Masterclass: Natasha Pulley on Writing Historical Fantasy

I recently went along to a rather brilliant Masterclass at Bloomsbury with Natasha Pulley, bestselling author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.

Although I can’t share all the mince pies and mulled wine I tucked into with you, I can share some of the writing advice and activities about how to create the perfect blend of history and fantasy in your fiction. Feast on my pick of the top tips here:

RESEARCH

• Natasha stressed that you don’t need to do all your research and have an in-depth chapter plan before beginning your novel. Writing tells you what you need to research in the first place – allow the possibility of ideas to flow into other ideas.
• Look for the weird stuff in history as inspiration, from unusual crimes, to the fact that ancient Greeks had clockwork. JSTOR offers unlimited access to journals which are great sources to delve into, and the Illustrated London News is ideal if you like to work visually.
• We did a mini-workshop in the Masterclass, where we looked at a map of 19^th century Edo (aka Tokyo), and had to create the beginnings of a story from this. The purpose was to take a time and setting that’s unfamiliar to us, and find out what exactly we should be researching. For example, most people found the gaps in their knowledge were around Japanese names for characters, and what the local area would have looked like in that period.

LANGUAGE

• Natasha explained that in historical fiction, there are two approaches to language: imitation and translation. The former means writing in a style that mimics the way people spoke in the era you’re writing about. For example, The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth imitates Old English. Translation, on the other hand, is finding modern words and register to give readers a sense of the time period. Natasha does this in her Victorian-set novel The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.
• Some shortfalls with imitation are that it can be alienating to 21^st century readers if they have to keep checking a dictionary to understand out-of-use words, and it can be a hard style to sustain. Personally, I prefer translation, as I feel it makes characters easier to relate to. But the Oxford English Dictionary is a handy tool to check word origins, ensuring your writing doesn’t become jarringly modern.
• We were set an interesting exercise, taking a piece we’d written, and re-writing it in both formal, high-register Latinate style, and then stripped-down, informal Anglo-Saxon style. This really got me thinking about what language I choose to use and why in my work – why not give it a go!

FANTASY

• The second half of the Masterclass involved Natasha focusing on the fantastical, and discussing sub-genres from Flintlock Fantasy to Steam Punk. She stressed that language doesn’t have to be in the High Fantasy, Norse-inspired Tolkien style.
• Natasha suggested that a great way to add a sense of fantasy to a historical novel is through the use of a magical object. Often in fairy tales, these take the form of items such as enchanted mirrors or rings, which have a sense of the uncanny or peculiar. However, if you’re writing about non-European cultures, it’s worth thinking what items would have magical or uncanny connotations there (such as bamboo, parasols or peaches in Japan).
• Masterclass attendees were set a task to think of a familiar everyday object that we use, and to come up with a magical explanation for how it works, with some logic behind it. For example, watches and trains. Or if there’s a tree that grows golden apples, how did this come to be, and what’s the wood used for? This means the object isn’t simply arbitrary, and your story goes from fairy tale to fantasy and world-building. But Natasha still advised to keep some vagueness about how the items really work, to help maintain the fantasy (this made me think of Phillip Pullman’s Alethiometer in His Dark Materials).

 

Overall, I found the Masterclass invaluable as I embark on my own historical fantasy fiction – an alternative reality novel that imagines what if Britain didn’t win the Opium Wars against China? The main things I took from Natasha were: write before you research; it’s ok not to stress about perfectly mimicking language from the era; and to add both a sense of the fantastical and logical to the magical objects you include. Plus I got a copy of her book signed for my sister, so an evening well spent 🙂

 

Feel free to comment if you have any other helpful hints to add about historical and fantasy writing!