Diving Into the Silence: Writing Inspired by Real Life

My novel, The Herbalist, is set within living memory (1939) – and is based on a real-life court case I came across when I was nineteen.

I was archiving yellowed local broadsheets crammed with small print when I noticed a tiny article. It referred to an Indian Herbalist who was arrested for an ‘offence against a girl.’ What was an Indian herbalist doing in a small town in the Irish midlands, in the late thirties? What was his crime? What happened to him? A word popped into my head – scapegoat. I searched subsequent editions of the paper but there wasn’t any more information on the crime. I forgot about him.

Almost twenty years later, I began to write. And I remembered the herbalist and the girl, and all I did not know about them. So I wrote a short story, which grew into a longer story – that eventually showed signs of wanting to become a novel.

How much fiction, how much fact?

This was my first decision. How far I would delve into the real case and its consequences? How much I would fictionalise? I went to the library, searched the microfiche files and printed off that old article. It was three sentences long. There was a palpable silence between those sentences. It told me nothing.  And it was a nothing I was ready to dive into.

I bought a Collins notebook, and began. The voices that came when I wrote were those of the women and girls that knew The Herbalist. They rushed from my pen. I had little to do with the process, it was as if the voices were truly confiding, telling secrets. In reality, the secrets of that summer, the summer of The Herbalist, would never have been passed on. I was very aware of that fact. As Rose says in the book… You wouldn’t know it but it’s my story. You won’t find me in the column inches. You won’t find me in the newsprint. You’ll find me in the gaps, the commas, the full stops – the small dark spaces where one thing led to another.

The women spoke from those dark spaces, and I wrote as quickly as I could. I wanted to enter the world of the novel and stay immersed in it. I was afraid the spell would be broken if I took too long over the first draft. Not that I wrote in a bubble – I work for a living, I have children – but I protected the early and late hours for the world of the herbalist, for the world of the women, the river, the potions, the magic, the darkness.

When the first draft was complete, I researched in earnest. I read archives, depositions, and evidence. I listened to local lore. In an eerie coincidence, my first draft echoed the real life case, echoed the voices I had heard. But now that I knew the real details, I had to make a decision – again…

How much fiction, how much fact?

I did not want to exploit or expose living people, so I decided my story would not be a ‘true –life’ version, or what is often termed ‘faction.’ It would be completely fictional. Writing the full draft completely from my imagination protected the integrity of that fictional world. But if course, you can’t ‘unknow’ something, so the truth of the matter did inform the final work, made it darker, more complex.

For the sociological details- I researched as I went, in bite size chunks rather than one big block. I wanted to absorb the atmosphere and texture of the times – the music, the films, clothes, medicines, politics, social life, habits, food. I wanted them to flow into the story as I wrote rather than be consciously incorporated as ‘facts.’ The purpose of research is to bring the book to life, not to weight it down. A novel should feel immediate, even if it’s set in the past. And that’s down to voice, voice comes first, and research last, for every time the book is opened, it’s the voices that reawaken to say, ‘you wouldn’t know it but it’s my story…’

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Niamh Boyce’s novel The Herbalist (Penguin Ireland) won Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and has been nominated for the 2015 IMPAC award. She won Hennessy XO Writer of the Year and her unpublished poetry collection, The Beast Is Dead, was highly recommended in the 2013 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Buy the herbalist  HERE

Find out more about Niamh on her website: http://niamhboyce.blogspot.ie

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Tags: featured, fiction, Irish women writers, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing