What is this cycle, actually?

 

 

Well, Book Four is well and truly out now. I took along three copies to my German conversation group this morning. All three were taken up.  Hopefully they’ll like it.

“Do you need to read Book One first?” asked one of my friends.  

You absolutely don’t.  That’s why it’s a cycle. You can read the books in any order.

There is some overlap but even where that happens the story is being told form a different point of view.

The point of view in Face to Face with the Führer is that of Käthe Edler, mother of the main character in The House on Schellberg Street and daughter of the main character in Clara’s Story. All three are based on real people but there is a lot of fiction here.

Or might we call it educated guesses.

It may come down to the fundamental questions about how did that school for the disabled survive in Stuttgart? Some of it must be down to Clara and Käthe for being wonderful feisty women. Renate, from The House on Schellberg Street, was mainly absent from Schellberg Street but her influence was surely on two other feisty women; her friend Hani  and  Hani’s mother.  

Books Five and Six are also written but not yet published. Book Seven, the final book, is just in my head.

Fiction in this case becomes a way of exploring what might have happened. It can help to fill the gaps in our knowledge. In fact I would say it helps us establish what probably did happen. I wondered about how Renate’s father could have worked on the V2 bomb whilst his daughter and wife were in England.  I worked out that he would have probably dragged his feet. A few weeks after I’d written that I read that the German engineers working on the V2 found it so horrific that they delayed its use as long as possible.   

Yes, fiction can be extraordinary in how it digs out the truth.    

The Difference between a Series and a Cycle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m very keen on my group of Schellberg novels being called a cycle rather than a series. One of the beauties of this is that they can be read in any order. Though the reader may know the outcome of particular plot line, different books in the cycle give them another angle on what has actually happened.

I’m very aware of this as I get into the early chapters of Helga’s Story. Anyone who has read Girl in a Smart Uniform will have met her already. She becomes the girlfriend of the protagonist’s brother in that book. Yesterday I wrote the scene of the squashed cakes from Helga’s point of view of Helga.  In Girl in a Smart Uniform we saw that scene through Bear’s eyes.

Helga is also interesting for us in that she shares some characteristics with Renate whom, we meet in The House onSchellberg Street. Both girls only find out in their teens that they are Jewish. Both girls feel more German that Jewish.

I’m finding that each book I write suggests another story. Planned after this one is a story about someone who worked on the edge of the German resistance. I wonder whether it will ever finish. Because there are some other pieces of historical fiction I would like to write.

Creating Helga

 

So, I’m going to be starting the sixth book in the cycle in the next few days. Helga appears in Girl in a Smart Uniform. Part of the story is already there. This is why this is a cycle not a series. It is possible to read the books in any order.

I’ve decided to set part of the novel in the early 2000s and tell the story partly from the point of view of her granddaughter who lives with her. Helga and her granddaughter are experiencing in Wales in 2002 similar attitudes to those that Helga experienced in Germany in the 1940s.

She is resilient, though, because of what happened before and reaches a point of stasis. Helga and her granddaughter are allowed to resume living peacefully in the Welsh hills.   

I have a profile for Helga: German Jewess, but blond-haired. Refuses to leave Germany but goes into hiding there. She has a child; Bear, a main character in book three is the father. She becomes strong. She meets an American at the end of the war. He buys a sheep farm in Wales. She loses her son and daughter-in-law and has to bring up her granddaughter.

The granddaughter I have yet to create. I actually quite like doing that sort of work when I sit in cafés.

There’s a lot to do yet about firming up the plot but it’s something I’m looking forward to doing over the next few weeks.

This will probably be another book with lots of dates in it. Some people have criticised this practice – not just in my work but as a general principle. I’ve read quite a few books where this happens.  I tend to not take in the dates as I read them, but can get into a chapter and wonder what is going on, then have to look back at the date.

The granddaughter will be a young adult. I don’t think this will make the book a YA text but it will certainly be read by young adults.   

I’m toying with writing each strand separately and then weaving them together afterwards. Even if I don’t write that way, I shall certainly plan that way.

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