Curated by Charlotte Maddox, Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation

Welcome back to our Mini Masterclass series, designed to provide you with expert insights into the essential elements of storytelling from five of the authors shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, Best Published Novel award.

Last week, C.E. McGill, Francesca de Tores and Leo Vardiashvili explored three of the fundamental ingredients of successful storytelling: plot, setting and narrative voice. This week, we are delighted to welcome Derek B. Miller, author of The Curse Of Pietro Houdini, and Chukwuebuka Ibeh, author of Blessings, as they discuss the importance of historical accuracy and character development.

When writing a captivating story, it’s crucial the reader feels situated and rooted in time in a comfortable and believable way. Authentic representation of any given time period, and the seamless weaving of historical accuracy with a fictionalised plot, is no easy task, but essential if the reader is not to be jarred out of the imagined world. Equally vital is the creation of strong, relatable characters readers can connect with and truly root for. After all, without this connection, do we really care what happens?

We hope you find these personal insights and practical tips helpful in refining your craft and elevating your writing.

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Derek B. Miller – Historical Accuracy

There are no laws to writing historical fiction. Freedom of speech and expression have no bounds. There are no rules. There is no body that oversees the writer’s engagement with the genre. And there are no customs that direct us to writing with a seriousness of mind guided by expectations or social norms. No: there is only the writer and the covenant formed with the reader.

In my case, I’m committed to historical accuracy. On reflection, it’s for two reasons. The fact that the two reasons work in synergy is why my commitment is firm.

The first is an ethical stance anchored in observation: People learn most of their history through drama and that matters because in a democracy regular people make big decisions.

The Boston Public Library is the oldest in America. Engraved in stone on the frieze are these words: The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty.

Yes. It does. And I want to be a part of that.

But literature is not merely a vehicle for education. It entertains. It expands. It engulfs. Done right, we fall into John Gardner’s “fictional dream” and live other lives. So why — for art’s sake — should we take historical accuracy seriously? To quote Bruce Springsteen: But Mamma, that’s where the fun is.

My inspiration — my north star — are the first sentences of Edith Wharton’s 1937 translation of The Trojan Women. There, she defined for me the gold standard for what historical fiction can and should do. She wrote:

The greatest piece of anti-war literature there is in the world was written 2,350 years ago. This is a statement worth a thought or two. Nothing since, no description or denunciation of war’s terrors and futilities, ranks with The Trojan Women, which was put upon the Athenian stage by Euripides in the year 416 b. c. In that faraway age a man saw with perfect clarity what war was, and wrote what he saw in a play of surpassing power…

I was moved to tears by The Trojan Women. I quoted from it to start The Curse Of Pietro Houdini — my latest novel — which is historical fiction, adventure fiction and a survivor story. Euripides, I saw, did not root his plot in authenticity, but rather derived and discovered the plot from it. He did not weave together the threads of the past to create a new story, but rather internalised the essence of the events so profoundly that the characters, their dialogue, their decisions, their emotions and their fates became a product of that intense act of empathy and listening.

Historical fiction is the movement of the past through the soul of the writer. What results is what the mind can learn, the soul can understand, and the writer’s own creativity and craft can convey. As always, the better we understand the world, the better we can dwell within it.

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Chukwuebuka Ibeh – Character

My first introduction to any character in my stories is usually through [their] voice. At the risk of sounding precious, the initial process of any character’s formation in my plot is largely somewhat hallucinatory. A particular line sticks in my head while having a shower, for instance, or a gesture or gaze floats around my vision while taking a walk. Over time, there’s a progression to speech, sometimes clearly articulated, sometimes not, but always lingering enough to create in me a kind of curiosity, a desire to know. Who is this? What do they want? What are they trying to tell me? And so I get a few lines down, and a few more after that, until, over time, a full character comes alive on the page.

Sometimes, simply, my characters are based on real life individuals, with as many details distorted, of course, to expand the dynamics of the character as well as avoid direct representation. To do this accurately though, a writer must be something of an anthropologist. An endlessly curious people-watcher and a shameless eavesdropper.

Other times, the characters are mostly unfamiliar to me; their worlds and struggles an uncharted territory. And so, coupled with a lot of research, I pull out a literal sketch of the character, from what they look like to the characteristics that make them work on the page. Now, while this might sound daunting (how can you create a character without real life reference?) the truth about human behaviour is that we are much more similar than we are different. In other words, whatever period the story covers, whatever culture, in any part of the world, there are characteristics that are so fundamentally human they are ultimately applicable to whatever character(s) being created.

In Blessings, a young man comes of age in a society hostile to his sexual identity. Although set in a specific country – Nigeria – with specific laws and norms, I do believe that not a lot would have been different if the setting was changed but the circumstances remain the same. For whether set in West Africa or Europe, human beings are mostly made up of the same cells, and just as likely to react with hate and ignorance as we are to react with love and tolerance. My knowledge of this also helped me get over my initial worry of writing from a mother’s point of view. Instead of worrying about getting a ‘woman’s voice’, I focused more on writing from the perspective of a parent who loved their child and struggled to reconcile that with their faith. With this understood, creating that character was a breeze.

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Thank you so much to Derek and Chukwuebuka for these wonderful insights.

Derek B. Miller: Derek is an American novelist, who worked in international affairs before turning to writing full-time. He is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College (BA), Georgetown (MA) and he earned his PhD in international relations from The Graduate Institute in Geneva. He is the author of six previous novels. Norwegian By Night won the CWA John Creasey Dagger award for best first crime novel, an eDunnit Award and the Goldsboro Last Laugh Award. How To Find Your Way In The Dark was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a New York Times Best Mystery of 2021. He has lived abroad for over 25 years in Israel, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Switzerland, Norway and Spain.

Chukwuebuka Ibeh: Chukwuebuka is a writer from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, born in 2000. His writing has appeared in McSweeneys, The New England Review Of Books and Lolwe, amongst others, and he is a staff writer at Brittle Paper. He was the Runner-up for the 2021 J.F Powers Prize For Fiction, a finalist for the Gerald Kraak Award and Morland Foundation Scholarship and was profiled as one of the Most Promising New Voices of Nigerian Fiction in Electric Literature. He has studied creative writing under Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers and Tash Aw.

Derek and Chukwuebuka are shortlisted for The Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, Best Published Novel award. Find out more here.

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You can hear great new ideas, creative work and writing tips on Write On! Audio. Find us on all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Google Podcasts and Spotify. Type Pen to Print into your browser and look for our logo, or find us on Podcasters.Spotify.com.

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