Author Catherine Hokin on how she sets about creating the characters that drive along the storylines of her historical fiction.
It’s probably fair to say that there are more invisible friends lurking in an author’s study than there are in the average primary school playground. We spend our days talking to characters who exist only in our imagination, or – if you write historical fiction like I do – people from the past who we need to add flesh to. By the time they hit the page, however, they need to be rounded, hopefully sympathetic if not necessarily likeable, and definitely worth investing in for the reader. So how do we bring them to life?
In my World War Two and Cold War novels, the fictional characters take centre stage and the historical figures are bit players. Both play an important part in the overall story, but there are differences in how I approach them. A well-known historical figure usually comes with a publicly-perceived personality and voice. We may have a sense of their skills and flaws and what motivated them and – for the people I write about anyway – considerable background information may already exist. A fictional character needs those details filling in, and it’s their developmental arc which is crucial to the novel. They are the ones facing the road blocks in the plot and it’s them I spend most of my time with. But, like the real people they tangle with, I don’t make them up from scratch.
A painting is crucial to the storyline in The Train That Took You Away and a painting, actually two, is where the book began. I met Esther, the mother who has to give away her child, in an art gallery in Berlin (where the novel is set), staring down from a 1930s painting. On the next wall was a portrait of a little boy who could have been her son. So that’s what he became, and that’s where the idea of their forced separation also began. I’m very visual and paintings and photographs are often a character trigger for me – a photo of three German girls laughing together became the starting point for the friendship central to The Lost Mother. Once I have my starting characters, the others follow and then the real work begins.
My novels tend to include three or four main characters and – once I’ve done the background research – I write a detailed study of each one. I write about their parents, their upbringing, their emotional landscape, their key relationships, successes and challenges in chronological order until I know them inside out and upside down. A lot of this information never comes into the finished book, but that doesn’t matter – I need to know it so that these studies can become the skeleton the novel builds from.
What develops is in part a series of composites. Amalie, another character in The Train That Took You Away, is an art conservator who joins the Monuments Men team responsible for recovering stolen art after the war. I read a wide range of biographies and autobiographies to build up a picture of the kind of person who would go down this road, which did include women despite the name. Esther’s son, Sascha, is sent out of Germany on the Kindertransport and this involved a lot of memoir reading. Laurenz is a painter whose work is banned by the Nazis, so again I drew on real people to start shaping him. But this is only part of the picture, the other crucial element is personal experience. All writers dig deep and bring something of themselves to their characters, or the traits they’ve lived with in others, and that aspect is key. Without it, a character is a shell without a heart and no reader will engage with them for long.
So what about real historical figures? That’s a very different kind of challenge as ideas about them are often fixed in stone, but the last thing a writer wants is a cliché wandering across their pages. Or a two-dimensional figure who the fictional characters can’t meaningfully interact with. This is a particularly difficult challenge if, like me, you’re dealing with Third Reich politicians like Hitler and Goebbels who absolutely cannot be sympathetic. They can, however, be human and that is crucial for me. I write novels which are largely centred on the human experience of the war in Germany and – while it is accurate to describe what they did as monstrous – it would be a disservice to my readers to resort to the simplistic ‘monsters’ view of the Nazis which puts them apart from the rest of the population. There’s nothing of psychological interest to explore in that.
For people like them, biographies are obviously useful, but there are other avenues worth exploring to get round the public persona and closer to the human being underneath. I have found contemporary memoirs written by ambassadors and diplomatic staff incredibly useful – they often contain anecdotes which are a writer’s dream. Speeches are also helpful. Hitler’s are in reality often so long and so dull compared to the few minutes of tub-thumping we tend to see, that it must have been an endurance test to sit through them. Goebbels wrote a novel which offers a lot of insight into his self-image. As for biographies, I read the most recent one, but it’s always worth checking for the oldest ones too. One of the biographies of Hermann Göring I used for The Train That Took You Away was written in 1974 and has been superseded, but the writer (Leonard Mosley) met him and included jokes that were being told in contemporary cabaret clubs.
Creating characters is one of the best things about being a writer, especially when they start to wander about on their own and steer the plot, which they do. Perhaps characters are like children and you’re not meant to have favourites, but the ones who feature in The Train That Took You Away are definitely some of mine. I hope they resonate with you too.
(c) Catherine Hokin
https://www.catherinehokin.com/
About The Train That Took You Away by Catherine Hokin:
I wipe the tears streaming down my darling son’s face, my heart shattering into a million pieces. “I promise I will find you, my love. No matter what…”
Berlin, 1938. Ever since the Nazis came to power, violence has spread through the city Esther Spielmann once called home. Each night she prays her family will be spared, but when her husband and father are murdered during Kristallnacht, she has no choice but to send her beloved son, Sascha, to safety.
Seeing his tear-stained face breaks Esther’s heart, but she knows letting him go is her only choice. Tormented, she watches his thin legs trembling in the cold as he is ushered with the other crying children towards the Kindertransport. As the train leaves in a cloud of smoke, she vows that this won’t be the last time she sees her treasured son. But has Esther made a promise she can’t possibly keep?
When Esther is taken to a concentration camp, her world feels devoid of hope. But each day she thinks of the heartfelt promise she made to Sascha, the hope of finding him burning like a flame in her chest. The war has taken everything from Esther, but she is determined it will not take her boy…
In the ashes of war, can Esther make her way back to her beloved son? And if they do meet again, will either of them be prepared for what they find?
An absolutely devastating, emotional page-turning story of a family torn apart by war – and the hope that can sustain us in the darkest of places. Perfect for fans of The Book of Lost Names and The Nightingale.
Order your copy online here.
