Some days I feel like a traitor. After decades of writing about law and legal developments with an almost obsessive determination to find and stick to verifiable facts, I’ve started to write fiction. Historical fiction.
The book of short stories I’m working on is based on a collection of old court records. The work is tough, but thrilling.
For years, before I really got going, I wrestled with the problem of how best to tell these stories. Most of the characters disappeared, slid off any existing records, once their court appearances were done. And few seemed to come from any past that I could find. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t see a way to bring these people to life, as I felt they should be, if I only used verifiable, documented information about them. Even creative non-fiction just didn’t cut it. I needed to ‘know’ what happened to them afterwards, where they had come from, how they had landed in the crisis that brought them to court.
So I started to work on the stories, putting the court material front and centre, researching each character as obsessively as I would a law column. Reading just as obsessively about the period, the characters of the time, their issues and the pressures they experienced.
And then – I just let go, and activated my chronically under-utilised imagination.
To my surprise, it turns out that an imagination can be stimulated to revive. And now I have a revised first draft of a number of these stories.
As I write I sometimes think of Henry James who was so dismissive of historical fiction as a genre. He said it couldn’t ever be authentic because the writer could never properly imagine the inner lives of people who lived in another, earlier, time.
What I’m finding though, is that it’s actually no more difficult to imagine the lives of ‘my’ people who lived in the past, than it is for someone like me, so far from her reality, to imagine the life of, say, a woman caught up in the horrors of Sudan.
I remember all the wonderful books of my childhood that took me into other times and into the feelings of other people who lived then. I see how they have shaped me in a way that I didn’t even realise until now.
Turns out that thinking into the reality of someone else takes an incredible amount of work. Of inner work by a writer. Honestly, it’s far harder to write in a way that’s ‘true’ to one of my characters than it is to write clearly and accurately about even complex, current law issues.
It will take a bit more time to finish all the stories, but meanwhile, I’m starting to feel that the process of this writing is changing me in some way. I listen to conversations differently. I try to hear the inner story of the people I meet.
When I wrestle with the creation of these characters, I find that I have to reach deep inside myself. And that, while they are all so different, they face difficulties that I understand. Maybe this work and these stories are a lesson about the universality of the human condition, even across the years?