A REMINDER

HAS AGM

followed by

Researching Novels

HASpanel discussion and debate

Panellists:

Deborah Moggach, Jennifer Potter and Robert Irwin

Cost: Cheques received before 28th March: £4.00 for HAS members; £6 for guests.
At the door: £6 for HAS members; £8 for guests. Places are limited, therefore guests for the panel discussion need to be registered in advance. Please put your and your guests' names on the back of the cheque, payable to HAS, and send it to: Mariane Rosel-Miles.

About the Panellists

Deborah Moggach has written 14 novels, the latest, Tulip Fever being set in 17th century Amsterdam. Stephen Spielberg has bought it, and at the latest count, it's now Christopher Hampton who is writing the screenplay. She has recently adapted Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, from a more recent historical period, for the BBC.

Jennifer Potter has published three novels: The Taking of Agnes (Cape 1985) set in Martinique; The Long Lost Journey (Bloomsbury 1989) about a journey into the Yemen in 1911; and After Breathless (Bloomsbury 1995) set largely in France in 1969. Her non-fiction includes Secret Gardens (Conran Octopus1998); and Lost Gardens (Channel 4 Books 2000), written to accompany the recent television series. She is currently planning and researching a new novel set in Pennsylvania.

Robert Irwin was a lecturer in Mediaeval History at the University of St Andrews until (quite bored) he resigned, in order to become a househusband and a novelist. He has written four books on mediaeval Islamic culture and history, as well as six novels. The novels are The Arabian Nightmare (1983), The Limits of Vision (1986), the Mysteries of Algiers (1988), Exquisite Corpse (1995), Prayer Cushions of the Flesh (1997) and Satan Wants Me (1999). They have been widely translated, and Satan Wants Me has been optioned for a film. He is also a consulting editor at the Times Literary Supplement and the director of a publishing company. He is currently working on a novel about the history of cinema, as well as a history of Orientalism.

Membership of HAS

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Membership is £8, if you are already a member of the Society of Authors;
otherwise it's £12 per year. To apply, please send your short bio, with a list of your publications, to:
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DO YOU DO MUCH RESEARCH?
Rosemary Friedman

Research is an integral part of the writing process. It falls into two categories. `What you know' and `what you don't know'. `What you know' consists of the author's knowledge of life. It is a rag-bag of remembrance, of places recalled, of conversations recollected, of relationships explored, of random and apparently unrelated occurrences added over the years to the compost heap of the writer's mind. By the time a new novel is started the matter is well rotted, and all that he has to do is turn it over with his spade.

The second type of research is more specific and for some writers is the fruit of experience. Conrad's novels relied on his background as a sailor, and War and Peace on Tolstoy's life as a soldier and man about town. A.J. Cronin and Somerset Maugham drew upon their medical knowledge and Ernest Hemingway upon his skills as a fisherman, while Ian Fleming used his training as a secret agent to establish the credibility of James Bond.

Although Uncle Tom's Cabin, about the brutality of Southern slave owners, was written while Harriet Beecher Stowe was confined to the North with her large family, there are very few authors who are able to invoke unfamiliar worlds without leaving their desks. Research for my own nineteen novels has led me to uncharted library shelves, transported me to places I would not otherwise have visited, opened the doors to unfamiliar milieux and introduced me to a fascinating cavalcade of people I would not otherwise have met.

The best research is talking to people. Most people are happy to have their routine interrupted and flattered to think (usually mistakenly) that you are going to put them into a book. In the name of research I have frequented a strip club and worked in a beach café (We All Fall Down). Research has taken me - amongst many other places - into a New York police precinct (Rose of Jericho), behind the `Chinese wall' of a City bank (Golden Boy), into a judge's inner sanctum (An Eligible Man), and as an invited guest to the major chateaux on the Bordeaux wine route (Vintage). When I am asked how I know so much about how to make toffee-apples, US police procedure, `hostile' takeover bids, the Crown Prosecution Service and wine-making, the answer is that I don't. The writer knows, or appears to know, the whole world. The success with which he does this is in direct proportion to the meticulousness with which he carries out his research.

Research for my new novel, Intensive Care, has led me once more into strange territory. It has a bizarre history. In 1996 I answered a small ad in the back of The Author inviting writers to apply to the Royal Post Graduate Medical School at the Hammersmith Hospital where Professor Julia Polak was hoping to raise both the profile of, and funds for, her Lung Transplant Fund. The catalyst for the appeal was Julia's extraordinary story which she felt could be put to good use.

In early 1995, while spearheading major areas of research at the Hammersmith Hospital Royal Post Graduate Medical School, Julia was discovered to be at an advanced stage of a lung disease which by an odd trick of fate was the very disease that, together with cardiac surgeon Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub, she was investigating. Without an urgent heart and lung transplant she would die. After an agonising wait for donor organs, Sir Magdi was able to operate on his colleague, bestowing upon her the `gift of life', albeit one in which the future was uncertain and in which there were still a great many hurdles to be overcome.

In gratitude for her life-saving operation, Julia committed herself to a programme of further research into the cause of her illness and the ensuing complications, and to developing treatment for people with lung disease for whom transplant is the only option. In view of my track record, I was engaged to write a play which we both hoped would raise funds for the project.

Since my knowledge of heart-lung transplants was zero, where did I start to learn something about this new and fascinating subject, a world away from corporate finance and from wine? I had a couple of meetings with the extremely busy Professor and familiarised myself with the department of Histochemistry where she worked. This was followed by a visit to Harefield Hospital where the actual heart-lung transplants were carried out and where I was able to pick the brains of members of the team. Later I attended a landmark Pathological Society meeting in Southampton, at which Julia brought the house down and a tear to every eye as she presented slides of her own diseased lungs. At Julia's `first birthday party' (one year after her transplant), which was held at Harefield, I was introduced to other surviving transplant patients whose rewarding and chastening stories provided the human dimension of my theme. By the end of a few weeks, and having read as many books and papers on the subject as I could lay hands on, I felt sufficiently confident to switch on the computer and start writing.

Despite the best efforts of my theatrical agent, `Julia's' play, in common with most plays, failed to find a producer, although during this time another play of mine, Home Truths, was put on.

When it became obvious that the lung-transplant play would not be staged in the immediate future, I made the decision to use the material I had so painstaking gathered for a novel which was more likely to see the light of day. This turned out to be the case and Intensive Care was born.

While the background to the novel is factual, constructed both from my research at the Hammersmith and Harefield Hospitals and through my wide reading on the subject, the narrative is pure fiction. I met Julia, an extremely busy woman, only on two or three brief occasions - once we had tea in Selfridges - and I knew nothing of her personal life. Generously she gave me carte-blanche to make up what I liked about `her'. Despite this largesse I took care to get her approval of the final draft through one of her colleagues (who also corrected any technical mistakes) who read the manuscript and reported back to the Professor.

Although Intensive Care is not a story I would voluntarily have written, I was stimulated not only by the bravery of Julia and the many lung transplant patients whom I had the privilege to meet - some of whom have unfortunately since died - but also by the commitment of the medical and surgical teams, the transplant coordinators and counsellors who make the lives of those waiting tolerable and the too-few operations possible.

The acute shortage of donor organs, the moral and ethical implications of `spare-part' surgery and the desperate plight of the terminally ill patients, many of them still in their teens and twenties, is not only the stuff of fiction, but deserves the attention of everyone able to live a full and healthy life.

As a corollary to the above I was touched to learn that not only did my editor at House of Stratus, enthuse about my novel but was moved to apply immediately for a donor card. One definition of a good book is that it changes the world for us. If Intensive Care highlights the urgent need for donor organs as well as entertaining its readers, it will have not only have done its job but also enabled me to add `heart-lung' transplants to the long list of things my eclectic research has `qualified' me to do.

Intensive Care by Rosemary Friedman, will be published by House of Stratus on April 26th.