Author’s
Inspiration
Widdershins
By Helen
Steadman
Reading
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall inspired me
to write a historical novel. I had the title, Pushed by Angels, but no ideas beyond historical-research-induced
anxiety. In May 2011, I decided to take an MA in Creative Writing, which gave
me immediate permission to stop writing until the MA began in October 2013.
Until
then, I was determined not to waste all
my free time drinking, so I continued taking my dog out for daily woodland
walks. One day, I smelt a strange strawberry-like smell and followed my nose
uphill. At the top of the rise, the source of the smell became clear: loggers
had cut down hundreds of Scots pines, revealing an enormous natural
amphitheatre, albeit one populated by oozing stumps. Stunned by the sight, and
possibly in an altered state on account of the pine sap, I sat down to wonder
what might have happened in this place centuries ago.
Apropos
of nothing, Florence Welch jumped into my head, singing ‘We raise it up, this
offering’ Sacrifice! Ritual! Rituals
could have happened here, magical goings-on. Witches! Armed with nothing more than an overdose of pine sap, I
realised that my book had to be about witches. It felt right. An astrologer
once tried to convince me that I had been burnt as a witch in a past life and
offered to regress me. Thank you, but no.
Strangely, the revelation of my book’s subject was equally unwelcome. Why
witches? I knew no witchcraft. I knew no witches. Witches would not be easy.
This would mean research. Sorry, this would mean Research. And lots of it.
Cue a
spending orgy in second-hand online bookshops (to the chagrin of the postie,
who came to hate me). Tree medicine lessons were taken, gardens both physic and
psychic were visited. The walls filled with old maps. The garden filled with
strange plants. The cupboards filled with home-grown lotions, potions and
tinctures, and I was haunted by endless moaning:
 |
| Elder linctus |
‘Can I
just have a paracetamol, Mam, I can’t stand the taste of silver birch.’
‘Can
we have mouthwash from an actual shop? That acorn stuff has made my teeth
brown.’
‘Who
put hawthorn berries in my good vodka?’
‘The
police have been round again.’
Undeterred,
I continued. Paranormal groups were joined (mental notes were subsequently made
not to confuse paranormal groups with BDSM clubs). Divorce papers rustled in
the background, yet still the research went on. County archives were raided,
local historians were interrogated, execution records were pored over, and
spectacle prescriptions were renewed at a rate hitherto unprecedented.
During
this research, I found my story, courtesy of a disgruntled Northumbrian coal
trader, Ralph Gardiner. Thanks to his grievances, I discovered that sixteen
people had been executed for witchcraft on a single day in Newcastle in 1650.
This resulted from the Puritan-ran council (in perhaps the earliest example of
local authority performance-related pay) offering a witch-finder twenty
shillings per witch caught. Fascinatingly, at the trial, the witch-finder was
revealed as a fraud, but only one girl was spared execution, and the
witch-finder escaped.
Having
been inspired by Hilary Mantel’s makeover of Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, I was initially tempted to write the
witch-finder’s story. However, I could not stop thinking about the girl who got
away. Despite further research, I could find no information on who she was or
why the other accused ‘witches’ were still executed. This conundrum continued
to bother me until I decided that this girl would have to be my story. The lack
of information surrounding her mystery proved to be a blessing as it provided
the freedom to write an entirely fictional account. So, I had my title, my
research was under way, the end of my book was in place, I just had to write
myself there…
I began
writing by employing a trusty notebook during my walks. However, both the
weather and my Scottish Terrier, Archie, had other ideas. After two
heart-lurching near-losses of Archie, compounded by soggy-notebook syndrome, I
needed a more mobile system.
Enter
the Dragon – one purchase of Dragon voice recognition software later, I had the
answer to my writerly prayers. First, though, the instructions said that I must
train my dragon. But no matter how much time I spent training my dragon, it
refused to get along with my Geordie diphthong. So, my dragon was consigned to
the growing pile of gadgets that I have bought to help me to write.
Since
it was inadvisable to write slowly when Archie was off his leash, and
impossible to write at all when he was on it, and since my dragon didn’t like
me, I needed a new outdoor-writing system. What was hands-free and would enable
me to supervise a feisty Scottish Terrier? Thinking!
Thinking fitted the bill perfectly. So, I developed ‘freethinking’, shamelessly
plagiarised from Peter Elbow’s term for ‘freewriting’, a method first described
by Dorothea Brande.
Armed
with my new freethinking technique, I tramped the woods, semi-conscious, but on
high sensory alert, taking in the sylvan sights, sounds and smells. Then, directly
after work, child-feeding, assorted housework and herb harvesting, I began to
write slowly and by hand. Despite having the memory of a goldfish, I managed to
convey many of my experiences onto paper.
Being
a self-disciplined sort of writer (that accidental BDSM club sojourn was not
entirely wasted), I promised to write a thousand words per day in a notebook. I
planted notebooks in likely places: bedside, car, conservatory, garden, kitchen
and living room. Whenever there was a spare hour, I would lean, sit or lie, and
write one thousand words. I wrote without conscious thought, in no particular
order, and without thinking about the overall story. Whatever popped into my
head while walking in the woods was distilled onto paper that night.
I
wrote my first word on 14 January 2014, and, 122,440 words later, I wrote the
final word of my first draft on 5 May 2014, having filled five notebooks. There
was no apparent order to the writing, but I kept calm with home-grown lemon
balm tea, and picked my way through the first draft in order to create a
timeline. From this, a story magically emerged – along with a lot of nonsense.
I put the whole book away to brew for a few months until I could return to it
with fresh eyes, ready for editing.
And
then… a mere six years after starting the research, Widdershins was published.
Helen Steadman
Helen Steadman lives in the foothills of the
North Pennines, and she particularly enjoys researching and writing about the
history of the north east of England. She is the author of the best-selling
historical novel, Widdershins. This
novel was inspired by the seventeenth-century witch trials in Newcastle. The
sequel, Sunwise, is due to be
published later this year by Impress Books. For her PhD in English at the
University of Aberdeen, Helen is working on her third novel, Running Wolves, which is about the Shotley
Bridge Swordmakers.
Widdershins
‘Did all women have something of the witch
about them?’
Jane Chandler is an apprentice healer. From
childhood, she and her mother have used herbs to cure the sick. But Jane will
soon learn that her sheltered life in a small village is not safe from the
troubles of the wider world.
From his father’s beatings to his uncle’s
raging sermons, John Sharpe is beset by bad fortune. Fighting through personal
tragedy, he finds his purpose: to become a witch-finder and save innocents from
the scourge of witchcraft.
Inspired by true events, Widdershins tells the story of the women
who were persecuted and the men who condemned them.
