Last night I went to a very interesting talk by Tracy Chevalier, a novelist best known for writing Girl With a Pearl Earring, which was subsequently made into a film.
She was in town under the auspices of Women on Air, supporting her new novel Remarkable Creatures, a fictionalized account of the real-life prolific fossil collector Mary Anning. About 70 people turned up to meet her.
Ruth Todd from Women on Air introduced Chevalier, saying that she had been delayed in Auckland because of the fog, and so had spent six hours that day in the Auckland airport terminal. (“Thank goodness it’s such a nice place,” muttered Chevalier in exasperation.) Then Todd took an informal count of how many of Chevalier’s books people in the audience had read: one? Two? … I would guess about three-quarters of the audience had read one, while several had read five. Fortunately Todd didn’t ask who had read zero of Chevalier’s books, so I didn’t have to embarrass myself 
.
What followed was a discussion between Todd and Chevalier, interspersed with a couple of readings from the book.
Todd started off by asking Chevalier about her permanent move, in her 20s, from Washington to London – did this have anything to do with her writing aspirations? “No – I went to London for fun, folly, and romance.”
Todd pointed out that Chevalier’s novels all had strong historical bases to them, and asked about the research side of things. Chevalier said that the research was her favourite bit, and enjoyed it much more than the writing. She said that her novels always started with a very specific thing, which broadened as she researched it. For example, the genesis of Remarkable Creatures was coming across a display about Mary Anning in a museum. She hadn’t heard of her before then. So she started researching into her life, which then broadened to researching about Lyme Regis (where Anning lived) and then to geology and paleontology.
As part of the research she visited Lyme Regis, which she found a fascinating and unusual place full of eccentric people. She talked about the geologic structure called Jurassic Rock, a crumbling cliff by the sea which fossils regularly come tumbling out of.
When asked about the advantages of writing historical fiction, Chevalier said she did it because it enabled her to remove herself from the writing. She didn’t start out to be a historical novelist, but her first novel was part-historical and part-contemporary, and she found the historical aspect much more satisfying.
When asked about her blending of fact and fiction, she said that some readers found it frustrating that there was no easy way to tell which aspects of her novels were made up and which historical. She is constantly getting letters from people pointing out various “errors” she has made. She (jokingly) likened herself to the Persian rug-weavers who deliberately put errors in their rugs, as perfection is for God alone.
When asked about science vs religion, Chevalier said that Mary Anning lived in a very interesting time, just before Darwin came onto the scene, in which even men of science were frequently vicars and were certain that the Earth was only around 6000 years old. She claimed that Anning’s discoveries of the fossils of whole, clearly extinct animals were very disturbing to a society that considered the world static and unchanging and God-made.
In the Q&A session, a member of the audience asked about how much input she had into the movie version of Girl With a Pearl Earring. She said that at first she had toyed with the idea of writing the screenplay, but had been talked out of it by her agent (something she described as the best bit of advice he’d given her), and in fact had very little to do with the movie. For all that, the differences between the book and the movie didn’t bother her, and she was very happy with the movie, especially how it looked.
When asked about how she decided on the titles for her books, she told a long story about the eleventh-hour decision to call the book Remarkable Creatures. Her UK publishers were immediately happy with this idea, but the US publishers didn’t want another two-word title because her previous book, Burning Bright, hadn’t sold well and they feared that some of that bad luck would rub off on the current book because the number of words in the title was the same! They wanted to call it “In Pursuit of Remarkable Creatures”, but fortunately they got talked out of it. She reiterated a point often made by writers, that they have very little control over the look of their covers, but was very happy with that of Remarkable Creatures.
Once again the talk was a fascinating glimpse into the life of a working writer.
