Tips for writing your history book

 Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Here’s some invaluable tips for writing that history book you’ve been planning, from Green Hill’s own Richard Maerschel.

1. Preserve and value private photo albums and document collections 

When you decide to write, don’t expect that background information will be on the internet in more than superficial depth. Even basic information on the net is often wrong, not deliberately but because, unlike you, the writer might be too quick to get a story out, often using documents perhaps a century old which might have been wrong in the first place. My own family records have examples of such errors.

I feel lucky that I have always kept books and a lots of notes on things important to me. I also feel lucky that forty years ago I asked my old aunty to sit down with me and her numerous photo albums – she told me names and I wrote them on the backs of photos. My main my point is Don’t rely on memory which inevitably loses accuracy and completion over time.

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​2. Don’t rely too much on public records 

Trove is very good at preserving old newspapers and making them freely available on line, but they stop at 1954, and that is now more than seventy years ago and receding further every day. State libraries and archives hold a vast amount of material, but the funding of our State Library is being squeezed so that expertise to help you and me find what’s there is diminishing, and quite rapidly.

Newspapers are shadows of what they used to be, so the little things going on in daily life are no longer in the papers but on our phones and tablets. Those records may be a 100 times larger than what we used to read in the papers, but they are too fragile. When a phone is lost or is thrown out when someone dies, the photos and text messages are usually lost too. The same happens with emails when we change computers or even update software that took charge of everything that we wrote on our keyboards and received on our screens.

Marriage isn’t what it used to be, and neither is our old way of children taking their father’s surname, so your descendants will probably have a hard time doing family histories because the line of names will be hard to find and decipher.

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​3. Other information sources 

When you are writing about history, your work gains its main value after you get inside the minds of people living in those times. Their ideas about society might be a world away from your ideas, but unless you can see their world from their times, your critical evaluation will be defective. Old books are invaluable. If you haven’t got your own, go a library and ask questions, and be prepared to go down roads less travelled to find answers to what you want to know.

O’Connells, Old and Rare Books, and Michael Treloar are mines of old books and photos, but they are more focussed on collectors rather than writers. If you want information rather than an expensive rare book, I suggest suggest that you think about the relevant locality. If your story is based in Adelaide suburbs, go to the local library for relevant records, maps, photos and the like. In recent time I’ve turned up sources valuable to me from Aldinga and Mount Gambier libraries. The custodians there love to think that people from Adelaide want their help, and those same people are usually involved in local museums run by the National Trust and district councils, so there is a good chance you’ll get more than you are expecting. Also, when you travel, drop into any place that advertises old books.

Three of my most valued books I bought interstate, one from Maryborough in Victoria, and two from Berrima and Uralla in NSW. It is essential that you keep your eyes and mind open to finding information in unexpected places

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4. Quality of photos 

The digital technology which drives our screens – cinemas, computers and phones – is now so good that it often makes any photo more than five years old look below par, even miserable. Wonders of enhancement and removal have now descended out of the realm of touchup artists into the hands of you and me or, more particularly, our kids and their children. This is bad news for us who write history books because the old pictures we are forced to use look bad and worse against the expectations of what anyone can get, even out of a cheap mobile phone.

The good thing is that the technical advances which present us each day with high quality images we might have just taken also enable us to improve old pictures, even though they may be the third or fourth in a series of copies out of a book. Light and shade, clarity, and blemishes can all be made to look better using software which keeps coming out of the same smart minds as the imagery on our screens.

But improving old photos can take a lot of time and money, and there is the risk that the final image looks too good, lacking the warmth and charm of an old defective photo. AI will never match what the old camera tried to do but missed, but the compromise available now and into the future should enable us to present impressive pictures.

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5. Juggling writing with staying alive 

For too long I put off writing a whole lot of stuff which had been running around in my brain for decades. I had jobs which kept me too busy to give time to writing. Writers like actors, musicians and sports people, are countless in number, but very few get to the point of fame and riches, so don’t wait for that to give you lots of leisure time. Get on with your writing, make enough money to keep body and soul together, and your writings will bring you satisfaction whether the world values them or not.

Richard Maerschel ~ richard@greenhillpublishing.com.au

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