You are trying to bring to life a world your reading has and never will see in real life. Writing historical is just like writing fantasy. So I thought again: what is this research for? In such a fast-paced, action-heavy plot this detail not only got lost, it made the story harder to grasp. Early versions had so much more of the political nuance baked in – but I hadn’t understood the needs of the story I was telling. Dangerous Remedy is set in latter days of the French Revolution, during the period known as The Terror where the revolution seems to have been poisoned and lost to the designs of dictatorial monsters. It took me several drafts to understand this point. The right ones: what is historical research for? When writing a book set in the past, what are you trying to do? The question I get, over and over: how did you go about researching? How do you know when you’ve done enough to start writing? The wrong questions. Of course, I was entirely missing the point. I thought writing a historical setting would be easy.
History was somewhere I thought I knew, a familiar city I could navigate through like a local. The past is a foreign country and I am compelled to read guidebooks on it, to holiday in my mind. Countless overlapping images, dropped off-kilter across my surroundings, a shadow image of the past – names, dates, dresses, diseases – laid out like a pattern over fabric. Half-formed memories of knowing something once. I am a collection of facts and quotes and pictures. National Emerging Writer Programme Overview.
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