What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I can be unusually precise about this! Acts of Love and War had its genesis on the 23rd January 2020, and the final proof-read was signed off on the 13th January 2022, so it was almost exactly two years in the making.
It was inspired at a lunch near the British Library in London with a friend of mine, Professor Farah Mendlesohn. We were in the middle of Brexit, and I wanted to write about divided nations. She is an expert on the English civil wars, and I thought she might give me some ideas abut that, but instead she directed me to her PhD thesis about humanitarian aid during the Spanish civil war. I read it and was hooked.
Click on the link below (the word “about”) to visit Professor Farah Mendlesohn’s Facebook page.
Then I had just enough time to visit the Quaker library at Friends House, London, study their collection of photographs and pamphlets and gather the books I’d need in my research, before Covid hit and we were all locked down.
Click on the link below to visit the website of Quaker Library at Friends House, London
https://www.quaker.org.uk/resources/library
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? Our small spare bedroom in London is also my study. I sent away for a big map of Spain and unrolled lining wallpaper to create a detailed time-line which I consulted constantly as I built up the plot. In order to save my neck, I work with my laptop balanced on a pile of books, and using a separate keyboard and mouse.The room has a window onto the main road, and in spring it is framed by wisteria.The nerve-centre.
After I sold the novel (hooray!) I bought myself a new desk, made of recycled timber. Copy-editing on new desk!
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? All through the writing process (essentially through the two years of Covid lock-downs) I started the day with yoga, and was at my desk by 9am. I stopped to make a (decaf) coffee at 11am which I took back to my study and continued working steadily till 1pm, when I’d join my husband for lunch. In the afternoon we would take a walk and I’d often have to stop to note down an idea or a phrase on my phone.
Once I’d moved from the research stage to the writing stage – once I knew that my main character Lucy would be going into a war zone to try to bring back the two men she loves, and would help to save the lives of thousands of children, I couldn’t bear to stop. So in the afternoon I often returned to my desk saying, ‘I just have to go back to Spain.’ Or I did my email, read or called a friend. All the time I wasn’t at my desk, and especially when walking, the next scene would be developing in my mind, so I always knew what I wanted to write the next day.
If I was making notes from books or internet sources, I hand wrote those in a carefully tagged and referenced notebook. I made many notes in a notebook, but I wrote the novel directly onto my laptop. My typing now pretty much matches the speed of my thinking as scenes unravel before me. Some scenes were written out of the chronology of the novel as I came across research which compelled me to write them first, but mostly I worked through from the beginning. Each morning I would read the previous day’s pages, edit as necessary and then press on, cross referencing and checking back on my research.
Quite early on, I showed the synopsis to my agent and editor who encouraged me to continue, though with less preamble and getting to Spain more quickly. At about the half-way point I shared the work with them again and incorporated their useful suggestions into the writing of the second half.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
Click on the below link to purchase ACTS OF LOVE AND WAR from Amazon
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? As a writer of historical fiction, I use sources and try to stay close to the historical truth. So this excerpt is based on first-hand accounts of the bombing of Barcelona. But then imagination has to take over, or the scene would never come alive for the reader. Something rather magical happens when you imagine your character in that place, how they would react, what they might say or do. You have to know them well, but even then they might surprise you. The most emotional moments for me as a writer are those which are the most emotional for the character who I’ve in a sense both invented and inhabited. So in this book, the moments of horror, of despair, the love scenes and death scenes (no spoilers!) are the most emotional to write, because they are the most emotional for the characters themselves. I feel the emotion along with them, and if I do, I hope the reader will too. Before I wrote the scene in this excerpt, I already knew that Lucy was brave – she defies her father, she goes abroad alone for the first time, she even enters a war zone. But up to this point it was all a big adventure for her, with the principal aim of bringing back the two men she loves. . In this scene she is truly afraid for the first time, and I was afraid for her. And then I discovered how courageous she actually was, barely hesitating before putting the rescue of Jorge before her own safety. It was emotional for me to write because I was there with her, experiencing the terror and the split-second decision to dash back out into the station under bombardment. In a way it was a coming of age moment. From now on I knew what she was capable of – and so did she.
Click on the below link to visit the website of Maggie Brookes.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. I write directly onto my computer, saving each day’s writing and editing under that day’s date, so the manuscript goes through literally thousands of small changes, but I’m not really able to share them. My editor and the proof reader will also have made small suggestions to increase clarity for the reader. I do remember that I had to alter some things because I couldn’t find the historical research to confirm whether or not the glass in the arching roof of the station had been removed, and exactly where the nearest air raid shelter was. I also changed the name of the little boy, because I had two characters with similar names. But in its essentials – in its emotional truth, it was largely unchanged.
Most of the INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html