More than Writers

My journey to faith in Christ culminated in reciting the Creed, and believing it, during a CofE Communion service…a long time ago. My journey since then has included a hunch that God would bring books to me at just the right time. It’s happened again. Last week. I was half an hour early before meeting my daughter and granddaughter at the Bristol Aquarium, so I diverted to find a warm radiator in the Central Library. Most had already been nabbed – but I was stopped by Dewey 808: ‘Literature and Writing’ and zeroed in on Fay Weldon’s Why Will No-One Publish My Novel?   Amusing title, I thought, and may become hyper-relevant in the months ahead. Oh boy! I wish I had read this years ago. Except that now, with a historical novel undergoing its third re-write, and having received advice from two authors, it seems like I have stumbled across treasure hidden in the field at just the right time. And for one phrase in particular: Cosmic Statement. Weldon: " Boil your whole novel down to one...

What do you do when the prevalent opinions at the time and place your historical novel/short is set story do not accord with what is acceptable today?   Some years ago, I wrote – and placed – a short story about a World War Two evacuee in which one of the characters said, “The only good German is a dead German”.  This is not my opinion but t his character (a schoolgirl) was repeating a saying  common at that time.  I wonder if that story, with that comment in it, would have been published in 2023.   Many of the opinions and ways of doing things are what we are now supposed to challenge.   People at the time you are writing about may have a very different world-view; they might be xenophobes, regard women as infernal gossips and believe in witchcraft.   Unless you are writing about the immediate past, all those are likely to apply.   In the Bible, the apostle Paul returns Onesimus to his slave-master, Philemon, admittedly with a plea that he...