Research: Things you won't find on Wikipedia!
Posted by groupthing on 01 Jul 2009
Judy Blundell's new novel What I Saw and How I Lied is set in 1940s, and amazingly her mother had saved newspapers from December 1941 right up until the Japanese surrender in 1945, which made for perfect research material.
Judy says:
Those newspapers were a great resource. There's nothing like touching the actual sorce to feel the immediacy of the time. I wasn't looking at war news so much as the other articles about what was happening on the home front, the advertising, the society column - things like that. Newspapers tell us so much about attitudes and feelings of a time period.
I also asked my mother to teach me the Lindy. It didn't make it into the book, but we had a good time. While she taught me the steps, I realised that she moved differently than I did-- we did the same steps, but her rhythm was different-- it was very fluid and loose-jointed. That got me thinking about how different eras have different rhythms, in speech as well as movement. My job was to reproduce that as well as I could.
What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell
www.judyblundell.com
So, do you think this unique research will have an impact on Judy's writing? Does it make you want to start saving newspapers, or do you think now that the world has gone digital we should be saving other artifacts?
Judy says:
Those newspapers were a great resource. There's nothing like touching the actual sorce to feel the immediacy of the time. I wasn't looking at war news so much as the other articles about what was happening on the home front, the advertising, the society column - things like that. Newspapers tell us so much about attitudes and feelings of a time period.
I also asked my mother to teach me the Lindy. It didn't make it into the book, but we had a good time. While she taught me the steps, I realised that she moved differently than I did-- we did the same steps, but her rhythm was different-- it was very fluid and loose-jointed. That got me thinking about how different eras have different rhythms, in speech as well as movement. My job was to reproduce that as well as I could.
What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell
www.judyblundell.com
So, do you think this unique research will have an impact on Judy's writing? Does it make you want to start saving newspapers, or do you think now that the world has gone digital we should be saving other artifacts?
Tags: features
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