I love this moment...

...the moment of promise and anticipation, right before a first draft of a new book is started. In the spirit of my continual striving to make life difficult for myself, I'm tackling a project now that should prove challenging in a number of ways. Like the book I recently completed (which is now in the capable hands of my agent), I suspect the new WIP will be a lengthy brute - I'm not certain it will be as long (time will tell, though), but looking at my notes I doubt I'll get everything into a diminutive word count; and while the WIP doesn't have as many protagonists as the last book, the challenge of writing that one has opened up my confidence in many ways, and so now I'm tackling another couple of challenges; namely writing a story that spans over a considerable number of years and writing about people who really existed. I am not, I hasten to add, writing from the point of view of people who really existed - not that there's anything wrong with doing that, but something in me just prefers to really get inside the skulls of people who are figments of my imagination. Still, I could not tackle this subject and realistically hope to avoid actual historical personages making considerable appearances in the narrative, so for the first time I'm going to have to do it.

However, in order to feel more comfortable, I'm establishing some ground rules for myself, and here they are:

• When writing about someone who actually existed, I will refer to the research I did on them before starting the book - recorded facts and events, quotes, personality, attitudes both of the person themselves and those of others whose descriptions of the person in question were based on actually knowing them etc - and I will not wander off that path into the realms of complete invention (that's reserved for the characters who are my own creations!). People who make the history books tend to leave us plenty to write about without adding myths to the canon.



• In keeping with that, when the circumstances surrounding an event are unclear or unknown and for dramatic purposes I wish to cover them in more detail, I will do so using characters of my own creation. Coverage of actual historical events will be based on the detailed research I did beforehand.



• I aim to present real people as accurately I can based on my research, and while that will hopefully give some insight into their perspectives and reasons for approaching things the way they did, that doesn't mean that I won't present them as naive, overly trusting or a complete twunt, should my research have given me evidence to hold such views; and I will not kowtow to the tradition of refusing to view certain people critically purely because they are known for being connected to certain things. Needless to say, I intend only to present such views evidentially throughout the narrative through the person's (historically recorded) attitudes and actions, and through the sorts of opinions about them that were recorded as coming from those around them.

So there they are - my three rules for tackling the enormous responsibility of writing about real people with (I hope!) ethics, honesty and rationality. Now I just have to see how well I do...