Issue No.26

And I love Chartres, which is twinned with my
home town of Chichester in Sussex. When I’m
in Chartres, I have such a strong feeling of
history and of the past. When I was writing
my latest novel The City of Tears, which is set
in the late 16th century against the backdrop
of the French Wars of Religion, I had to train
myself to forget the 13th century city I'd
written about Labyrinth but imagine instead
what life would have been like some three
hundred and fifty years later. Novelists are
nosy! Wherever I am, when I'm writing, I'm
always snooping, always excavating the city
beneath the city. I seek the untold stories, the
stories of ordinary people, particular the
women who are left out of the history books.
I prefer to explore on my own, quietly with a
notebook and a map, standing alone in the
shadows and letting the past fill my head. I
find that the story, the plot, the characters
and atmosphere come to me best in silence. I
do a lot of my pre-site research at home, so
that I already have the sense of the
topography and architecture of the place I'm
writing about, so by the time I visit, I'm feel I
already know the city. This slower process
helps me to bring a place to life. The research
through archives, museums, libraries and
books are an essential part of the preparation
- readers deserve accurate and gripping real
history - but then there’s what I think of as
the “foot research” - walking, seeing the
landscape, imagining the characters, that's
what brings a novel to life.
Photo: Bobby Chitwood
Sometimes I will have spent years visiting a
place years before I even think of writing
about it. All of my knowledge of Carcassonne
comes from having spent some of every year
there for the past 30 years or so. And the first
time I ever went to France was to Chartres on
a school orchestra exchange trip, so all of my
memories of Chartres go back to being a 14
year old clutching her violin. But It wasn’t
until I was writing Labyrinth in 2004 that I
ever put those streets and that amazing
cathedral down on paper. Novels, ideas,
characters take a long time to brew ...