Writing Regional English Sagas
By Janet Woods
A saga often follows a family story over number of years. This means that saga writers often split the story between two or more books. Pocket Books UK, produces novels of around 100,000 words and I’m contracted to write to that length. By nature, most sagas are historical.
The most common English sagas are regional ones, which are set in a certain region of the country. The north of England with its industrial history naturally lends itself to saga writing with its cotton and woollen mills and coal mines.
Names which might be familiar to you are Catherine Cookson and Anna Jacobs.
My sagas are set in the South of England. I thought I’d have a problem setting my story in the southern county of Dorset with its rural atmosphere. It was fifty years behind the north as far as industry and emancipation of the work force was concerned. Dorset is where I was born and grew up. It seemed to be famous only for the The Tolpuddle Martyrs, the men who were transported to Australia for forming a workers union. In rural Dorset the landed gentry grew fat off the labour of the peasants, who were forced to live on subsistence wages. But in that I found the cement for my first story. My saga ran to three books as my characters began to live and breath.
At a rough guess I juggled about 25 characters and 5/6 interweaving plot threads through the first book. Many of those threads and characters go on into the 2nd book, where some were then resolved. Still others carried on into the 3rd book, where new characters and subplots were introduced to keep interest up. The threads include social themes, love stories, a Welsh legend/births, deaths and marriages.
I tend to eat and breathe my novels as I write them. Emotionally and physically, writing novels is a draining process - especially with saga, where the common theme is hardship.
The research for any historical novel is fairly heavy. Small details add authenticity to your tale. If you’re writing rural scenes you have to find out which crops are planted and when, and which month they’re harvested, and the difference between a scythe and a sickle.
You also have to learn about sanitary conditions, diseases of the era, what caused them, medicines, remedies and beliefs, marriage laws etc. During the course of my trilogy I learnt how to build a thatched cob cottage, how to amputate a leg without anaesthetic, how workhouses were run and methods of printing.
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