Even though Dr. Joanne Paul had wanted to be a writer for a long time, she had lost sight of that identity and had to find her way back to it. But now, she has embraced creativity and imagination as a historian, and is here to encourage you to do the same. I was thrilled to be joined in this episode by Dr. Joanna Paul. Joanne is a historian of the Renaissance and Early modern periods, especially of their political, intellectual, and cultural histories. In addition to two academic books, she is the author of two books for a general audience. The first The House of Dudley, was published in 2022. It follows the Dudley family’s history alongside that of the Tudors, telling the story of the family’s proximity to the throne and, as she puts it, “revealing some of the period’s most talented, intelligent, and cunning individuals.” Her most recent book, out this year, is Thomas More: A Life. In it, she tells the story of one of the most infamous figures in English history in a fascinating biography on this complicated man. I can tell you that both of these books are genuine page-turners, and I loved getting to ask Joanne more about how she wrote them.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Joanne Paul, Thomas More: A Life
- Joanne Paul, The House of Dudley: A New History of Tudor England
- Deborah Harkness on Drafting the Past
- Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
- Joanne’s episode of Penguin’s Break It Down Series: Tudor Historian Joanne Paul Breaks Down Tudor Films & TV Shows
- A YouTube playlist of some of Joanne’s appearances
- James Meek, To Calais in Ordinary Time
- Helen Castor
- Dan Jones
- Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
- Maggie O’Farrell
- John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story
- Blake Snyder, Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need, and the Save the Cat website
[Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you purchase a book through one of these links, Drafting the Past gets a small amount, which helps to keep the show going.]
Transcript
Kate Carpenter 0:02
Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast on the craft of writing history. I'm Kate Carpenter. Today's guest shares an experience that I think a lot of listeners can relate to. Even though Dr. Joanne Paul had wanted to be a writer for a long time, she had lost sight of that identity and had to find her way back to it. But now she has embraced creativity and imagination as a historian, and she's here to encourage you to do the same. I'm thrilled to be joined in this episode by Dr. Joanne Paul.
Joanne Paul 0:32
Thank you. I'm really excited to chat with you.
Kate Carpenter 0:36
Joanne is a historian of the Renaissance and early modern periods, especially their political, intellectual and cultural histories. In addition to two academic books, she is the author of two books for a general audience. The first, The House of Dudley, was published in 2022. It follows the Dudley family's history alongside that of the Tudors, telling the story of the family's proximity to the throne, and as she puts it, "revealing some of the period's most talented, intelligent and cunning individuals." Her most recent book, out this year, is Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England. In it, she tells the story of one of the most infamous figures in English history. It's a fascinating biography on this complicated man, and I can tell you that both of these books are genuine page turners. I loved getting to ask Joanne more about how she wrote them. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Joanne Paul.
Joanne Paul 1:32
I really wanted to be a writer when I was, well in my sort of twelves and thirteens. I even wrote a novel and a half, and I was obsessed with it, but it sort of got taken out of me, you know, teasing and bullying and things like that at school, and I lost sight of that passion I had for being a writer, and got distracted by things that felt more serious, and so did degrees in history and political science and a PhD in history, and became very good at that form of writing, academic writing, which is its own genre. But it wasn't until I was I was fairly well established at that that I was very lucky to be approached by a literary agent who had read some work I'd done for some history magazines, and said, I think you can write, you know, beyond the genre of academic history. Have you ever thought about writing a book? And I was very lucky that I had an idea for a book that had been very back burnered during my PhD, which became The House of Dudley, my first trade book. And I've now just recently published my second trade book, which is a biography of Thomas More. So that's a very long answer, but I think it's important to me that it's something that I always loved and always wanted to do and have this point in my life and my career sort of recaptured.
Kate Carpenter 1:32
Well, let's talk about practicalities a little bit. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Joanne Paul 1:32
I tend to write at home. I don't find that I can write out very much, you know, cafes or libraries or things. I like to have a bit of a cozy hovel while I'm writing. And I've managed to build one of those at home that is full of things that have to do with my writing, portraits of various Tudor figures and the like. And I keep mostly a nine to five with my writing. I will sometimes do a bit of a shift after dinner, after the kids are asleep in the sort of eight to 10 o'clock window. But generally it's, it's during the day. What I do do, which I think is, contrary to a lot of advice that's given, it has indeed been given on this podcast, is I do compartmentalize my writing. The wonderful Deborah Harkness gave the advice to touch your writing every day. That's not actually something that I do. I like to give space to my writing. And so it happens on days where I've built in at least half a day, if not the whole day, to writing. And contrary, again, to a lot of advice, I actually will start the day with doing things like checking my email and social media, I like to know that that's done. There's nothing waiting for me burning a hole in my inbox before I get writing. So it's clear space and a clear head that really works for me.
Kate Carpenter 4:33
How do you like to organize yourself? Are there tools that you use?
Joanne Paul 4:37
Nothing too fancy, I think I've experimented with a few writing tools, but I mean, really, I'm just a Microsoft Word kind of person, and organize my files in file folders like you know, anyone would have 10 or 15 years ago. It's not that exciting. And what I would say, though, is about my research notes. I do organize them by chapter and chronologically, and I think that's because I think a lot about structure of a book before I start writing it. So it's very clear to me, and it will change, but it's very clear to me, how many parts, how many chapters, what those chapters cover, and so the research is very focused for each chapter and then organized chronologically, because I like to live in the history that I'm telling so much. It's important to me to work out what happens when and in what order. I find sometimes, when we tell stories about the past, even if things happen very close together or even at the same time, we'll think about them in happening different at different times or or in different ways, because they might fall on either side of a reign ending, for instance, or because one happens in England and one happens in France. But of course, those things will still impact each other, so I'm very keen on keeping that sense of chronology very alive for me, and I try not to separate out the things that happen in my books by those artificial divides that we've imposed on the past.
Kate Carpenter 6:14
Where in the research and planning and thinking process do you actually start writing?
Joanne Paul 6:19
Very early on, I will do some preliminary research, which will tend to be fairly secondary, maybe, if there's a big archive of stuff that is especially relevant to me, as it was with the Dudley papers, for instance, for House of Dudley, I will go and visit that and get that sort of squared away in some sense of what's in there, so that I know I can, I can draw on it. But there's very much a conversation, I think, between my writing and my research. I can't sit down and write unless I've got the research there, or can can go and access it. And likewise, I don't, I have trouble just researching for research's sake, like I need to know what I need to know it for, if that makes sense. I have to understand what I'm looking for. And so very much it will be the demands of the story and the scene that will send me out looking for something.
Kate Carpenter 7:17
Do you do a lot of revision as you go then, or do you wait until you have sort of a completed draft?
Joanne Paul 7:23
Very much as I go, I tend to read over an entire chapter before I start continuing on that chapter. So at the start of a writing day, for instance, I'll read through what has come before most of the time, and inevitably, there are things that I want to change, and so it will usually be a process of continual revision. I'm also very lucky. I have some people that I tend to share chapters and drafts and things with, a writer's group that is especially supportive, and so I will share things with them as we go, not not the whole thing, but just to give them a sense of the voice and the direction, and then I can apply those comments to the rest of it as I go. It often is the case that the this means that the first sort of half or so is more heavily revised than the second half, but ideally, I'm picking up some of those, some of that feedback that I've gotten revising those early chapters, and it tends to get easier by the end.
Kate Carpenter 8:28
You hinted at this in describing how your career as a writer has progressed, and then you also, I think, mentioned it in maybe the acknowledgements, but you talk about sort of recovering your identity as an artist and not just as a historian. What has that meant for you? What does that look like?
Joanne Paul 8:45
Well, it started, a friend of mine recommended this fantastic book called The Artist's Way, which hopefully some readers have encountered. Go check it out if you haven't. But it is about the idea that we all have an inner artist who's closely related to our inner child, and often they do get sort of pushed down, beat down, ignored, neglected. And that really resonated with my own experience, I think, in sort of practical terms, what it's meant for me is a sense of openness and flexibility when it comes to my creative practice, it's being able to have the bravery to say that I have a creative practice. I think sometimes I don't know if the sort of imposter complex, but we're afraid to describe ourselves as artists and to give ourselves the scope to talk about our art and to give that space to breathe and to occupy space in the world. I think that can be a bit scary, but I think it's very necessary, and so it often means doing things like spending three or four days writing something that I know isn't going to get published or or, you know, has no productive value, but is a creative exercise for myself. I think that that's very important, that sort of experimentation, and just being willing, in some sense, to let, describe it as a muse or the mood or whatever it is, but just letting that guide you a little bit. And I think the final thing I'll say is that it's also about honing your art, making it a project to grow and to be better at the creative representation of what it is that you do, I think sometimes with nonfiction, certainly with history, we aren't encouraged to be artists. We aren't encouraged to be creative, and we aren't encouraged to explore the possibilities that come with that and to talk about our genre as creative. And I think that if we did, we would stretch the bounds a little bit more of how we represent the past to people, how we help people understand the past. And that is, that is our job as historians. So I'm, yeah, I'm a bit sorry to get a bit preachy about it, but I really believe that we should see ourselves as creatives.
Kate Carpenter 11:29
To look more at how Joanne brings her own creativity to the page, I asked her to read an excerpt from her new book and talk with me about how she put it together. Here's Dr Joanne Paul reading from the start of chapter five of Thomas More: A Life.
Joanne Paul 11:45
Thomas More was sixteen years old when he first entered the Great Hall of the palace of Westminster. The façade of the northern end, with its grand entrance, looked more like the frontage of a cathedral than somewhere banquets and business took place. At more than 200 feet long by 70 feet wide and just under 100 feet high, the hall was the largest of its kind in Europe. Morning light filtered in through its many windows, drawing attention to the arched timbers which supported more than 700 tons of hammerbeam roof. Overseeing the goings-on in the hall were gilded oaken angels, silent in their judgement of events below. Erected 400 years before More first stepped through its six-foot-thick stone walls, Westminster Hall had housed some of the greatest royal events of the preceding centuries, not least many coronation banquets. Its size had also made it useful for important state trials; for instance, that of the Scottish rebel Sir William Wallace, who in 1305 was sentenced to death under the eyes of the hall’s angels. Wallace was stripped naked and dragged through London to Smithfield, where he endured the full punishment for treason: hanged by the neck until almost dead, then cut down, his private parts hacked off and his bowels removed and burned before him. He was then beheaded, and his body cut into four parts, to be taken to the four corners of the realm as a warning to others. His head was impaled on a spike above London Bridge, as were those of all traitors to the Crown. There was, however, none of the solemnity that might be associated with such grand events as More entered Westminster Hall for the first time. Instead, it reverberated with the inescapable babel of a hundred overlapping conversations, and the thunderous roll of a thousand other noises—the slapping of boots, the scratching of quills and the screech of wooden furniture dragged across stone. More had arrived into the chaos and cacophony of the king’s courts. The press of bodies, the clamour of passionate orations and the buzz of anxiety and busyness, this was justice.
Kate Carpenter 13:55
I struggled to pick a passage because there were so many that I loved, but I chose this one, because it illustrates something you mentioned to me in our first emails, and that was that you focus on furnishing a scene. I think you can really see that in this one, all the sensory details and the real sort of visual description here. What kind of research goes into creating a scene like this?
Joanne Paul 14:16
A huge amount. Typically this one, I was very lucky because Westminster Hall still exists, and it exists more or less in the state that it did 500 years ago. That's not always the case. In fact, it's very rarely the case that I'm so lucky that I can describe something as it is today. Most of the time I'm having to go back through inventories. I'm having to go back through often, archeological findings to try to understand what the hall was shaped like, or where the windows were or so on. So it's usually a lot harder than this one was. That being said, the sort of physical space is, is only part of it. As you say you want to furnish it. This passage does go on to talk about where the various benches were, what people were wearing. Here, I'm very focused on the sound as you enter, because that's the first thing you're hit with. Where you, when you enter somewhere like that, is just the sound of it. And so for that, I mean, there aren't a lot of records that tell you what somewhere sounds like. So that's where imagination comes in. You know what's going on in that hall? We have records of how many courts there were, the number of people that would be involved in a given court, how often cases were being dealt with, and so on and so forth. And from that, you can determine, yeah, it's going to be a noisy it's a pretty noisy place, and you can identify the things that would make noise. And so I think that's part of it for me. I often I go to sound, I go to smell, occasionally taste, usually, it's largely visual. But you can see here too, I'm trying to pull out very thematic things, so that the perspective of the angels from above, I'm doing a bit of foreshadowing with the treason trial of William Wallace, and so it's not just describing everything, it's picking out those details that serve that sense of entering the scene while also serving the story.
Kate Carpenter 16:21
So I love this. I know that somewhere out there, there is a historian who was trained very traditionally with perhaps an overly judgmental advisor who just cringed when you said the word imagination. And you had sort of mentioned to me, kind of thinking about the difference between invention and imagination. And you even said, I'm going to quote it from your email, because I liked it. But you said "there's a lot that can be imagined between the archives and the realities of the lived world." And I think you've given kind of a great example here, right? That there's not necessarily a document that says this is what it sounded like, but you know, when things are built of wood and they're this size, you know what, what kind of acoustic effects there are? I mean, what does that sort of embrace of imagination. What does that mean to you writing narrative history as someone who is really trained as a serious historian?
Joanne Paul 17:07
I think even the most serious historian, if they took the time to reflect on it, would acknowledge that imagination is the essential tool of the historian. I don't think we get very far making even the most sort of dry, serious historical arguments, without a sense of imagination. That is different, as you say, from invention. I think imagination we have to use. I think invention probably shouldn't be used, or even if it is, it has to be very carefully earmarked and shown that that's, that's what we're using, that, it's beyond what we know from from the records. I haven't invented anything here. What I have done is imagine what it would be like, and be like, we mean the senses, right? What it would feel like, sound like, possibly smell like, to be present in that moment based purely on the research that's been done to tell us what, what was going on at at the time. I've been accused of invention. I swear I don't do it. It is based on on either the archival material that I've dealt with or that somebody else has has already published on. And so part of it is coming from the archives and from research, historical research. But also then I talked about the lived reality of the world. There are certain things that are true of the world and of physical existence that were true then and are true now, and that can be relied on, I think, to furnish a scene to help understand what that day might be like, so that the sun rises in the east, that that is what happens. And it's, it's, we might play with probabilities a bit here, but generally, there's a chill in February, right? If you're out in February, it might be warm in August. If you get stabbed, you will bleed, right? Like these things are, are true, and I think we can rely on on these, these realities of the world, to help us enter the world and connect with it, in some sense. And so I will rely on that at various points as well. Again, maybe there are probabilities involved. It. You know, it could happen that there is an unseasonably warm day in February, for instance, and there isn't some chill in the air. It gets pretty unlikely. But you know, it is possible that that was the case, and therefore I'll admit that maybe I'm wrong if I describe a February day as chilly. But you know, we're always doing probability. It's when it comes to history, we're always, it's always guesswork. We're doing our best with the material we have in front of us. And part of that material are these lived realities.
Kate Carpenter 20:02
I have to imagine, especially for a biography of someone like Thomas More, who is not exactly an obscure figure in history. He has been covered in both fiction and nonfiction in multiple generations. As you mentioned in the book, a lot of readers might come to this book with some sort of preconceived notions of who Thomas More is. How does that shape how you approach writing about him?
Joanne Paul 20:25
Ideally, it doesn't, you know, one can never be fully aware of the biases that one brings to any study. But my intention, very much, in approaching the biography of Thomas More was to treat him as I would any other historical figure, which meant that the sources that had tended to be used for him, which were posthumous, weren't that useful to me. That's not, that's not what I would use if I was studying literally anyone else. I would want to use contemporary sources. I would want to understand him based on reflections of the people around him. And I'd want to understand him based on what he had to say. You know, obviously there are facades and everything else that are built up, but that helps us understand a person just as much. And so I really spent a lot of time with his own writings, his letters and his very, very copious of writings, from lewd poems to religious polemics, to try to understand what his central beliefs were and what really motivated him, and tried to put all those other debates aside. Now, obviously, I think the biggest temptation in doing that or away from doing that, is is the desire to myth bust and to go, Aha, actually, which I do not so much in the book, I think.But in promoting the book, that's, that's how I do it is like, oh, you think you know this, but… Which, which hopefully draws people in to reading it. But I was not trying to do that in the book. I read a lot of works about life writing, writing biographies before attempting this biography, which, you know, I took very, very seriously, given More's legacy. And one of the things that really appealed to me in terms of an approach, is this idea of the invisible artist in the narration of a biography that you kind of don't want to appear too much. And fortunately, that's how I like to write. Anyway, I did make a couple of passes at the first chapter in, I think, a slightly more traditional biographical mode where I was present as a narrator, leading people through the research and the facts and so on. But that just didn't feel natural to me. And the benefit, I think, of doing it the way I've done it, I hope one of the benefits is that I'm able to sort of lay the information in front of people without imposing my own judgments or conclusions on that material, people are just allowed to take it as as it is, which hopefully means that what I'm laying in front of people is, is complexity, is contradiction, is as as Virginia Woolf talked about it, you know, the six or seven lives that we're able to get down on paper, as opposed to the 1000 that actually inhabit all of us. So I'm hoping that that is what I'm presenting, devoid of any sort of assessment about what that means for the larger debates about his legacy.
Kate Carpenter 23:35
You also mentioned to me ahead of our conversation that you like to employ screenwriting techniques in your writing. What does that mean to you?
Joanne Paul 23:44
Sort of tips and tricks that I've taken from a variety of books on on screenwriting, but I've, I've looked at some of them have to do with the wider structure of the books. I will attempt to lay it out to a five act structure, to understand where, where the rise and fall of it is, to think about parallels between the two sides of the rise and fall, and to understand where I'm going to introduce things like challenges to, it's not quite right to call it a protagonist, but to the main figure in the book, for instance. So there is an attempt to do that. I will often attempt to do that within a chapter as well. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The thing with, you know, non fiction and a biography is you can't, you can't, there's limits to how much you can serve the story and any sense of structure, because you're not inventing it. It is what it is, and so, so that's, that's part of it, but I think it really does help in that initial structuring phase for me. The other is that I have a tendency, much more with House of Dudley than Thomas More, but I have a tendency to write in sort of what I call scenes, these sort of episodic moments. That's, I I tried for a bit more flow with Thomas More than House of Dudley, but I think it's still there. And so I'm very attentive to a lot of the advice around constructing and indeed entering the scene from screenwriting, which is, get in late, get out early, right? You want to enter the action of the scene, and so I do try to do that as much as possible. The one we've just read is maybe not a great example of that. And actually, I think reading it back, it's a bit heavy on on annoying numbers and details at the beginning. If I were to rewrite it, I think I'd come in sharper than that, but by the end, I'm getting into some nice onomatopoeia and some alliteration that I think is kind of okay, but I do try to do that as well. And I guess the final thing is, is I do think very visually. And so there's something of of the, I guess, the cinematography that comes out as well. Because when you're writing, you're not only scripting the scene, but you're filming it, in some sense as well, you are giving the viewer the perspective on that scene. And so I do have a tendency, I think, to start wide and then zoom in to a scene. And that one, for instance, and with a lot of scenes in Thomas More, and I did this quite intentionally, I'm starting from above, and you get this sense the opening of the book, for instance, you get this sense that you're watching from above, and then getting closer and closer and closer. And finally, find John More on the streets of London, who is Thomas More's father, and follow him home. So there, there's something to that as well, which I've I've taken from my love of and admiration for, for screenwriting.
Kate Carpenter 26:49
I know that as part of your career, especially as you've sort of moved into more trade works and public facing history, you've done a lot of appearances on television and some really great online videos. I'll link to those in the show notes. Do those sorts of opportunities to share your expertise? Do they feed back into your writing? Do they affect the way you work?
Joanne Paul 27:09
It's a really great question. I think I'm really intrigued by it, because I have a tendency to think of those as very different outputs and different very different parts of my professional life. But also, I think I tend to think of them as opposed, in tension in some way. I think that, you know, I often see that sort of work as aw, it's another day not writing, right? I love doing it, but I'm aware of the toll it takes on progressing my page count. But I really like that question, because I think probably it does. I think there is a positive sort of feedback that happens through that primarily, one of the things that I took from a lot of the prep around writing biography for Thomas More is how much curiosity drives a biography, and the reader through a biography, which is a real art. When you're dealing with someone who's very, very dead, and for whom everyone knows exactly how they died, that's why they're reading the book. And so finding ways to pique people's curiosity, I think, is very important, and engaging in filming. And, you know, doing those YouTube videos and everything else, I think, helps me to understand what people are curious about and where those those drama moments are for a lot of people. You know what, what they might be familiar with and what might be totally unknown to them, and therefore, might be quite exciting. You know when, when you've spent, I've spent more than 10 years working on Thomas More, I know all the stuff, and I've kind of forgotten what I didn't know. You know, it's difficult, so I think that that's really, actually quite helpful.
Kate Carpenter 28:56
For the last part of our conversation, I want to talk a little bit about influences. So first I'll ask what I always think is kind of a hard question, but what, what is the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Joanne Paul 29:06
That is a really hard question, because I've been fortunate to receive a lot of advice, and it has been very useful. Read screenwriting books was a fantastic piece of advice I got from Dan Jones. Actually stood outside the tower at about 5:30am on weekday morning, and that's been very helpful. But I think actually, I was very lucky when I was teaching at the University of Sussex to be able to audit a Master's course on creative historical writing, most of it fiction, but there was some space to talk about nonfiction as well, and part of that course was workshopping each other's writing. And so I brought in a very early chapter of House of Dudley, and the students were always polite, but there was this sort of quiet, and one just said, and so, how are you positioning the narrative voice in this? And I said, holy -- I haven't thought at all about narrative voice, right? You know, especially coming from an academic writing background, I hadn't heard the phrase narrative voice in years, but it was hugely important, and it came about largely because I had described Edmund Dudley, one of the figures in the book as something having happened to him when he was a teenager. And I used the word teenager, and they said, Well, that's that's really jarring, isn't it? And I hadn't really ever thought about that, about less in terms of, you know who the narrator was, and again, you know, I prefer the invisible artist, but where the narrative voice was in time. You know, I thought that was a really, really important thing to think about, and so I made the decision really then and there, that the the narrative voice would be in the moment that it was describing. So, you know, obviously I'm not going to fully adopt 16th century language. There's a very good book that does do that, To Calais, In An Ordinary Time, but I'm not going to attempt it, but you know, to at least have some awareness of the vocabulary of that time, as opposed to this time, and most importantly, to not express any knowledge of what happens beyond that moment. So I mean, there might be a few very, very rare exceptions, but I'm hoping there aren't any at all where the the narrative voice says something is coming around the corner, or, you know, talks about what their fate will inevitably be. Or, you know, like there's, there might be jumping around in terms of the prologue happens five, you know, 50 years after, after the first chapter. But within the actual story, it's very, very rooted in that moment. You know, it doesn't talk about the ruins of that castle being next to the M 25 or something, like it's just there. And that became really, really important to me. So I'm very grateful to those wonderful students who very politely schooled me on how to write, very basic things.
Kate Carpenter 32:05
You mentioned, I think, early on that there are people that read for you, that give you feedback. Are you part of like a formal writing group?
Joanne Paul 32:12
No, I would be lovely if I were. I think that that would be fantastic. No, it's, it's, it's informal. It's a few, we call ourselves Women Who Write, just a few historian friends who are more or less in the area, and therefore we can actually physically get together and discuss things. I do, again, it's sort of part of my preaching, but I think I'd love it if we did think about and talk about, I mean, that's why I adore this podcast. You know, we thought a little bit more about the craft of writing when it comes to creative, non fictional history, I think that there, there is a bit of a hole there that needs filling.
Kate Carpenter 32:51
Are there other historians that you look to as inspiration, that you read, or other writers, other people you watch or listen to?
Joanne Paul 32:58
I mean, the short answer is yes. And I could, I could start naming off, you know, some of some of the fantastic writers doing amazing things with with narrative history right now. I mean, the first one, off the top my head, in terms of recent book, is Helen Castor's latest book is, it's an amazing piece of work. You know, I've mentioned Dan Jones, he's wonderful at crafting a scene and making you feel like you're there. I mean, if I start listing people, we'll be here for a while, and then I'll feel bad about having left people out. So the short answer is yes, absolutely. The slightly longer answer is that I absolutely do, but I'm also very protective of my own way of writing, and so I'll often not read too too much within that genre while I'm trying to write, because I think that I have found my voice as a writer and my particular way of approaching writing, and I'm quite pleased with that and proud of it, and want to to maintain that, and like to think that there's not many who quite do it in the way that I do it, that my voice is unique in some way. And I think sometimes, if I read too widely, I'll find someone like me, but better. So I tend not to read too too much non fiction. I will read a lot of fiction, though, when I'm writing. So those who have have read Ken Follett, for instance, Pillars of the Earth will probably see some motifs of that, you know, especially in the sense of a sort of intergenerational epic in House of Dudley. I was, I was re reading Pillars of the Earth at that time. I adore Maggie O'Farrell for the way in which she thinks about perspective in her writing and uses perspective in interesting ways and also crafts motifs and themes that recur. I like to think that I do that as well. Well, House of Dudley, it was a lot of wood and blood, because it's all about family and family trees and so on. In Thomas More, it's a lot about fire. Fire comes up a lot. So, yeah, I look to those sorts of writers, I think, much more when I am actually turning to write. It's more in between books that I I try to catch up on all the wonderful things that have been written in my field.
Kate Carpenter 32:59
If I'm a listener who has listened to this whole interview and is now thinking to myself, Oh my gosh, I need to go get a book on screenwriting techniques. Do you have any that you recommend?
Joanne Paul 34:04
I mean, Into The Woods is, is one of the classics, and it's John Yorke. I think that one is obviously, I mean, I, I think I read others, and I'm kind of looking over my shoulder at my bookshelf now, I'm trying to think which, which other ones are worth worth mentioning. But that one was really clear and pivotal. But beyond that, I mean it, you don't have to pick up a whole book, I think, because unless you are going to start screenwriting, which I've played around with, and I think it's really fun, I love formatting. So screenwriting, for me, is great of structure. But you know, there are all sorts of aids online. I think Save the Cat has a great website, for instance, where, you know, you can get some of these plot structures. There's a fantastic infographic that that lays out some of the different ways that, essentially, the five act structure has been conceived of, whether it's the hero's journey or, you know, a more classic five act structure or or so on. And just play around with what works for you. And the other thing that that I do, and maybe this, this shows how deeply a nerd I am, is I'll watch a TV show with a notebook and see if I can identify the various bits of the structure of it, just to sort of practice identifying these things and and getting a sense of so that the rhythm becomes a bit more innate, and you can start to understand how stories are structured, and be able to identify that so that you can then either replicate it or throw it out the window. You know, I think that that has to be allowed as well.
Kate Carpenter 37:14
Well, you have these two marvelous trade books out, House of Dudley and Thomas More. What are you up to these days? Do you have new projects on the horizon?
Joanne Paul 37:23
Yes, I do. I don't think I'm allowed to talk about it, but I am very slowly working on it. At the moment, I'm doing a lot of promotional work around Thomas More still, that tends to take a while after publication, so it's, it's slow going on the next project for a little while. But I'm, what I will say about the next project, is it, it's more creative, I think, than it is sort of serious research based. I mean, I am doing serious research, and I am going to the archives, and I've been to the archives, and will head there many more times. But in terms of, I suppose its overall intention, it's to tell an interesting story in an interesting way, still nonfiction and from from the sources, but I guess I'm just sort of flexing those creative, artistic muscles a little bit more, and to see where where that takes me in to see where that takes the story and other people's way of of interacting with the past.
Kate Carpenter 38:27
If listeners want to stay up on what you're doing and on your career, where can they find you?
Joanne Paul 38:31
I have a website, Joannepaul.com, I tend to be pretty good about updating it. I am on Instagram. Dr. Joanne Paul, I have sort of legacy existence on Twitter, slash x, which is Joanne underscore Paul underscore, and I sometimes post the big things on there as well. But the website, the website's probably your, your best bet.
Kate Carpenter 38:53
Dr. Joanne Paul, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past. It was great fun to talk with you about writing.
Joanne Paul 38:58
That's brilliant, brilliant. Good fun. Thank you.
Kate Carpenter 39:00
Thank you for listening to this episode of Drafting the Past. You can find links to Joanne's books and everything else we talked about in the show notes at draftingthepast.com. While you're there, you can also sign up for the email newsletter to get updates on the show, more of my thoughts on history writing, and whatever else I think listeners might find interesting. In the meantime, keep in mind that friends don't let friends write boring history.
