Fiction Scribe

Welcome once again to the Friday Author Interview. This week I am very pleased to give you an in-depth and thought-provoking interview with Australian medieval mystery author Felicity Pulman.

The Sydney resident has written many books which include the Janna Mystery books set in medieval England. Felicity Pulman gives insight to her writing, the relevance of writing medieval stories for teenagers today, and even lets us in on her guilty writing pleasures.

Enjoy.

Hello and welcome to Fiction Scribe. Tell us a little about yourself.

I live in Sydney with my husband; we’re lucky enough to live near a national park and a beach, because I love swimming, surfing, snorkeling and bush-walking. We also belong to a bush regeneration group which is very rewarding. I have two (married) children, a son and a daughter, and three grandchildren, so I consider myself very blessed indeed. As well as writing stories, I love reading and listening to music. I enjoy watching (some!) television, especially the English crime shows and drama series, and also going to concerts, plays and ballets, although I don’t do it very often.

How did you get into writing? Did you always want to be a writer?

I grew up in a small town in Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia as it was then) – no TV, computer games or anything else like that, so reading was my ‘escape’ into the big world outside. When I ran out of books to read, I wrote my own. I started writing stories in primary school but I never thought of writing as a professional career. It was only when I embarked on a BA Communications degree after I turned 40 that I began to take my writing seriously.

Why do you write stories set in medieval time? How are they relevant to teenagers today?

Times might change, but human nature does not. In my stories, my characters always go on some sort of quest: to find out about themselves, to find out about life. They question everything from who they are and where they fit into the world to what the world is all about. By challenging themselves, by acquiring knowledge and acting with courage, and by learning about themselves and about other people, so they change and grow and come to understand and (hopefully) reach their full potential. By reading about fictional characters, I hope to inspire readers to think about their own lives and future direction. Of course there are far more opportunities to ‘find yourself’ today than there were hundreds of years ago, but the quest remains the same, no matter when it is undertaken.

How did you get into writing medieval mysteries in particular?

They say you should write what you know. I’m not a (qualified) historian, but I learned a lot about the middle ages when I wrote the Shalott trilogy, and I found it all fascinating. I’ve always enjoyed reading crime, and have had some success with my crime short stories for adults (eg I won the Queen of Crime competition some years ago) so it seemed a good idea to combine my passion for history and crime to write The Janna Mysteries.

You have the Janna mysteries book four coming out soon. How much of Janna’s personality and experiences come directly from you and your life?

I can see myself in just about all the characters I create. Just as I explore myself (and incidents from my childhood that influenced me) through my characters - what I believe, what makes me tick, how I think I should live my life etc) so I also explore other issues of concern to me: identity, family relationships, human behaviour, personal responsibility, society, our future, our world. There’s also a LOT of wishful thinking: my characters are always far more courageous, resourceful and independent than I could ever be!

You wrote the Shalott trilogy before the Janna mysteries. Was there a special appeal about writing more than one book for your characters? Or did you feel there were more stories to be told about them?

‘Shalott’, Book 1 of the trilogy, was written as a one-off: to explore the world of King Arthur and Camelot through the eyes of a contemporary character, although five Australian teenagers end up making the journey via the medium of virtual reality. The story was structured around Tennyson’s poem, The Lady of Shalott, and episodes from Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Part of the teenagers’ quest was to change the legend, change the fate of the Lady of Shalott, and consequently the future of Camelot, and I’d addressed some of that by the end of the novel in that, by the end, the characters came back to our time empowered, enlightened and in some way changed. But by then I’d become interested in the characters from the legend, in particular ‘the wicked witch and the jealous bitch’, Morgan and Guinevere, and I explored them further in ‘Return to Shalott’, incorporating Celtic legend into Arthurian legend to shed light on why these women acted as they did (and why they’ve had such a bad press ever since!) Only then did I realize the REAL reason why Callie had to go back in time to Camelot: it was to save a child and in so doing, save herself. Hence Book 3: Shalott: The Final Journey. (This is a classic example of how NOT to write a trilogy!)

What is it about writing medieval mysteries that you love?

I love entering the medieval world, and I love the places where the novels are set, so it’s a great pleasure to be able to access, in memory, my visits to England as well as what I’ve learned (and am still learning) about medieval time. Of course I can’t use any whizzbang technology in solving the crimes, so I enjoy the challenge of setting up crimes typical of the middle ages and using Janna’s personal skills to solve them: nosiness, and always asking questions; memory and observation; her knowledge of herbs and healing, and also human nature; plus the tricks and techniques she employs to elicit the truth. At the same time, I try to lead readers along false trails and keep them guessing who really dunnit!

Anything about it you hate?

No, I love ‘living’ in medieval time, and I consider myself fortunate and privileged to be able to dream dreams and be paid for it!

What is it about the medieval time setting that draws you?

I honestly don’t know. I think I must be what they call an ‘old soul’, for I feel I ‘know’ this time, this is my heart and my dreaming and (often) my reality!

Is there anything about that time period which makes your writing more difficult?

Given that I live in 21st century Australia, writing about medieval England is a HUGE challenge, requiring trips overseas to walk in my characters’ footsteps and capture the ‘flavour’ of the places I’m writing about. Plus I’ve had to do an enormous amount of research (viz earlier advice to ‘write what you know’. But I think it’s more important to write the story you’re passionate to tell – because you can always find out what you don’t know.)

Are there any authors who inspired/inspire you in your writing?

The Janna Mysteries are set during the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda in the 1140s. I first came to know about this period when researching information for the Shalott trilogy. I read and thoroughly enjoyed Sharon Penman’s When Christ and His Saints Slept (about the civil war) and also the Brother Cadfael crime novels of Ellis Peters. Since then I’ve read a lot of wonderful historical novels. Including ‘whodunnits’ by authors such as AE Marston, Philippa Gregory, Isolde Martyn and Posie Graeme-Evans.

How do you do most of your research? Do you prefer the internet? Books? Interviews?

I’ve used all the above resources, but I found the best thing was actually to travel to the places I’m writing about. You get to see the countryside and locations, walk among the ruins, visit local libraries and museums (a great source of information). I’ve also been lucky enough to meet and talk to so many people, all with valuable information to impart, including the historian at Wilton House (once the site of Wilton Abbey), an expert on the civil war based at Hyde Abbey in Winchester, the gardener in charge of the ‘Anglo-Saxon herb garden’ among the ruins of Shaftesbury Abbey, the warden of Grovely Wood, and so on. The internet is also invaluable, but there are traps for the unwary (eg I Googled something I needed to know and wound up with a listing of porno sites!)

You mention traveling to the Quarantine Station in Sydney for your book Ghost Boy. Do you do a lot of traveling for your books? Where is your favourite place to go to?

Yes, I do a lot of traveling, as you’ll see from my answer above. Researching Ghost Boy was comparatively easy as the Quarantine Station is just a hop, skip and a jump away from where I live, and our local library has a copy of the proceedings of the Royal Commission held in 1882 which was a wonderful source of information for the historic part of the novel. As for my favourite place – it’s wherever I happen to be writing about at the time!

Do you have a muse? If so, who or what is it?

Writing is hard work, like any other job. If I hung about waiting for the muse to descend, I’d probably never write anything! Having said that, music is a great source of inspiration, and there’s a lot of music in the Shalott trilogy – but none in The Janna Mysteries because Janna can’t sing! Ideas often come when I’m walking, or doing the ironing, or even trying to go to sleep, but at the end of the day, you have to sit down at your desk and hope for the best.

Do you have any guilty pleasures when it comes to writing?

The escape from the every day: no cares, no responsibilities, just the fear and exhilaration of exploring the unknown.

What are your dreams for your writing?

First up, I set out to write a good yarn, something that will suck readers in and keep them turning the pages until they reach the end, so that amongst other things they discover the joy of reading (and, hopefully, improve their reading ability and literacy at the same time.) But I want to do more than that: I want to take readers out of the known and familiar; I want to give them an insight into another country and another time and way of living. I want to challenge them and make them think – about their own lives, their hopes and dreams. I want to inspire them, and to touch their hearts and minds. And judging from the emails I’m receiving, readers are responding to at least some of my hopes and dreams for my writing!

Any advice for mystery writers? For writers who choose the medieval setting?

You must play fair with your readers when setting up crimes and their solutions. You just can’t have a ‘golly gee, guess what’ sort of ending, because part of the fun of writing a mystery is to set it all up and then lead readers in the wrong direction, while the satisfaction of reading crime is to try to second-guess the author. So you must give readers enough information for them to recognize where they’ve gone wrong, while the reason for the crime must be convincing enough for the reader to recognize that OF COURSE the criminal should have been the suspect all along.

A medieval setting means you don’t have to come to grips with eg police procedure, fingerprinting, DNA testing, and a whole lot of new technology for solving the crime. Unfortunately, you have a whole lot of other stuff to research instead! I have a library full of books about everything from medieval herbs and herbals to dress through the ages, English history and medieval society, chronicles contemporary to that time, biographies of eg Stephen and of Matilda etc etc – there’s a booklist on my website: FelicityPulman.com if you want to check it out further. Also, it’s hard to write about a place you’ve never seen, so at least one visit is a good idea – but it’s expensive, of course. I’m also lucky to have a medieval expert, Dr Gillian Polack, who looks at my mss and sets me on the right track if I go wrong (and who also comes up with great ideas!)

Any advice for writers in general?

The three Rs: write, write and write! Like everything else, you learn by doing. Joining a critique group, whose opinion you trust, is a good idea. And the best tip is to read your work aloud, especially if you think a scene isn’t working properly. You can often hear what your eye doesn’t see: repetition, omission, saggy and boring bits, stilted dialogue, something no explained in enough detail, non-sequiturs, grammatical errors, typos. Reading aloud is absolutely invaluable.

Thank you for your time.

Do you have any questions for Felicity? Let me know, and I’ll post up a part two.