Mary Beth Keane, author of Fever – about an Irish immigrant battling her way through life in 1900s New York – explains why character detail trumps historical and cultural precision when writing historical fiction.

I never expected to write historical fiction, though some of my favourite novels of all time are in that category. Never great with names and dates, I figured historical fiction was for people whose minds work in a more straightforward fashion. Once, taking an American History exam when I was in high school, I couldn’t remember the exact dates of James Madison’s presidency but I remembered that Dolly Madison, his wife, was said to have a ritual of peeking from an upper floor window whenever his carriage departed their home for the Capitol. I offered up this titbit in exchange for hard facts. I did not get an A.

When it first occurred to me that Mary Mallon, who was better known to history as “Typhoid Mary,” would make a fascinating character, it wasn’t immediately clear to me that I should be the one to write her story. Everything about early 20^th century New York was sepia-toned in my imagination. The clip-clop of horses on the avenues, the long skirts of the women brushing the sidewalks – it all seemed too distant, too quaint. I began by reading about the politics of the period, the manoeuvres of politicians and their staff, but how much did that tell me about what the average person thought and felt? Nothing. In order to get my arms around Mary’s story I had to walk alongside the people making their way in this world and not just observe them doing so. I had to understand their worries and their hopes. If they harboured secret ambitions, I had to discover them. Thinking back to high school, I knew that I remembered that detail about Dolly because it I found it moving that even a President’s wife peeks out of windows. I identified with Dolly, saw myself in her, and recognised her vulnerability. I had to get there with Mary Mallon.

Now that the book is written, many of the responses I’ve gotten have been about the research, how it must have been overwhelming, difficult to keep track of. It was those things at times, but research was also a crutch when I didn’t want to do the truly difficult work of writing fiction. I knew, when I was getting too focused on how many buttons a woman might have on her corset, or what route, precisely, the subway took when it first opened, that I was avoiding the task at hand, which was getting to the centre of Mary’s life – the confusion, fear, and frustration she must have felt, and later, a battle-worn sort of peace. The heart of a good novel must always be character, and where is the most important research for character done but inside the writer? Advice to those embarking on historical fiction? Close the books and face the blank page. Begin.

-          Mary Beth Keane

With his debut book, Red Sky in Morning, Paul Lynch has made the transition from prolific film writer to novelist in spectacular fashion. Writing exclusively for the Easons.com Blog, he describes how he dreamed up his first novel.

Red Sky in Morning came to me in snatches of dreams: dreams in broad daylight; dreams on the edge of that cliff-fall into the dark of sleep. A book must be dreamed into being. The good stuff in writing comes from those liminal moments when you are held in that timeless space, that mind’s drift outside the present moment. Being a writer means learning to cultivate this. As children we are told by parents and teachers to stop daydreaming. This is nonsense. Tell children to keep dreaming. Some of them will become dreamers for a living.

Novel dreams rise into consciousness like effervescence in sparking water. You must always be receptive to these gifts. You must be willing to write every thought down. This is not without its problems. Often, during the writing of a book, ideas flash into my mind during conversation, a thought sparked by something somebody has said. They arrive during dinner in a restaurant. They arrive while reading a book. They come in the middle of the night when you are stumbling blindly to the loo. It doesn’t matter — you must always be catching those butterflies in your net. To forgo writing them down means you will lose most of them to the white sky of your mind. So I take notes wherever I go. I have walked into bins on the street while putting notes into my phone. I have been almost clipped by traffic. People say writing is not a dangerous occupation. It is.

Red Sky in Morning took just under three years to write. For the first two years I was gainfully employed, so my life then was about time management. I would write on holidays. Write on weekends. Write at night during bone-tiredness, hoping that what I put down would later make sense. I learned that it doesn’t matter what you put down, so long as you put down something. Once you have committed your consciousness to the page, it can always be rewritten. And the art of writing a book is less about that first draft, than it is about the rewriting of it — over and over and over again. And when you think you are finished, going at it again and again until it has found its perfect shape.

I found my best moments writing Red Sky in Morning were often writing in the dawn. To write in that deep quiet is like breathing mountain air. An uncluttered mind is the writer’s best tool. Some say they find it late at night, but most writers agree it is best to write in the morning, to hit the desk with coffee and dream shadow still snaking about you. You must step into that shadow and make it your friend, be guided by its whisperings, before it shrinks from the light of day.

-          Paul Lynch

Last summer I got the news: Hachette Ireland wanted to publish my first novel. I was overjoyed, but dazed – part of me couldn’t quite believe that this was happening. Then gradually everything started to make sense. Of course! The Mayans! The book was scheduled to appear in 2013, and that date would never arrive, in fact my contract with a publisher was probably one of the signs of the End of Days. But January came and went safely and by March I was holding a printed copy of Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World in my hands.

I’ve wanted this for as long as I can remember, but life kept getting in the way. I was a confident child who wrote and told stories because it was easy and fun. (I still have one, a science-fiction saga that was really just Star Trek with cats.) Then I was a miserable teenager who didn’t write at all because I was sure that it would be lousy. Later I became a confused twenty-something who wrote plays as a ‘hobby’ while training to be a teacher, specialising in English as a second language. In my early thirties I moved to Japan, where I taught at a girls’ high school and churned out educational material and adaptations for the school drama club. ‘We need a cast of forty, and everyone must have at least one line and wear a pretty dress.’ That kind of thing.

Everything changed when I met an Irish journalist who was in Tokyo for the 2002 Soccer World Cup. I never could have predicted that I’d one day be living in Ireland, but three years later there I was: married, semi-employed, and looking out the window at a lot of rain. But rainy days and a relaxed schedule are very good for writing, and Ireland turned out to be the perfect place for me. I switched to prose, took part in writing groups and classes, taught English to Chinese students at Dublin Business School. In the first few weeks of 2010 I got up the nerve to apply to Trinity’s creative writing programme. By the time the first semester started I had 70,000 words of a novel finished.

Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World came about through a homework assignment from a class I’d taken in 2006. I started with an image – two teenage boys having a violent argument on a cliff by a river, and the idea wouldn’t leave me alone. I wrote it as a flash fiction piece. I wrote it as a novella. A virus erased it from my computer. Four years later I was at it again, reconstructing the story from memory. Soon it became clear that this was going to be bigger than a novella, in fact it was going to be a book.

I worked on the story obsessively. I’d been a person who enjoyed spending hours in the kitchen, someone who dusted the curtain rods. When the novel took over I left the cooking to my husband, or the microwave. I let the apartment get filthy around me and barely noticed. I carried notebooks and scribbled in them like a maniac, no matter where I was. If I thought of something in the middle of the night, I’d write in the dark. It was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me.

The characters were what kept me hooked. First of all, there’s my hero, seventeen-year-old Stephen Shulevitz – bright, funny, impulsive, sarcastic, vulnerable, and in love with his straight best friend Mark, who grows up dyslexic and abused and learns quickly to be the toughest kid on the playground. Stephen also has to deal with his mother Maryna, who is dreamy, disorganised, and stuck in a dead end job in a small town – the one bright spot in her life seems to be her son. Stephen’s father Stanley is a self-absorbed academic who remains irritatingly calm in a crisis, especially if it’s one he’s created himself. Then there’s Stephen’s big-hearted, Goth-punk friend Lana, with an unfortunate crush of her own. I had to keep going to find out what would happen to them all.

I worked on the novel through the year at Trinity, and when I was sure I’d gotten the manuscript into shape, I entered it in a competition sponsored by the Irish Writers’ Centre and eventually was chosen as one of twenty winners.

The Novel Fair was nerve-wracking, exhilarating and a lot of fun. The twenty of us sat at tables with our stacks of sample chapters and prepared to pitch our stories to a selection of publishers and agents. I can’t remember much of what I said – by the end of the day I’d repeated the same information so many times that I felt like a bit of a dingbat. But I must have been at least partially coherent, because a few months later I got the news that Hachette Ireland were interested in seeing the rest of the book. Now it’s in bookstores all over Ireland.

This still feels like a miracle, and for me at least, a lot more impressive than anything the Mayans could have predicted.

-       Janet E. Cameron