Can Trace your Roots help fiction writers? Author David Robinson believes it can. Here he tells us how it got him digger deeper into his characters' history.
All writers keep some research books to hand. But why would a writer of fiction keep a copy of Trace Your Roots nearby?
When
Maureen sent me a copy of Trace Your
Roots, I thumbed through it and tried one or two of the suggestions.
Behold: within the space of an hour or two, I’d tracked down both sets of
grandparents and their respective weddings, my father’s birthplace which had
always been subject to some doubt, the births and marriages of several uncles
and aunts, my own birth record in the parish registry and my brother’s.
I was
suddenly interested in tracing the family line, but… I’m a writer. Somewhere
along the line, I have to turn out the words. Hobbies like genealogy must take
a back seat, especially when you’re sitting dangerously close to publication
deadlines and you still have another 20,000 words to find.
It was
only later, as the pressure eased, that I realised Trace Your Roots had another possible use.
The
mainstay of my work is crime fiction, usually from a private detective point of
view. How many times has Joe Murray needed to make a link between characters A
and Z? How could Alex Croft have dug out the descendants of The Great Zepelli
and narrowed down his search for TheHandshaker?
How do
you conduct those kinds of searches? To be honest, until I read Trace Your Roots, I wouldn’t have had a
clue. Now I have. I know how that
person can be traced, I know how Joe
can track down the heir to the fortune he’s stumbled across, and I know how Alex Croft can tackle the
search for Julius Reiniger in post war Britain.
Taking
a wider view of the matter, there have been novels written where the
hero/heroine specifically searches out family history in an effort to come to
terms with present problems. How much easier is it to produce that kind of work
when you have all the research to hand in one volume, and I could see this
working in most genres from romance to horror.
Maureen
didn’t produce Trace Your Roots as a
handbook for writers, but as a handy guide for budding genealogists, but like
thrifty, “waste not, want not” devotees, we scribes can turn any book into a
useful tool for our researches.
David lives and works as a novelist on the northeast outskirts of Manchester, England. He is a prolific author, having produced works in cosy crime, psycho-horror, sci-fi and humour.
