No matter what kind of story you are writing you always have to know the rules of the world in which it takes place. If you are writing fantasy you can pretty much set your own rules, but if you - as I - write historicals then there are already set rules for you to work within. There are many great resources for the budding writer to find out about how the world worked back in the day.

But today I wanted to talk more specifically about the more personal world of your characters. Where did they live? What are their surroundings like? What did their days look like?

Personally I love finding these things out. I browse the internet for pictures of period houses, I look at interior design from the era, I make sure I know what a London townhouse looked like (smaller than I first imagined!) and of course think of the social events my characters will attend.

Because my current stories are all connected through the fact that they are three sisters and a brother and I’m writing a story about each I happened to get an easier job - I could make up everything and then re-use it! Obviously the family’s country home is the same, I have yearly events that re-occur; such as the Kilkenny weekend party, the Bates’ musical evening and Lady Whatshername’s yearly ball. I got to create a village near my family’s estate that they could go visit.

Finding the perfect home for your family is quite fun. Obviously you cannot take something exactly the way you find it, but I usually pick the facade of a house that I find and then change it around to suit my family. You can quite easily see from an image if something suits your family or not. The picture to the right is the image I used to create my family’s country home Davenhall. I thought it looked so cosy and friendly it would really suit my characters. And the moat around the house was the perfect place for my tomboy Nick to fall in as a girl! (As a side note - a year or so after I’d chosen that picture the house on it was chosen as the location for the Bennet family in the latest Pride & Prejudice movie!)

To the left you can see the estate I used to inspire my ideas of the Duke of Ashbourne’s country home. The duke’s son is the hero of my second story and he hates being home since he never felt quite welcome. I wanted something with grandeur but that didn’t look so much like a home as it did a grand show. As my heroine thinks during the story, the estate is beautiful but doesn’t have the same feeling of home or as much of a soul as her own house. Can you see the difference in the houses as well as I?

When you write a story, what kind of effort do you put into creating the world your characters live in? Do you have favourite parts that you put extra work into?

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