Holley Martlew: Why My Novel Has Its Own Non-Fiction Companion Book.
How did my novel turn into two books?
It was never my intention in the beginning. It evolved.
The original storyline, the love affair, and its setting, were conceived as one. Venice was where my characters lived when they came alive in my mind. To have the place come alive in my mind at the same time as the embryo of the story is a natural as for me, setting is all-important. My characters don’t live in a vacuum. They live in a place, and the atmosphere it imbues is critical to their story. It doesn’t direct the action or interfere; it swirls round it, adds colour and drama.
A Life Lost: a novel
In A Life Lost, Venice and Istanbul were part and parcel, essential to the story, essential to the love affair, its intensity and its beauty. essential to the story, essential to the love affair, its intensity and its beauty.
I hasten to add, if such is your intention and you believe setting is all important, be sure you know the place well, very well indeed, as it won’t work unless you do. Your characters will wallow around in a sea without definition. The detail in my book relies on two things. Time. You don’t understand a place unless you spend time there. I spent a lot over several years. Observation. You don’t live, walk around, mindlessly. You notice and memorise details, people and places, and there is a third thing which is important to my novel, to all my fiction. It is:
History. I not only study places. I want to know the history. I want to put history into my fiction. I actually feel compelled to do so, as odd as that may sound. I am a professional archaeologist and an academic who has spent a great deal of her life doing historical research. I have always enjoyed it, and I have been honed by it. I find it impossible not to let a story evolve in my mind without researching the history of the place, the history of the setting.
Researching my Novel
In the beginning, I put this research in a series of historical notes that appeared at the end of each chapter. As my research grew, they grew. And grew. They expanded into many things, from simple human interest stories, as an example, The Tale of the Fork. This eventually expanded to the serious, e.g., the complex relationship between Venice and the Byzantine Empire. (Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul).
In between the two came subjects like The Art of Poisoning, inspired by suspected poisonings in the novel. What was discovered was mind-bending, e.g., that poisoning in the Renaissance, in Venice, was not only legal—it was Big Business. The Council of Ten even established a department at the University of Padua to research and develop new poisons and to devise methods to use them to poison enemies of the state.
All this research I loved, but would the reader?
Writing my Novel
During the years it took me to write the novel—and it did take years because I had to weave writing it into my professional career and my family life—I did ask a couple of friends, whose opinions I respected, what they thought. I didn’t go into detail or show them any of my writing. I just explained that I was writing historical notes at the end of every chapter, and what did they think? No one ever gave me a straight answer; they all waffled around, but no one was ever positive. Hmm, I thought, and then I stopped asking. I just tucked these bits of information, their reactions, in the back of my mind.
Looking back on it, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, because eventually I realised it simply wouldn’t work. For a start, it interfered with the storyline, distracted the reader when he or she should be, I sincerely hoped, excited to see what was happening next. Perhaps after reading notes that followed three or four chapters, they would begin to wonder, even resent them. Worst of all, and my blood went cold at the thought, skip them altogether! That was something too terrible to contemplate. So what to do? Well, initially, I did nothing. I just carried on with what had been my routine. I wrote the novel, and when an historical subject came to mind, I researched it and wrote it up. What I might or might not do with the notes was for another day. This was a lot to do with the fact that…
Adding to the Plot
Something extremely useful was coming out of the research. It allowed me to add things to the plot that I could never have done otherwise. It is not that I am recommending this, because I believe the value of my research and the way it affected the plot was peculiar to me and the way my mind worked. But my research was making an invaluable contribution to what happened in my novel. I was able to enrich the plot, make it twist and turn, which I could not have done otherwise.
Time went on. I finished the novel. Or to be truthful, ‘thought’ I had finished the novel. It is long, and it is complicated. It took a lot of editing over a long period of time, but eventually I did it.
One day, I woke up to realise I had to make a decision, and I made one. The notes at the end of each chapter had to come out. I did that and put them in a separate document one by one, in the same order as they had had in the book.
The Most Serene Republic of Venice and the Byzantine Empire
Then, one day, I had a eureka moment. They enhanced the book in their own very individual way. Readers who liked the book would enjoy reading them on their own, as they would enhance their understanding and appreciation of it. Taken together, they were a companion to the novel. That was ‘novel’! I liked that. Icing on the cake, and as far as I knew, it was unique. “You gotta have a gimmick”, sang Gypsy Rose Lee. Suddenly, I realised I had one, albeit on a much higher level.
There followed another realisation. The ‘book’ could stand on its own and at that point I gave it a title, The Most Serene Republic of Venice and the Byzantine Empire: A Celebration of Their Lives and Relations. However, as written, the notes did not have the depth and breadth they needed if they were to be published as a book on their own. Much more research was required. Off I went. I carried it out with great pleasure because I not only had the experience it required, I loved it, for how it would enhance my novel. And I loved it because the subject offered new perspective on these two empires. As such, the book would make its own unique contribution to history.
(c) Holley Martlew
About A Life Lost:
A passionate love affair. A glittering secret buried for centuries. A question that could destroy everything.
When an English writer meets the fifth-generation owner of a glass foundry in Murano and they fall in love, their worlds explode.
Business and pleasure take them to Athens, the Greek islands and Istanbul. The shocking sequence of events that follows includes two murders in a Venetian Palazzo on the Grand Canal, the unmasking of an international smuggling gang in the bowels of a ruined Byzantine Monastery in Istanbul and the discovery of a cache of glittering medieval mosaics that have been hidden away for over a thousand years.
Finally, their story takes a surprising and horrific twist. It raises a question and when it is answered, a life is shattered, raising a moral dilemma:
Was a murder committed on the slopes beneath the Parthenon?
Order your copy online here.
About The Most Serene Republic of Venice and the Byzantine Empire:
It is a combination of the light-hearted and the serious. There are chapters of interest for travellers today (What did, What do, Venetians eat? and Gardens of Venice to visit); chapters that are fun (A Ménage à Trois at the Great Palace), as well as eye-opening chapters on the dark arts of Poisoning-it was legal and big business- and Espionage and a chapter that compares the two empires (Minds that do not Match).
The volume offers a new perspective on history. This is because it addresses a subject previously overlooked: the relationship between Venice and Byzantium. It began when the Republic of Venice was established, which, according to tradition, was in 697 under Doge Paolo Lucio Anafesto, a relationship which ended with The Conquest in 1453. The book exposes the great difference between the two cultures: so near, but yet so far. This alone makes the book unique.
With regard to Venice, its fascination never ceases. It is a magnet.
But how many know the Byzantines preserved The Iliad and The Odyssey for us, and taught Homer to their children for 1000 years.
Order your copy online here.
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