One of the great pleasures of this past summer was reading Clare Dudman’s wonderful new novel, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees. Set in Patagonia in the mid-19th Century, it follows the dashed dreams and stubborn hopes of a group of Welsh colonists determined to create “a new Wales” amidst a cold South American desert surrounded by dangerous Indian tribes.  I love reading historical fiction, though I find the thought of writing it rather daunting.  Clare was kind enough to take the time to answer some of my questions about how she proceeded to create this stirring tale.

SG: I’ve always been intrigued by the importance of place. In my own writing, the setting seems to become a character itself, and I would say that is also true of “A Place of Meadows….” But in order to create that character, how much needs to be rooted in fact and how much can be imagined? How important is it to actually travel to the place you are writing about rather than read or research about it? I know of writers who have written successful novels about places they have never been to but have only read about. Can you talk about that a bit?

CD: I don’t think I’d feel confident about fully describing somewhere that I’d only seen in pictures and not experienced. When I go to a place I discover detail that I couldn’t possibly know without being there; the smells, sounds, and how it physically feels – all of these are much more easily conveyed if the writer has personal experience and can use appropriate and accurate descriptions. For instance, when I was in Greenland I discovered that it was easy to locate an Inuit settlement – not from seeing anything, but from the sound of the dogs howling, and then, when closer, the whiff of fish drying on racks. I think I’d have to be lucky to come across that in any accounts.

In Patagonia it was the sound of the wind, and the general bleakness and flatness of the place. And I could see how the animals moved, for instance how the rhea moved in a flock – zig-zagging as they ran. I also had to go there to speak to the people that lived there, and to purchase books that were unavailable in this country. It was only by going to Patagonia that I discovered that they even existed.

I know some authors do not feel the need, but maybe that is because the book is plot rather than character-driven. If it is the plot that is important – as it is in a lot of genre books then it may be sufficient to work from photographs and concentrate mainly on how the setting looks. I think such a book tends to acquire a filmic quality which is fine for a lot of books – but not for what I wanted to do. I wanted to evoke the place as convincingly as I possibly could.

SG: When you write about a place or culture that is not your own, how important is it to get all the details right? For example, do you need to know that you really do turn right off a certain street to get to a specific spot — especially if you are writing about something that your readers will have no personal experience with. Do you feel tied to reality or free to make things up? When writing historical fiction, is this search for verisimilitude freeing because you can assume your reader has no previous knowledge, or limiting because you feel compelled to show how things “really” were. Which leads to the question, “What is reality?” A joke, but not really….

CD: I think it depends. When I was writing about Frankfurt in “98 Reasons For Being” I went there a couple of times and studied maps of the time. I actually walked where I thought Hoffmann, my protagonist, would have walked. Although the extent I could do this was limited because Frankfurt was largely destroyed in the Second World War and so not much from that era remains. However, some of the streets are in the same place, and it was possible to get a feel of how it must have been by just being there. The same applies to several scenes in my Wegener novel.

I suppose for both of these books I did as much as I could. I would settle on a specific place, research that and then place the action there. However, once I had set it up I felt free to invent. I invented character and the detail of what happened, but each time basing my action on some real event – the more meagre the description the better because I then felt more free to invent.

The strange thing is that some things I invented turned out to be true. For instance I invented that Wegener’s middle daughter would have an interest in dinosaurs – and I later found out that she did (from the daughter herself who read my book!).

“A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees” is a much more invented and imagined book – mainly because there was much less recorded. I took the bare bones of the lives of the people that went out to Patagonia – the births, marriages and deaths and invented their characters. I decided what they looked like and put them on my wall together with ‘thumbnail’ sketches of their characters. Then I researched the events and invented how they would individually cope and interact. However, I also researched what they took, the language, the beliefs of the time, and the general and social history of the Welsh. I tried to get to know what they had been through. I felt I had to know their world and therefore, I hope, glean an idea of how they would think, act, react and interact with each other. Again, I suppose it is invention based on as much as I could find out.

I do all this for the sake of the integrity of the piece, not really because I am concerned to get things right for any didactic purpose. In a way it doesn’t matter how much the reader knows, the important thing, I think, for me, is to try and get at some sort of truth. It may not be what actually happened in detail, but I hope that it evokes an essence. I want to try and understand, and then make a point. It is what I always aim to do when I write – convey some sort of message, or series of messages on what it all means to us to be human.

Thanks so much, Clare, for giving us all this insight into your process. And thanks for letting me now add our conversation to the growing list of my blog interviews, over there on the right of the screen. Clare also blogs here. I follow her blog faithfully, although the whole snail thing still escapes me….