Chasing the Story Part II

Traveling is almost always fun, and even more so for us bookish types when a story is involved. I traveled this month with the author of an upcoming book about William the Conqueror and the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and following. (See previous post). She wrote the book during the course of a year at Oxford University. There was time during the year to gather some atmosphere (not nearly enough) in England. As the book neared completion, however, we got the chance to see William's homeland of Normandy, France. The author has kindly allowed us to print her comments about writing and traveling through Normandy in pursuit of William and history:

"Writers spend a lot of time sketching mental images into words. Sometimes we have photos or paintings; sometimes we just have the blurry constructs shaped in our undoubtedly demented imaginations, to set a scene, depict a trait, or convey a character – whether of a place, a person, or a thing. We can do this just fine in our heads, in isolation. But in storytelling, a very communal enterprise, our task is to transfer them from abstractions into something (theoretically) comprehensible, arrange them in something that’s (ideally) lucid and lyrical and can unlock the images for the reader as we first saw them. We writers, aside from being horribly antisocial as a rule, spend a lot of time finding the right combinations of words to facilitate this. In the progress of writing this novel, I relied on photos, on historical material, and the Internet. But when I got to Normandy and had the actual setting itself, the unfiltered images, showing me the enveloping scene and not the flash-frozen sliver, it was – to say the least – quite an experience.

I’ve spent the better part of a year now writing this book, living almost wholly in the eleventh century one way or another. (If it wasn’t the history tutorials, where I was studying – what else – William and his successors, then it was the writing tutorials, where I was wresting with the words themselves, trying to shape them into a cohesive, exciting, and engaging novel. Jury's still out on that, of course). I’ve acquired, if I say so myself, a highly conversant knowledge of the period, the settings, the people. But there’s no replacement for walking the roads they did, seeing the cities, how the sunlight falls on the castle walls in the afternoon and the broad sweep of the Normandy countryside that, in William’s time, would be utterly uncluttered by the power lines and the lunatics on motorcycles. I had the thrill of driving past an otherwise nondescript tower and realizing it’s where he won the Battle of Val-es-Dunes in 1047. I had a chance to synthesize a knowledge with a reality. I saw still photos develop into clicking reels of film. I breathed the same air (approximately). You can get the rough details from photos, but the place itself, that’s something that can’t be replaced. Something that I have to conjure up for you in the meantime, in words. Just part of the weird and wonderful alchemy that is language, and the way we shape stories – and history – with it. To William, the idea of shaping history, at least, would be the same, if not the form. Remember that it’s thanks to him that modern English has the structure it does. So the very words you’re using owe their core to the Norman Conquest. I realized that these figures aren’t just names on a textbook page and (very) insistent voices in my head. They’re there. They’re real.

Pretty epic stuff. N'est-ce pas?"

Perhaps you can't go to Normandy as we did. You can see our photos at: http://s598.photobucket.com/albums/tt64/hilaryrhodes/

BTW, the Camembert was divine.