Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

I should put my cards on the table from the get-go: I don’t ask this question as an academic exercise or abstract hypothetical, but as something I live, breathe and am nagged by every day. That’s because I’m currently deep into drafting a historical novel – and not just a historical novel, but an ancient-historical novel to boot, set in the Greek world of the fourth century BCE. (As one friend asked me, with a sceptically raised eyebrow: “Do people read novels set that far back?”) So what I have to say on this topic is more personal credo-in-progress than ex cathedra pronouncement: what it lacks in academic rigour it makes up for in personal urgency. . .

My first guiding thought is that historical fiction should be genuinely historical in the sense of respecting and drawing inspiration from the otherness of the past. To quote the wonderful opening sentence of L.P Hartley’s The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” And crucially, “doing things differently” encompasses not just wearing funny hats or riding horses instead of driving cars, but how people think and what they think about (and consequently what they feel). IMHO, one of the worst reasons for writing a historical novel is that it provides an exotic/pretty/colourful/scary/romantic backdrop for a story that could be set at any time. The idea of a “timeless story” should be anathema to a historical novelist: history is more than just scenery and costume.

My second guiding thought – which may superficially (but only very superficially) seem at odds with the first – is that the past, to those living it, is modern. It’s an obvious truth – but one that it’s surprisingly difficult to keep at the front of one’s mind – that people in the past didn’t think of themselves as living in the past: they were living their present. Reading ancient Greek literature, I’m often been struck by how, although the context maybe radically different from our own in terms of belief-systems, the psychological attitudes that people bring to those beliefs (encompassing irony, scepticism, humour, mockery) can seem more modern than much of what is written in the twenty-first century. At dizzying moments, Aristophanes’ anarchic satire, or Thucydides’ cold-eyed, forensic politico-military analysis, can sometimes seem not only ahead of its time, but of our time too. . .

I’ll be returning to these two Guiding Thoughts, and unpacking them further, in future blogs. But while I may have said something about the how of historical fiction, it may seem that I haven’t yet said anything about the why. Why should one (seemingly) turn one’s back on the pressing, urgent issues of our own day (the issues that immediately concern us in our everyday lives) and escape into the (supposed) obscurity of the past?

In fact, as I see it, the answer to the why question lies precisely in that paradoxical intertwining of past and present which can be seen in my two Guiding Thoughts as to the how. Briefly put, stepping out of the present into the otherness of the past (which includes its modernity, its presentness – see above) can provide us with a new – indirect, but illuminating – perspective on our present, one that is impossible from within the torrent of the twenty-first century’s self-commentary. The same argument can and has been made with reference to the way fantasy and science-fiction can take aspects of our world and refocus our perspective by recontextualising and exaggerating them through transplanting them to imaginary worlds. But with historical fiction, there is the added factor that the world being evoked is also our world, in the sense that we are still, even after all this time, working out its consequences, its karma. (Mao Zedong, asked what he thought was the significance of the French Revolution, famously replied that it was too soon to tell.) The enormous changes that were taking place in the fourth-century BCE (a new modernity was being forged) are still all around us, not least where they are ordinarily least visible – within our own minds. I’ll try to back up that bold claim in future blogs. For now, suffice to say that for me it’s key to answering the why question – it’s a sustaining thought, another Guiding Thought.