How we tell women’s stories

THE WOMAN ALL SPIES FEAR officially debuts today, and I’m grateful to the many people who helped me along the way: librarians, archivists, cryptology enthusiasts, early readers, publishers, friends, family, and all of you who have cheered me on. Above all, I’m grateful to the extraordinary code breaker at the heart of the book. Elizebeth Smith Friedman fought the Mob and helped defeat the Nazis, but for decades she was all but forgotten. That’s changing, and I’m glad to help put her in the spotlight.

(photo courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, VA)

Elizebeth was a woman of many secrets, and sometimes I had to become a code breaker myself to crack them. It was exciting to discover new material about her childhood, courtship, marriage, and career – as well as a missing year in her life.

She made me think hard about the way we tell women’s stories. It’s good that we are doing more to celebrate women’s achievements, but Elizebeth herself was wary of hero worship, and I think she had a point.

In our efforts to show that certain women were heroic, sometimes we focus almost exclusively on their strengths and successes. That can make their triumphs seem almost inevitable, a matter of superhuman qualities. But that doesn’t serve anyone well.

To judge from the archive that Elizebeth left behind, she wanted to share a more complex story about her life. She had a brilliant mind, and she was rich in love and courage, and her papers certainly have a lot to say about her victories—which were even greater than we knew. But her papers also reveal the cracks in her life, her doubts and disappointments and frustrations, and at times even her despair.

These darker moments are part of her story, just as the triumphant ones are, and talking about both is important. We all face our own hard times, and it strengthens us to know that others have, too.

Painting a complex portrait of a woman doesn’t make her any less remarkable. If anything, it makes her triumphs all the greater—and more real. In the end, creating myths about strong women doesn’t make us strong. What makes us strong is sharing the truth about our lives.

Traveling back in time

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Avebury, Lacock

What do I love best about England?  It might be all the time travel.  The other week we managed to work our way back to the 19th century, and then medieval England, and then finally the Stone Age, all in the space of a day.

We started in Lacock, an English village used as the location for the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice and for a host of other films and series, including Cranford.  Jane Austen fans, hold onto your hats!

We arrived so early that only the locals were about.

It was easy to imagine how Lacock looked in Lizzie Bennet's time.

From Lacock village, we walked through gardens to reach Lacock Abbey, a grand manor built around a former abbey dissolved by Henry VIII.  It has a real Northanger Abbey feel to it, with bits and pieces added to it over the centuries. Until 1946, it had its very own copy of Magna Carta on the premises. (The founding abbess was a widow on one of its signers.) Lately its biggest claim to fame is that it was used as a location in the Harry Potter films.

The cloisters were my favorite part.

But lots of other parts were spectacular, too.

After a spectacular meal of toasted local brie and tomato sandwiches, we then headed up the road to a very ancient site indeed: Avebury, a stone circle thought to have been built over 4500 years ago. We reached just as a thunderstorm was sweeping up, but it would have been a dramatic place at any time. The sheer scale alone is awe-inspiring.

How on earth did they drag these stones here? No one knows.

But there are a lot of them.

And you can see how time has carved them all.

It was a lot to cram into one day, I suppose, but it gave me the feeling of being in a time machine, and traveling further and further back into English history with each stop. And now I’m home again, with my mind full of sights and sounds and smells that I can use for my usual kind of time-travel… the kind that happens at my writing desk.

Revision: Two views

How much should you revise?

I’m always curious how other authors answer this question. And this spring, at a Bodleian Library’s exhibition on the Shelleys, I had a chance to study how two authors revised in the days before typewriters (to say nothing of computers).*** Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley were a star-crossed pair if there ever was one, and it turns out they had entirely different approaches to revision.

Here is a page from Mary Shelley’s draft of Frankenstein:

Look at those neat lines flowing across the page! And note the minimal changes to the manuscript. A word here, a sentence there — and this was one of the messier pages I saw.

What’s most interesting is that the edits were generally written in her husband’s hand.

But if Percy Bysshe Shelley was tough on Mary’s work, he was far harder on his own. He won my heart with this heavily lined and be-scribbled draft of his sonnet Ozymandias:

Wholesale “re-visioning” here! And some great doodling, too. (If you don’t know the sonnet, it’s wonderful, and well worth the short time it takes to read. You can find it here.)

Here’s another one of his drafts:

Doodling seems to have been part of his method. I’m thinking I might try giving it a try, too.

I rarely write anything as clean as Mary Shelley’s first draft of Frankenstein. So it’s reassuring to see that Percy Bysshe was willing to cut his first drafts to shreds, too.

***I caught the Bodleian exhibit on one of its last days, but a version of it will travel to the New York Public Library in February 2012. And you can visit the online version of the show here, complete with Percy’s raisin plate and Mary’s hair. How can you resist?!

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Build your own castle

Ever wished you could live in a castle? Ever wanted to bring a ruin back to life?

Me, too. Which is why I loved a show I saw this week on Channel 4’s Grand Designs. In it, a middle-aged architect and his wife sell their ordinary house, buy a 14th-century castle ruin in Yorkshire, and then try to make it into their home.

We are blessed here in Britain with good TV. Lately there’s been Downton Abbey to keep us happy, and three all-new episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs. But my very favorite show of all is this one, and here’s why:

The romance of the ruin is indisputable, and oh, the views! But “ruin” isn’t a euphemism: The place has no roof, the walls are crumbling; trees are growing up inside it. And when one of the largest walls comes crashing down, I thought it was all over.

But I was wrong. The crash is a turning point, and it moves them forward. Step by step they bring the castle back to life.

From this…

…to this! For more stunning photos, click here.

While I watched it, I thought about ruins and wrecks and rebuilding. And about art and beauty and persistence. And the way love carries us through.

It was good inspiration for writing.

What’s inspired you as a writer lately? I’d love to hear about it!

***[19 Jan 2011: ETA a new and even more ruinous original picture of the castle]***

Roman holiday

When I see the small sign that says “Roman villa” on our way to the grocery store, I know I’m not in Massachusetts any more. David, who grew up with Roman ruins, is pretty blase about this, but not me.

So yesterday we packed a picnic and followed the sign down ever-narrowing country lanes, until we spotted another, less legible sign near a farm. Sweetpea was delighted when we parked the car by the stable, in the wake of two horses, and followed the stony trail down the hill.

And then we were there, sharing the ruins of a 60-room Roman villa with a herd of sheep:

This villa was built in the 4th century A.D. and included multiple bathrooms and central heating. Those Romans knew how to build.

When excavators discovered the place in 1813, they found an intricate mosaic floor in one room:

Some of us, however, were more interested in sheep.

After we were done exploring, we sat in the warm sun and feasted on biscuits and cheese and grapes and plums. Sheep bleated and blinked, and a breeze rushed through the tall grass behind us.

It was a quiet, green hour, the kind where whole centuries slip away, and time stands still.

“I’m glad we came,” David said.

I’m glad, too.

On treasure and writing

For me, buried treasure is usually the stuff of metaphor. But I was thrilled last week to hear about some real buried treasure: a spectacular hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold found in an English field by an amateur metal-detector enthusiast.

It’s by far the largest such hoard ever found, with some 1500 objects, including elaborate war helmets and garnet-studded scabbard bosses and stunning filagree rings. The pictures that have been released are breathtaking — worth a look if you haven’t seen them! Experts say the hoard will rewrite the history of Anglo-Saxon art and culture.

But among all this glitter, what also caught my eye was this detail: The man who found the hoard had been metal-detecting for 18 years.

What kept him at it? The hope of a great find, certainly. But judging from interviews, what also mattered was the camaraderie of his fellow enthusiasts, and the pleasure he took from the smaller discoveries along the way.

Which made me think of us writers.

Part of what draws us on is the hope of creating something truly wonderful. We dream of books that are extraordinary, that are celebrated and cherished, that may even change the world in some way large or small.

But what keeps most of us in it for the long haul are the daily things: The friendships we’ve made, the insights we’ve had, and the love of the work itself.

And with that in mind, I’m off now to dig and delve and take today’s small steps forward. Here’s hoping you’ll come, too.

The dustbin of history

One of the hardest things about writing historical fiction is keeping extraneous facts out of the book. Those lovely anecdotes about the origins of this and that, the fascinating details that take a paragraph to explain — they all must go.

Much as I love history (and I am the original research geek), the story comes first.

Still, I mourn my darlings. What hit the dustbin this week: eight lines of snappy dialogue about the Levellers.

Amazing people, the Levellers: In the 1640s, they had the courage to argue that every man should have a vote, that sovereignty should rest with the House of Commons (not the king or lords), and that there should be freedom of worship for everyone. Wild ideas back in the seventeenth century. And sadly the Levellers paid a heavy price for their originality: Their movement was put down by force, their leaders imprisoned and killed.

But the ideas live on.

I’d love to have the Levellers in my WIP, especially as one of its themes is resistance to tyranny and speaking up for yourself. But I couldn’t afford to give them a subplot of their own, not in this book. (Which is historical fantasy, rather than straight historical fiction — and has a lot of high adventure and magic in it.) So I settled for the eight lines. And now the eight lines, too, must go — because they detract from the thrust of the scene as a whole.

Arrgh. But at least I can pay tribute to the Levellers here.

What darlings have you murdered, historical or otherwise? I’d love to hear.