Telling Stories from the Archives

I went back to school this week.

As an full-time author, there aren’t many times where I find myself needing to dress up and present myself to the world as a somewhat polished professional, but this past Tuesday I had not one but two speaking events, including one actually in person!¹

I was asked to teach a masterclass to a group of creative writing MA students over at Roehampton University. I was asked to think about and present on how I use archival research not only to research my books but also to find inspiration at the beginning of the writing process.

While on campus, I took a visit to Grove House, which I featured in A Traitor in Whitehall!

Primary source research has always gone hand in hand with my writing. This might be because when I went to university I thought I was going to pursue a career in academia. However, during my second year at college, I realized that despite my love for history, a life in academia wasn’t for me and I pivoted to journalism. There is some beautiful synchronicity there because historians and journalists can often find themselves doing similar things: diving into large pools of information, searching for relevant information, and then distilling it for an audience.

Naturally, when I started writing books, I brought my penchant for research to my writing process. Although I write historical fiction and historical mysteries, I’m a firm believer that ever writer can benefit from becoming familiar with some basic research tools and using them to help flesh out their work.

To that end, here are some of my favorite places to dive into archival work:

Newspaper and magazine archives

If you want to capture what was going on on the ground in a particular time or place, this is a great place to start. Daily newspapers in particular can give you insight into what people were focused on during a particular time and how they thought about it in the moment. While speaking to the MA students on Tuesday, I mentioned that it’s very easy as a writer who works in World War 2 to forget that, decades later, I know what happened during the war and how it ended. However, people living it didn’t, and newspapers and magazines can help you get a sense of the contemporary mood of a time.

Photographs and video

Writing in the twentieth century, I have the good fortune of being able to rely on extensive photographic archives and video archives to help me when I am scene setting or even just trying to get a sense of how something worked. I have used British Pathé newsreels to help me describe the Queen Charlotte’s Ball for The Last Dance of the Debutante and the work of the women’s auxiliary services, and YouTube videos produced by plane enthusiasts were invaluable in describing the interior of a Blenheim Bomber and how the crews would have operated mid-flight for The Lost English Girl.

Audio

I put audio in its own category because for the time period I tend to write in, the wireless was such a ubiquitous thing and the BBC had such a presence in people’s lives. For example, Chamberlain’s announcement on September 3, 1939 was the way that many people learned that Britain was at war with Germany. It is fascinating going back and listening to the BBC’s reporting during the war, just as looking up what programmes played during the day as people lived their lives.

Diaries

Contemporary accounts of a person’s life can be so incredibly valuable to an author. For my purposes, the Mass Observation diaries—a program capturing accounts of people during the 1930s and 1940s—have proven to be so helpful because they give me a sense of how people were living their lives as some of the biggest moments of the war were happening around them.

Oral histories

I think of oral histories, which are often people looking back at a period of time, separately from diaries, which are usually people recording contemporary accounts. However, oral histories have proven to be some of the most fruitful resources for me. I was lucky enough to find the oral history of a Gunner Girl that inspired my first historical novel The Light Over London, and that account was my companion throughout the writing of that book. One of the great archives of oral histories I turn to a lot is the BBC’s WW2 People’s War. It’s worth having a nose around just to see what you can find.

Physical objects

As a lover of fashion history, I’m a big fan of physical objects as research materials! However, collections of objects are not just limited to clothing. For A Traitor in Whitehall, I used the Churchill War Room’s catalogue to mine for details about things like the UV lamps used by employees and the noiseless Remington typewriters that Churchill had installed in the typing pool of the Cabinet War Rooms.

After my talk, I led a few exercises meant to help the students think about archival research as it relates to their own work. I was so impressed with the connections they were making and the ways that they’re thinking expansively about their own projects that may on the surface seem as though they have very little in common with the kind of books I write. However, they seem to understand that a solid base of research can make the world of difference in contemporary, fantasy, sci-fi, and YA novels too. This kind of openness to different techniques and resources is exactly the sort of thing that can help authors grow and also make good books really sing.

1. Being a mostly-US and Canadian published author living in the UK, I sometimes feel as though I am the queen of the virtual Zoom appearance.