Past+Times

Past times

Image from Wikimedia Commons. "Illustration of bubonic plague in the Bible" (1411).

Getting started:
Do your research. Look for your hero. Search for a dilemma.

At home:
Interview older family members, Look at old photo albums, wills, family recipes, letters, postcards, heirlooms. Visit a graveyard. Visit a museum.

In the Library:
Search for: Any Historical event; Biographies; Photography books; maps; Census documents; Births, marriages, deaths. Collect pictures which will give you something to describe in your stories.

Some good beginnings:
On the morning the slavers came, the children were looking for treasure. Swept up in their purpose, they didn't see the mast of the corsair galley, all but obscured by the high rocks surrounding the cove where the ship had anchored for the night. Ball, David. (2003) //The sword and the scimitar//. London: Arrow books.

The small boys came early to the hanging. It was still dark when the three or four of them sidled out of the hovels, quiet as cats in their felt boots. A thin layer of fresh snow covered the little town like a new coat of paint, and theirs were the first footprints to blemish its perfect surface. They picked their way through the huddled wooden huts and along the streets of frozen mud to the silent market-place, where the gallows stood waiting. Follett, Ken. (1989) //The pillars of the earth//. London: Pan.

The //Alexander//, with its cargo of convicts, had bucked over the face of the ocean for the better part of a year. Now it had fetched up at the end of the earth. There was no lock on the door of the hut where William Thornhill, transported for the term of his natural life in the Year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and six, was passing his first night in His Magesty's penal colony of New South Wales. There was hardly a door, barely a wall: only a flap of bark, a screen of sticks and mud. There was no need of lock, of door, of wall: this was a prison whose bars were ten thousand miles of water. Genville, Kate. (2005) //The secret river//. Melbourne: Text publishing.