A witch subplot in hindsight – by Rowena House

One theme that seems to have been consistent in my ABBA posts over the past few years is how slow progress has been on Book 2, which are famously tough to write, my seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress proving that general point.

But...

As my characters and I approach the last two months of this being a PhD work-in-progress, I can also see how their stories came on in leaps and bounds in the past twelve months, including a scramble to finish Draft 3 of the main plot last month, hence the lack of an ABBA post from me in June. Apologies.

What changed? 

One simple answer is the end of the PhD. Who doesn’t work better with a deadline?

But the story hasn't simply ended; it has changed fundamentally from the first draft, completed in April last year when I thought the main plot was the entire story, just one with a massive hole in the middle where a woman’s story should have been, my main protagonist being a male pamphleteer. 

The feminist subplot told from a woman viewpoint arrived in a rush in June 2025 for reasons I’m analysing for the critical commentary on the novel at the moment. Some of these reasons have to do with grief, which I’m not ready to write about just yet, but as I analyse the process, I’m seeing parallels with The Goose Road, my children's debut, written with the massive benefit of the collective effort of Bath Spa’s MA in writing for young people, for which I still can’t thank everyone involved  enough. Doing this one without such support has definitely made it far harder.

The first big hurdle with The Goose Road that other people couldn't help me with was the enormity of the First World War as a subject and a feeling that I needed permission to write about it. With Book Two, the ‘witches’ story wasn’t mine to tell, either. 

Taking Wilfred Owen’s war poems with me to key WW1 locations in France gave me that sense of permission in 2014; I was honouring the past, not invading it.

Now, I wonder if it was the understanding that I think I've acquired from years of researching, writing, and thinking about witch trials that gave me permission to enter the witch suspects’ dungeon this time around.

 

 

For example, last year, when writing about finishing the first (partial) draft of Book Two, I noted:

‘The biggest creative eye-opener of finishing the full draft was an entirely unexpected release of pent-up creative thoughts which arrived in a rush AFTER I spent a week tweaking the resolution. Years of fiddling with single-sentence commercial pitches fell away, replaced by a solid plot one-liner (15 words). 

'More importantly, a character one-liner arrived out of the blue, too, which, with hindsight, I can see is the heart of the story, the universal wood hidden within the story trees. The specific character journey on which I had been fixated turned out to be a metaphor for something simpler.’

That one-liner: a young man overcomes group-think and regains his humanity. The driving force behind his change of heart: writing about flawed prosecutions forced him to think critically.

Really, that’s my story, too. 

Writing about a specific set of witch trials forced me to think critically about the how of witchcraft belief rather than dismiss it as archaic nonsense. Applying social psychology theories to my pamphleteer explained his belief system, to my satisfaction at least.

The link with the here and now therefore became the slender nature of the gap between seventeenth century mindsets and the irrationalities of our times, which seem to me to be no more than a variation on a theme. A notion which seems to have been the key to unlocking herstory (versus history). 

 

Next month, I’m booked into a remote Dartmoor inn for four nights to re-read her story to see if that creative rush still makes sense. I’m hoping her subplot won’t need more than a line edit/proof read. But then again, maybe I’m forcing myself into that position by not giving myself enough time to do much else with it. Like ruin it! We’ll see. I’ll be back from the moor in time for the next ABBA blog and will let you know how that plan worked out.


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Dear Diary - by Rowena House

It’s been full-on for the past week as I try my hardest to meet an academic deadline to get the development edit into my PhD supervisors by Easter, plus Draft 1 of a B-plot which, after five years of working on this one story, came to me last year.

My back can’t take much more sitting down, so here’s a selection of recent morning musings on my Facebook live diary about writing the seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress.

Happy Spring Equinox to anyone else who’s always surprised when it’s not on the 21st.

March 20th. 05.58 approx. Today I'll attempt to pull together ideas for an All is Lost chapter for Tom's plotline out of the mess of multiple chapters I left as dross in Draft 1, with the new thoughts informed by my new fear that the Draft 1 ending is wrong. Not totally wrong. The basic idea is salvageable, I think, but it needs to be more nuanced if it's to be plausible. I'd like to type it, but I think that's just the urge to get it done. Rushing this won't solve the problem. My March ABBA post is due tomorrow so maybe I can think this problem through 'on paper' for that. Not yet six am.

March 19th. 06.58. A day of life jobs. I'll go back to Alys if I get a moment. Then I should write an ABBA post. Hmm. Not ideal if I'm still even vaguely thinking I might make the Mar 31 deadline, though the request was 'by Easter', so, what if I say Tom's development edit & Alys's Draft 1 will be done & dovetailed by the close of Easter Monday? Doable? Pic: yesterday's dog walk. Twas lovely. 

March 18th. 06.05. Woken to a desire to put the work-in-progress aside after yesterday's dismal discovery of yet more major revision being needed. After three months plus of solid concentration it felt like a kick in the teeth to find I'd left chapter after chapter essentially at the Draft Zero stage of meandering half-discovery with a veneer of nice writing that utterly fails to tell a story. I should have flagged it up as needing wholesale rethinking. Surely, I knew it did. That's the end-March deadline blown.

March 17th. 06.31. Waking up to a big question. Is this 'a' development edit or 'the' development edit? Unfortunately, the answer isn't the one I want it to be, nor the one my PhD timetable expects it to be. By definition, if I'm still writing Draft 1 for Alys (or horror of horrors, Draft Zero, fumbling more or less blindly towards her story) then this cannot be 'the' development edit, and whatever I deliver to my PhD supervisors will be preliminary.

Is that conclusion an opportunity to break free from the self-imposed pressure to get it 'right' right now or a threat of more (endless) procrastinating because I don't have a deadline? Is craft a strength (let's get this done) or a weakness (let's package Alys & Tom's stories into industrial-shaped containers)? I guess the answer is personal. The deadline is hugely motivating, but I am fumbling in the dark for the dovetailed ending, hoping my storytelling instincts are good enough. With The Goose Road the denouement was the thing that my editor said she bought the manuscript for. That's a truism for any book: it's only as good as its ending.

So, a lot to play for but how do I play it? Plough on or step back & plot? In other words, what have I learnt about myself as a writer since starting out seriously to write fiction in 2007?

March 16th. 06.55. NB, I need a table charting Tom's shifting opinion of the trials from brilliant examples of justice to fiascos by the time he meets Beth, and ultimately to examples of injustice by the end. I probably need to add an explicit statement about each change of heart to keep myself & the reader aligned with this arc [so that the Act 3 deviation between his beliefs and what he's writing is clearly shown, rather than the reader needing to be told].

NB 2, identify the exact point Tom's story enters its Act 3. There will be opportunities as well as constraints from Alys's story taking some of the weight of the James denouement. Keep an open mind where Tom act break might be [e.g. this chapter you're working on!!!] [NB it wasn’t. All is Lost & the Dark Night of the Soul chapters are still to come.]

NB 3. Don't get frustrated. Tom's story has changed a lot because of the introduction of Alys's plot. Don't expect it to be simple to dovetail the two.

Re the development edit in general, it's interesting that I remembered the current London sequence as being aligned with the Draft 1 denouement, but yesterday I found a whole chapter that make absolutely no sense. From memory, I'd layered into this chapter Tom's evolving thought process about the past, having not known what it needed to be in Draft Zero, the very first full draft in which I was working out what the story might be.

Basically, the story was more evolved in my head than on the page.

I'll have to be meticulous about expunging this old story DNA from the development edit lest it damages the beast that is 'becoming' on the page. It will almost certainly take a fast read through of a printed version to see if I have made this arc clear. But that will have to wait till after I've dropped this version into the PhD system.

Re writing in general, this story needed to be edited at speed to establish coherence. Hopefully, being forced to draft Alys's story at speed will limit its incoherence. Overall lesson about discovering a stream-of-poo when you thought you were almost 'there'? Don't be fooled into thinking any of this is easy.



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On deadlines & writing deliciousness - Rowena House

Oops! Long time no post. Apologies. My excuse: I’m finally on a deadline after nigh on six years nibbling away at my seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress, with three (max four) months to get Draft 1 developed, polished, and proof read, including an entirely new narrative perspective on the same events, told in alternate chapters, decided upon last year.

So, about one quarter to one third of a novel to write in three/months. That’s do-able, right?

The writing gods are [ATM] being kind in letting me get on with it, but that’s very unlikely to last on recent form with life duties, so I’m writing and editing daily whenever I can.  

Updates on RowenaHouseAuthor on Facebook if anyone feels like joining me for this last dash, followed by more reflective thoughts about the story, its history, how I’ve bent history and invented stuff, and whether that’s justifiable etc. That’ll be from May-September as I write the critical commentary for the PhD, of which the novel is the main part.  

More good news. I have four readers! Two supervisors and two examiners. Hurrah. While not exactly No. 1 bestseller stuff, four readers are enough to order myself not to waste their time with any residual Draft 1 slop (slop being a 2026 version of Hemingway’s more graphic/honest description of Draft 1). 

Luckily, last November, when I should have been writing an ABBA post, I was en route to one of the classiest, most instructive and motivational retreats I’ve ever been on.

It was a week at the Moniack Mhor writing centre in the hills outside Inverness, Scotland, a place that lots of fine writers have recommended and was high on my wish-list even before they announced that the historical fiction retreat would be led by Lucy Jago, author of A Net for Small Fishes, set just after mine and a lovely, very well-researched read, and Andrew Miller – squee – fresh off the Booker shortlist, whose Land in Winter was the winner in bookshop if (sadly) not on the podium. His Pure has been a touchstone for the voice of this WiP for years and a comfort go-to read for more than a decade. 

To top it all, the other retreaters were super talented, including a dear writer friend off the MA in writing for young people at Bath Spa, Eden Enfield, whose prose for both young people and adult I vastly admire. Honestly, who needs to get published when such deliciousness awaits?

To keep the deliciousness going, I’m thrilled to have been invited by another writer-for-young-people-turned-adult-historical-novelist, Liz Flanagan, to one of her launch events for her English civil war novel, When We Were Divided. 

So looking forward to celebrating its publication with her up in Heptonstall next month (where I haven’t been since 1985) and then getting lost in her story.

Happy writing, editing, reading, plotting, dreaming.

PS I got both copies signed. :0)

Writing historical fiction - Sue Purkiss

It's an interesting thing, writing historical fiction. I've written several books in this genre: one set in the 9th century, one in the early 19th, and one in the mid 19th - plus there are two yet-to-be published books set in the Second World War.

There are practical reasons for writing books set in the past. For one thing, you don't have to grapple with modern technology - if you're writing in the present, and your hero/heroine is stuck up a mountain or has missed the last bus, you can easily - too easily - extricate him/her by means of a quick text or phone call. On the other hand, you know your context - the world of your story. Whereas I remember when I was writing Warrior King - about Alfred the Great and his daughter, I'd been researching for months, if not years. Finally, I came to the point where I was actually ready to start writing my story. In the first chapter, Alfred reaches for a drink. But what would he be drinking out of? A goblet made of metal? Wood? What? Or would it be a cup? And later, someone serves cakes (no, not THOSE cakes!). What would they cakes be made of? No sugar around then - honey, perhaps? What would make them rise? Or would they just be flat?

And then, of course, there's finding out, as far as possible, the truth about what was happening in your chosen period. Of course, the closer to the present you're looking at, the more information there is available. With Jack Fortune, for instance, which is about a plant hunter and his young nephew who set off for the Himalayas, I found online a detailed journal written by Joseph Hooker about his own adventures doing the same thing. Hurrah! But then that all gets complicated. You have access to how a person of that time perceived the world - but nowadays, looking through the lens of a 21st century view of imperialism, and recognising that Hooker's thrilling adventures were carried out in the sevice of the Empire with all that that entails - well, do you write from the point of view of a person of his/her time, or do you take account of a contemporary view of the same issues and actions?

And then there's the language. Do you try to approximate to the language as it was spoken in the time period of your story? If you're writing about the Elizabethan era, do you scatter your dialogue with 'thees' and 'thous' and the occasional 'Odds bodykins, forsooth'? To me, that's a no-brainer. If you're wrting about the 9th century, they would all have been speaking Anglo-Saxon, or some variant of it. So of course, your dialogue has to be in modern English. But it's not as simple as that. You have to avoid modern slang, obviously; you have to attempt to get the right sort of register for the person who's speaking - Alfred, for instance, will speak differently to a shepherd. Well, probably... So much to think about.

What's set all this off? Well, I've just read Ken Follett's latest book, which is about the building of Stonehenge and is called The Circle of Days. So it's set several thousand years BCE.

Now, I've been fascinated for a very long time by the era of prehistory. In particular, I'm intrigued by the cave paintings of south west France. They are so beautiful, so sensitively done - and how does this square with the version of the Stone Age that I was taught in school, with brutish early humans struggling to survive and engaged in a constant struggle with nature and with each other? Well, it doesn't of course, and that view of the distant past is being constantly revised. But when you start to write conversations between people of that era - how do you do it? How complex was their language - were their thoughts? Did they have similar notions about relationships to us - and about so many other things, like loyalty, friendship, duty, community?

So I found Follett's book interesting in terms of how he dealt with such issues. I'm still mulling it over - but I'm certainly impressed by the confidence and imagination with which he re-creates a world about which, really, we know very little. It's interesting that he uses very simple language and short sentences throughout - is that a nod to a simpler time?

As L P Hartley famously said, 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' But how different,  really, in terms of what people were like, was the past? It's an interesting question - I think! - and one to which there are no easy answers.

Why bother writing historical fiction: part 2 - by Rowena House

Back in February 2020, I asked here on ABBA why one bothers to write historical fiction. As I take a deep breath before embarking on the development edit of a first draft that took more than five years to research, plan, replan (a thousand times) and write, I’m still asking that question.

Back in 2020, I wondered aloud: ‘What is so important about this particular story that makes it worthwhile to spend years of one’s “wild and precious life” re-imagining the past?’

My answer today, ‘Sadly, old girl, I doubt it was worthwhile, but it got you through a difficult time. And having got this far, damn well finish the thing.’  

I’m going to dig out Hilary Mantel’s 2017 BBC Reith Lectures to see if she can re-inspire me having enthused in 2020 about ‘a mystical quality about her reasoning, a deep, personal connection with her resurrected dead; they speak to her across the centuries; she is comfortable in their company.’

Me, I get infuriated by the gross stupidity of the people who inspired my main characters. How could they have believed in witchcraft to the extent they hanged people for it? I often have to stop reading history books otherwise I’d jack the whole thing in.

[I’m writing a story based on a witch trial pamphlet for readers who don’t know. It’s blooming depressing, tbh. Anyhow...]

On the upside, I still like the contribution from Ronan Bennett, author of Havoc, in its Third Year, to the Writer’s & Artists Yearbook’s anthology of historical authors talking about their work. He quotes the 1st Duke of Newcastle telling his pupil, the future King Charles II: ‘What you read, I would have it history so that you might compare the dead with the living; for the same humours is now as was then, there is no alteration but in names.’

I must quote that in the PhD commentary on my novel which I’ve just abandoned – yet again. 

I also find comfort in Bennett’s observation that, ‘The best fiction prompts self-interrogation. Historical fiction can bring us up with a jolt, like an eerie deja-vu. This is what I tell myself. I hope it’s true.’

I hope so, too.

In the same Writers’ & Artists’ guide, Michael Faber identified a subset of novelists who explore a ‘specific clutch of themes and human conflicts, and … realises that a particular era, which happens to be in the past, is right for this story.’ Novelists of this type ‘don’t have to worry as much about over-employment of research. You’ll be so preoccupied with characterisation and getting to the heart of human complexity that you’re unlikely to get distracted by crinolines or flintlock pistols.’

Back then, I thought Faber freed me from Mantel’s edict that you can only start to write an authentic historical novel after you’ve plumbed every depth of your period and know it off by heart. Being rather obsessive, however, I forgot all about Faber's advice and plumbed the depths of early modern English history for five years, and still do not know the period off by heart and doubt I ever will.

As for research being ‘fun and exciting, with the weave of half-told history unravelling before your eyes and myths presented as fact disintegrating along the way’. What tosh, Ro! The research became a miserable journey into sad lives controlled by irrational toffs. If there is ever a next time, chose your subject more wisely, girl.

On the other hand, I was right about research being ‘an iterative process, a conversation between the story as you first imagine it and the credible details (AKA facts to the unwary) which modify or overthrow these expectations.’

What I didn’t expect was the way in which the physical process of typing changed the story. How I would plan a scene only to find it simply didn’t come out that way. Something else happened altogether that felt more plausible. Thus I kept replanning, changing direction to match what was rather than what had been imagined. In this, George Saunders’ description of steering a great ship across an ocean was much closer to what happened with Draft 1 than anything I’ve read elsewhere,

Turns out, even an obsessive planner can turn into a pantster on the page.

So, yes, I have constructed a story out of the ‘published pamphlet, lavish in its details of events.’ I even find what I created plausible, despite the events it describes being ‘preposterous to our modern mind’. They were also preposterous to other people at the time. So my protagonist was probably writing BS even then.

Re-reading my 2020 notebooks is also an eye-opener. While the storytelling theory I was taking notes about is still interesting and relevant, virtually nothing in terms of plot has survived the years. I over-plotted massively. It would have been a trilogy if not longer.

Fortunately, Draft 1 does answer my main 2020 question: ‘Why did my protagonist write his pamphlet?’ But not, for the sake of length or relevance, ‘Why did people believe him – or pretend they did?’ The first question proved complex enough for 77,000 words.

As for my final question to myself in that ABBA blog long, long ago – Why are false narratives so compelling throughout time? – I still have no idea. I guess they just are. We haven’t changed in that respect. If anything, dipping in and out of Twitter/X, makes me lose whatever faith I might have had that critical thinking will solve anything.

Hey, ho.

@HouseRowena on X

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Takeaways from a 10K writing challenge – Rowena House

Last month’s personal challenge to write ten thousand words during NaNoWriMo threw up several lessons, good and bad, which I’ve been trying to capture while they’re still fresh in my mind in the hope they might help me complete a first full draft of C17th witch trial work-in-progress next year, having failed spectacularly to reach that goal this year.

That failure is another story about spanners in the works of life, now best forgotten, because the good news is I DID IT! Ten thousand story words now exist that didn’t on October 31st. Even with zero words written on three days, the total accumulated in fits and starts.

Lesson One, therefore, is that it can be done, even at home with life doing its usual tricks. Expensive writing retreats are luxuries, not essential.

In my initial notes about Lesson Two, I also claimed that November's concentrated bout of writing demonstrated it is possible to pull the story back on track ‘on the hoof’ as it were. That is, plotting while simultaneously adding new words.

I thought I’d achieved this by first reviewing the structural aim of the new scene and making any adjustments necessitated by the previous scene/s. I then wrote a short first draft of that new scene, taking the protagonist or plot from A to B; finally, I increased the word count by weaving in nuance, meaning, and detail, plus polishing dialogue, before starting over again with the next scene.

Two subsequent events proved me wrong, however. First, my beta readers (AKA two PhD supervisors) couldn’t see the story in these 10K words; there was too much trial, they said, and not enough story. Second, I agreed with them.

Pondering the reasons why this 10K didn’t work in story terms (even though I'd covered a lot of plot ground) brought me back to something a very smart lady told me at a writing retreat early this year. She said I’m exploiting the witches to write my story, just as others have done over centuries.

I accepted that criticism then. I still do now. The people hanged as witches deserve our respect for their suffering. In light of this, and in hindsight, what I suspect I have been doing in my first versions of their trials – completed during MyNoWriMo – is writing stories about dead people with imaginative respect.

I refused to make them victims. I gave them a voice, which is the purpose stated by many writers for writing about women in the past.

But giving silenced women a voice is not what I’m doing in my work-in-progress. At least, not in the A-plot. The A-plot is about the pamphleteer. A young man in my fictional history of the trials.

Powering through 10K words in four weeks thus showed up a weakness in my emotional cognition (if that's a thing) as much as holes in my plotting. Basically, I hadn’t assimilated my creative purpose sufficiently to write the story truthfully. Out of a sense of duty to the past, I felt it necessary to first show the witches* respect.

Having sat on this idea for a while, I would now argue that dramatizing the trials was a necessary stage in the creative process, but it was clearly far from sufficient.

On the other hand, writing this blog, I can now articulate a benefit which I hadn’t anticipated from this year's forensic rewriting of the semi-official record of the witch trials.

When studied closely, one can see between the lines of the original account slights of hand pulled off by the pamphleteer (or perhaps by the prosecutor), tricks of presentation to fool the jury, the reader, or both.

One could even say, belatedly, I have spotted an elephant they’d hidden in the room. An elephant that can now stir again and trample about my story. Mwahaha.

Lesson Three, therefore, is thanks for that, MyNoWriMo. Now let the real work of plotting begin.

Two years ago, I noted here advice from author Hisham Mattar about the need for creative openness, which he explained during an Arvon Foundation writing masterclass back in July 2021. He said that without such openness, we risk becoming trapped by our original intentions; to access our deeper levels of intuitive invention, we should avoid planning the first draft altogether.

That, perhaps, is what happened during MyNoWriMo.

Despite my conscious efforts to follow The Plan, what came out was an undirected recreation of the past, liberated from my conscious control by the dictat of a daily word count. In it I honoured the witches’ memories, creating agency for them in mini histories of each trial.

If this interpretation is true, the question thrown up is this: if I want to write about witches, why write about the pamphleteer? If, on the other hand, I am writing about the pamphleteer, is the witch character I thought important actually incidental?

At the moment, I believe the latter.

After all, I’ve got half-way through the A-plot and she’s barely appeared. Thus, either the B-plot is hers, not Beth’s, or ... What? She isn’t there at all? Or nothing more than an ephemeral presence on the edges of his imagination? It seems cruel to erase her again, yet the witches’ story never felt like mine to write.

To put it another way, having honoured them in words, can I now escape from a subconscious, guilt-driven original intention?

Who knows. Maybe next year will tell. Meanwhile, midwinter greetings to you all. May 2024 treat you kindly.

@HouseRowena on Twitter

Rowena House Author on Facebook

*I use the term witch and witches to describe the people accused and convicted as such. This also is fiction. They weren’t witches in the satanic, supernatural meaning of the word employed back then.





Dec 1

33,468



33,798

MyNoWriMo - Rowena House

My admiration for people who are undertaking the full 50K of NaNoWriMo this month has increased  exponentially since the start of November as I've tried my own pared-down version of it: a 10,000 new words challenge for the witchy WIP. 

Below is the table of the position at the midway point. Not too far behind target, which is a relief, especially when it is the result of a lot of editing down as well as building up the total. Still, it pales into insignificance when I think what the true competitors are doing. 

What would it take, I wonder, to clear one's desk and shut the door on everyday life sufficiently to be able to attempt this 50K feat and create something even vaguely resembling a story at the end of it? More than planning, it must take ruthless dedication.

For me, it's life's demands that are the enemy of writing, but what is the point of writing without people in one's life? And dogs, natch, who's had her walk pretty much every day. And the birds have been fed. There's even fresh milk in the fridge. 

So, in case I can get a bit further back on track tonight, I'll sign off now, with a warm salute to NaNoWriMowers everywhere. [It needs the 'w' imho.] Very best of luck to you all. 

MyNoWriMo 2023 target count: daily target 333 words, total 10,000 words

 

Date	Start	Target	Achieved	Net daily count
1	23,297	23,630	23,651	354
2		23,963	23,837	186
3		24,296	23,969	134
4		24,629	24,770	801
5		24,962	25,230	460
6		25,295	25,630	400
7		25,628	26,028	602
8		25,961	26,239	211
9		26,294	26,423	184
10		26,627	26,640	217
11		26,960	26,640	0
12		27,293	26,798	158
13		27,626	26,973	125
14		27,959	27,497	524
15		28,292
16		28,625
17		28,958
18		29,291
19		29,624
20		29,957
21		30,290
22		30,623
23		30,956
24		31,289
25		31,622
26		31,955
27		32,288
28		32,621
29		32,954
30	33,297	33,287 + 10