Far more than if I gave you a lecture on how to do a wash at that time.
I think that that is a skill that I admire in writers of historical fiction,
you just pick this one little detail that will help me imagine myself elsewhere.
>> It's a nice metaphor for almost picking one thread out of a piece of embroidery or
a tapestry and that little thread just tells you about that whole world
that you see in front of you.
>> I find these details, generally, in travel logs and memoirs of the times.
For example, Catherine, I read a marvelous collection of diaries and letters of
the Wilmette sisters who spent six years in Russia as guests of Princess Dashkopf.
It's trouble to really imagine better witnesses to what they see
than people who live there because they notice the unusual.
When it's caught, an Irish woman arrives in St. Petersburg and
she's woken up by a servant, carrying a bowl with chunks of ice for
rubbing your face and for her, it's odd, that's why she writes it down.
A Russian woman perhaps would not even give it a thought.
She would say, doesn't everybody?
Travelers are marvelous and luckily,
a lot of people left a lot of thoughts on traveling and
you tend to trust certain writers because they write down a lot of details.
I think that that's attractive.
It's hard work though because it takes a lot of time.
>> Tedious. >> To have the knowledge of a different
time.
>> What do you think, maybe as a last question, picking right up on that,
what about your own self knowledge?
What is setting your novels in the past, a particular past,
or just in general, what has that taught you about yourself as a writer?
Are there things that you've learned about yourself, not just by writing a novel but
specifically, by writing a novel set where you've set your latest one?