragraphs each journey. Good practice I suppose.
How did you start going about it writing ‘Lady Jane’?
I wrote it “top down”. That is, I worked out a detailed timeline of events in the lives of Lady Jane Grey and her family. I then made each of these events into a chapter ‘scene’. At that stage, I created a page for each chapter and populated it with scene descriptions as bullet points. Sometimes I added bits of dialogue and other background ideas, like the weather that day. It became a scruffy working file. This process gave me a sort of populated synopsis which formed the scaffolding within which to write the book itself. I then went back to the beginning, joined my narrator Richard Stocker, and “walked through” the story with him, scene by scene. I tried to make each chapter about 1500 words, which I found was typically a day’s writing, but some were shorter and some longer, as events dictated. Sometimes I was as surprised as Richard was about the people who wandered ‘onto set’ and muscled in on the story, but at least, every morning I had something to tell me where to go and to get me started. We discovered as we went, but I always had the advantage over him of knowing what events were ahead of us. I still had my fair share of surprises though. Some evenings I finished typing and was amazed at where we had been; especially what had been in people’s heads. The ‘who did what and where’ was largely dictated by history; what I was discovering was why they acted as they did, and how others reacted to the resultant situation.
How did you find the necessary research information?
The events of the last four years of Lady Jane’s life are pretty well recorded in biographies and history books. These were my primary sources, but once I had the initial outline, most of the detailed questions were answered through Google . I leave it on in the background, as I write. It allows you to undertake “research of the fly” without losing your rhythm too much. For example, it only takes seconds to remind yourself how far it is from Tower Green to the Chapel of St Peter-ad-Vincula by Googling the Tower of London and looking at the images. I rarely use the other search engines now. One of my daughters showed me that you can use CTRL+F to search for keywords in any document, such as a long web page. Saves hours!
Did you write it by hand or work on a computer?
I did both. During the design stage I made an outline on the computer then printed it out, with big spaces and scribbled ideas into those spaces. Then I typed them into the outline and printed it out again and so on, increasing the depth and density of detail each time. In the end I had every chapter outlined in bullet points. Then ‘all I had to do’ was write the book. I have spent my life composing reports and communications on computers, so when I began the actual writing, I worked almost entirely at the computer from day one, editing and correcting as I went along on the screen. However, I still find the printed page allows me to spot errors and inconsistencies which I don’t pickup on the screen.
How many drafts did you write?
My computer says about fifteen, but I often save a version and move on, just for security. I probably re-drafted only twice to get the first manuscript. However, it was at that stage I realised that the book didn’t ‘work’ because I had invented Richard as a narrator, but by writing in the third person, kept having to describe his every movement, as if he were a key player.
One day I took a deep breath and re-wrote the whole book in the first person. It took me four months, writing three day a week, but it was worth it. Now it was as if I was in Richard’s head and looking at the events through his eyes. I found it much easier to write fluently in the first person and the results were a lot better. After that, I probably re-drafted another four times; twice with my wife editing and twice more with the professionals at Macmillan.
I detest the re-drafting stages, but it really is essential. ‘Get It Right First Time’ is a lovely dream, but hard to achieve in practice, at least in my case.
Will you carry on writing the same way?
I used the scaffolding / first person approach for Daughters of the Doge and for the next book in the series, which is now finished, but whose name has not yet been announced.
Late in 2006 I began writing what I hope will be the first in a different series of books, with a different hero, and set some twenty years earlier, in the Welsh Borders, as Thomas Cromwell tried to bring the Welsh under English Law, with the Council in the Marches in Wales. This time I am trying to write differently; character-driven, rather than plot-driven, and in the third person. Despite those good intentions, however, I still finished up writing a scaffolding.
At my stage in life I have decided to accept what I am and to live with it.
Once a control freak...
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