Writing Readable History – Ann McGrath

Professor Ann McGrath has made a career of writing history, for academic as well as public audiences. She has lectured at the University of New South Wales, been a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research at the Australian National University, and served as Program Director of Society and Nation at the National Museum. Professor McGrath is currently the director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the ANU and co-author, with Ann Curthoys, of How to write history that people want to read (UNSW Press). Ann McGrath addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 28 October 2009.

WRITING READABLE HISTORY

ANN MCGRATH

Somewhat unusually for me, I’m billed here today not so much as a Doctor of History but more as a History Doctor – in the style of an American-style advice guru: McGrath, MD, to help diagnose and cure some of the maladies of history writing. However, we do hope our just-released book, How to write history people want to read (UNSW Press, Sydney 2009) co-authored with my colleague Ann Curthoys of the University of Sydney, will serve to assist you on your historical journeys.

Let me confide that I’d secretly envied the annoying authors of the self-help parenting books I’d read, those with front cover images where an adoring teenager sits in a picnic area looking lovingly at her mother: ‘Ten steps towards a teenager who talks nicely to you’ etc. but never offering a money-back guarantee.

Seriously, Ann Curthoys and I realised that there was no other book that provided advice on history writing, other than our own co-edited Writing Histories: Imagination and Narration published some years ago. Years of teaching history in different contexts and years of researching and writing history in fact meant that we had a lot of advice to give. In post-graduate workshops, community history and creative writing workshops, we’d found hungry audiences eager for more. Phillipa McGuinness of UNSW Press had suggested that, rather than revamping the collection, we should write a book. She got quite excited about it, giving us ridiculously short deadlines; we started this year, finished a draft in May, and saw a real book this year. This book is truly late 2009 – very up to date!

In February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Apology speech was about history; how a nation might learn something about it, personalise and humanise it, acknowledge it and then take the next step of promising to do something about it. Kevin has spoken quite a bit about turning a new page, writing a new chapter of our history. This was virtually his maiden speech to the nation as PM and perhaps will remain his best remembered. In 2009, Kevin has now launched at least two history books, but neither is by a historian. One is by a novelist, one by a journalist. The authors are Tom Keneally and Paul Kelly. A novelist, a journalist. Is our Prime Minister implying that non-historians write better books than historians? That perhaps our history should be left to journalists, to novelists?

I’ve probably given it away, but there’s been another history scuffle going on – between novelists and historians. In particular, when Kate Grenville reputedly alleged she could do history better than historians, Inga Clendinnen started well – pardon the pun – war-dancing with strangers. This spat will continue: Hilary Mantel, the latest Booker prize winner for Wolf Hall, her book based on Oliver Cromwell stated on Radio National that whereas other writers had got the history wrong she, in contrast, was interested in doing “good history”.

I’m not denying that novelists cast beautiful spells. For me, Kate Grenville succeeded admirably in The Secret River. Historians often resist historical fiction, finding its boundary-blurring quite disturbing. For me, Peter Carey’s True history of the Kelly Gang was simultaneously wonderful and frustrating. Why did Carey need to make anything different to the real Kelly story, which surely couldn’t be surpassed? Later I realised he’d read things that I hadn’t. When, last week, I asked novelist Geraldine Brooks for words of wisdom on the matter of historical fiction and history – and excuse the inadequacy of my paraphrasing – she replied that she became intrigued where the actual historical records had dried up. These fluid unknown parts of history then became her imaginative task.

History’s bad reputation

Yet, despite all the heated public debate, new mediums and occasional political interest, let’s face it: historical writing as such has a bad reputation. People imagine historians as crusty, ancient, dusty-coated people who burrow in airless, windowless spaces, thus acquiring the pallor of vampires – but with bad clothes and without their sexual appeal. History is thought to be boring, dry, unpopular. Even – “Educational”. (When working at the National Museum of Australia, I learnt that this was a marketing perforative. “Never mention that word in advertising!” the focus-group experts warned us.)

When newspaper reviewers really like a history book, they often praise it because it’s not like a history book. They will say a book is ‘as good as fiction’ and thus “a pleasure to read” or even that they could imagine the film of the book – thereby implying they would rather be watching a movie. In the book, we do provide a few clues about how to write for film. Even one of our generous endorsers, Professor Iain McCalman, wrote: “The fact that it reads as easily as a novel shows that the authors know exactly how to implement their own advice.” Reads as easily as a novel – in other words, it doesn’t read like a history book!

Unlike those cool “creative” writers, however, it’s as if historians have no style. Historians also have a reputation for lacking wit and humour. So in writing our book, we decided to find some examples of historical humour to share with our readers. Instead, we found a lot of information about why historians are not funny, and even a series of jokes pointing out just how un-funny they are. Television reviewers had plenty of trepidation for SBS’s history quiz show ADBC. One hated it because he didn’t know the answers; another feared it would be like being force-fed history in school but enjoyed it. ADBC paired each historian with a comedian, pitted against another historian/comedian. Clearly, they have cast the historian as the “straight guy”. He or she can only be funny by accident. I must say I greatly enjoyed being on the show; a historian rarely enjoys such an opportunity for much-needed free glamour makeovers!

Which reminds me, another good thing about history is that it’s a profession where it is difficult to age. For your whole career, people tend to call you a “young historian” or one of the “younger generation of historians”. It’s certainly not an early burnout occupation. Indeed, age can be an advantage, as the older you are, the more decades of potential historical content you’ve lived through. On the other hand, there are also plenty of younger historians. If you are a young historian, remember your work can truly challenge the profession; you are the people who often ask the freshest new questions from the perspective of your own generation. You most easily embrace new forms, technologies and media for history writing, including radio, television, the web, and museum exhibitions. Irreverence is also a great virtue of the young, and we need lots of it if we are to challenge accepted explanations for the past in our present.

So, with all this elderly wisdom and youthful irreverence, why history’s bad reputation? Critics accuse historians of being unable to capture the whimsical moment of the past, unable to do justice to the wonder, immensity, magnitude, and excitement of our project. Journalists and popular writers accuse historians of writing only for each other. Noted filmmaker Ken Burns, who made the acclaimed documentary series, Civil War, says he is trying to “rescue history from the academy, which has done a terrific job in the last hundred years of murdering our history”.

Yet some academic historians write wonderfully well, and much history does capture the imagination and inspire. Many write clear, expansive, and accessible prose. Indeed, historians usually write much better than many academics in other fields. (We provide plenty of examples of inspiring history writing in our book.)

It is true, however, that academic historians rarely write the most popular histories. Popularity doesn’t depend only on how well a text is written. Readers may shun histories that challenge their fundamental beliefs, or which are critical of their community or their country. Scholarly histories will often examine shameful as well as proud moments in history, and can de-bunk popularly held and much-cherished myths.  They may be confronting, and have unwelcome implications for action in the present. Furthermore, the ideas in such histories may be more complex and nuanced than many people want them to be.

Popular historians tend to be journalists and freelance writers. Most bestselling histories celebrate and memorialise the achievements of nations, leaders or people fighting wars. Many reinforce positive images and popular preconceptions of heroes. They tend to explore topics that others have already researched and written about extensively; synthesizing and thus bringing the story to a larger audience.

So historians don’t want to become novelists but we do want to be read.

Aims

We see our book as a kind of GPS navigation tool for historians. You can take history’s main streets, the wide highways, the back-roads or the red dusty road. That’s up to you. What we have tried to do is lay out a map of the country of History, and indicate the routes most likely to take you down roads where your readers will follow. We provide practical advice drawn from years of writing history, and of teaching others how to write it. We want you historians – all those people interested in researching and writing histories – to be able to make better-informed choices as you write.

We also include a section on writing history for TV, films, radio, museums, legal situations, commissions of enquiry, courts.  History is now in the digital age. Things have changed. Web and pod-streaming delivery will be possible. History is delivered in a range of different ways. But they still involve writing.

Some tips

Key questions confronting the historian include: what’s your topic? Where to start? Where to end? One of our chapters is called “Once Upon a Time: Beginnings and Endings”. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the King of Hearts gave this advice to Alice:

“Begin at the beginning…and go on til you come to the end: then stop.” Ah! If only it was so easy!

We also discuss history titles. They can make or break a book. Would you prefer “The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn; The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, the Hidden History of… etc.” or the more intriguing The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg?

Other writing tips? OK, let me consider the process of writing this talk and the troubles I faced. Writing a talk on history for The Sydney Institute: who’s the audience? What should I speak about? Surely they’d rather hear Kevin Rudd. How much free advice do people really want? Wouldn’t they rather just buy the damn book? Should I plagiarise the book or do a new talk? Going for the latter, I found myself writing new advice, only to feel guilty that it wasn’t in the book.

To make matters worse, as I mentioned before, last week I went along to hear Geraldine Brooks give a talk. I know it should have inspired me, but it was just too bloody good; it gave me a chronic case of writer’s block. Why bother? I’m not Geraldine. I cannot pluck each fresh-ripened, perfectly chosen word out of the air to adorn my sentences like some gorgeous Australian Gourmet feast. The night after her talk I tried to sleep, not well. I let my daughter, who doesn’t always talk nicely to me, borrow the car, meaning I couldn’t get to the office until very late. This also meant I wouldn’t get out of cleaning the kitchen. It was Friday afternoon and people were starting to go into weekend mode, seeking idle chats. I had a meeting about the perils of being pressured to publish in A* journals. Then at home, I was too busy eating and watching TV. The whole day was gone. I felt guilty – but also summery, refreshed.

A “wasted day” sometimes means you become more revved up to write. Often some kind of subconscious filing process is going on. Perhaps it’s the inner librarian, the suppressed, brilliant genius-author. I woke with several ideas for starting points. After “centring myself”, breathing in – at my yoga class, I went home with boundless writing energy. But I could feel serious distractions looming at home. I trundled off to a café with my computer to write. I drank fresh juice, ate good food, had coffee and wrote. And wrote. No internet. No chance of email addiction stealing my time. Writer’s obstacle course navigated; writer’s block cured. Voice found. Words flowed.

One’s voice, one’s own words and tone are separate from what we may uncover in the way of words in the archives. In our book, we give a lot of advice about how to get over writer’s block. For example, walking, going to the beach, looking into the far distance, going back to your archival notes. Reading new secondary sources. Skimming over introductions and conclusions. Looking at photographs pertaining to the topic. Enjoying music or an art exhibition. Research in one place; write after you’ve absorbed something. But write early.

We’re all different. Some will find their moment of flow at the beach, in the mountains, in a whistling, parrot-congested bush. In the book, we describe different writing personality types, I won’t go into them all here, but they include “the data dumper”, the “staged writer” the “over-diligent researcher”, the “poetic paragrapher” etc. Which are you? Whatstyle do you choose? What kind of language and structure?

However immersed you may be in historical time, you are styling your pasts for the present. We have a chapter on the how and why of this. I threw in a hair straightener as styling kit metaphor but unfortunately the academic readers – both male – complained that they had no idea what it was, so we had to delete it.

But to sum up, if you are writing history, you are speaking with people in the present; you are joining them in an ongoing conversation. History has to be written in present day language. It’s got to be you. Don’t try to sound like anyone else – even your favourite historian. Don’t try to be Geraldine Brooks. Or even Tom Keneally. It needs to ring true. You have your own individual voice. Nevertheless, you’ll need to take the time to find it. That voice is the conversational tone whereby you can explain the interest and the meaning of your subject matter in a way that makes sense to both yourself and others.

You must create a writer’s space. A place and environment that is a “no go”, a non-interruptible zone. One way to go might be a la Manning Clark’s study, with its ladder-only access – the story goes that Robin Boyd forgot to design the stairs, but more likely it was a quiet conspiracy. Such a strategy only works if you have a wife who will ensure the kids aren’t eating rat poison or the dinner isn’t burning the house down. As Clark hand-wrote, he also had someone to type it all out for him.

But I digress. You want advice. In our book, we intentionally use a number of anecdotes – separated out in boxes as about Ann M or Ann C. We do this for various reasons. By sharing our own difficulties, we can share our own solutions. Hopefully readers will gain a sense of being with real writing companions. They may well have confronted the same kinds of problems as we have. We intended our book to be very encouraging, warm and supportive. We genuinely empathise with the many difficulties inherent in writing. Because we face them ourselves – still. Most writers do. We believe you can improve the quality of that writing. To write to the very best that you can. We go into whether you should use dialogue, whether you should use the first person. We ourselves use the second person, as we wish to speak directly to the reader. It’s a conversation between writer historians and reader historians, so we try to make it as intimate as possible.

We have one chapter called “Crying in the Archives”. Why? I have actually seen people crying in the archives, laughing in the archives. Myself, I’ve been amazed, exhilarated, shocked, horrified, saddened, pleased, angry. Yes we can have plenty of emotional rollercoaster rides as we get to know living people from the past. People who suffer tragedy, who enjoy youth, or who become ill and unhappy due to life’s tragedies and hardships. Family historians find numerous emotions take hold of them. The TV show Who do you think you are? always works best with some tears.

My co-author Ann Curthoys had cried in the university toilets. What, the former Manning Clark Chair? To me, Ann seemed a natural-born historian, with her university-educated political “commie” family and none of that imposter syndrome bedevilling yours truly, the Catholic daughter of a plumber. One whose DLP leanings made the free tertiary education of a 1973 university scholarship loom as threateningly as if it included a complementary one-way ticket to Moscow. On the front cover of Bob Santamaria’s DLP newspaper, there were photos of Queensland street protests, with the heads of my university lecturers circled – a little like the saints, I thought. But my parents didn’t. Anyway, where was I, the next episode: Ann Curthoys is sitting in the Mitchell library, still with no idea where to start her thesis.

Our book tries to help you get started and to avoid such pitfalls. It helps you with where to look, what to expect. For example, there’s a section about where to start if you were writing about early Sydney’s landscapes – or writing about a village in Connecticut. How long it will take. And why it’s worth the time. How to prepare for the library visit – and how not to annoy librarians. It doesn’t matter how many sky miles you’ve travelled to get there. Or how you sold everything to buy a Winnebago to travel all around Australia to discover your family history. The librarian may not want to hear everything you’ve found so far in your research project. Nor do they necessarily want to become your new best friend. In some cases, they may not even want you to disturb the perfect order of the Dewey Decimal place in the stacks.

Imagined conversation with librarian:

“So you wish to see the rare copy of the History of Elephants written in 202AD. And if that’s not available, you would wish to research the paper serviette upon which John and Paul wrote the first words of ‘I wanna hold your hand’ ?”

Throat-clearing sound. “We might be able to get you the microfilm…” If you do get onto something old, don’t be shocked if you’re asked,  “And would you like gloves and a book pillow with that?”

“No, I’d rather have the real serviette, and I don’t need a pillow, thanks. I’m already comfortable enough about our history.”

Now you’ll see why historians don’t generally attempt to make jokes.

The researcher may think they are the important ones, not realising that the librarian’s priority is often the collection itself, looking after it, not necessarily looking after you. So many rare items, and so many books are now being digitalised. We also give advice on this, about photography in archives and other newly available shortcuts. Libraries and archives are rich repositories for history writers. We all rely on them and appreciate them, but newcomers to historical research generally have no idea about what to expect and sometimes expect to walk in and have a “fast-food” style delivery of instant facts. The internet is priming the new generation up for this even more.

When to actually start your writing

We cover that. We have a whole chapter called “Footnote Fetishism: Quotes and notes”.Apparently many members of the public absolutely hate footnotes; they won’t buy a book that has those little numbers on the page because it’s too “academic-y”. We explain why historians like them and why we use them. What they mean to us. Why some people fought history wars over them.

Chapter 11, our final chapter, is called “Tough Love”.It’s about editing. This is what we have to say: “Editing is no mundane chore; it offers vast scope for creating a meticulous and pleasing product. It can be the most enjoyable part of writing….” It can lead to the “ah-ha” breakthrough idea.

“Be tough on yourself. Nurture yourself one day – smooth over your prose, give it a gentle massage. Savour what you’ve written. Enjoy it. Become your own number one fan. And well you might, for the next day it’s boot camp. Be a harsh, stern critic. You are aiming to write to the very best of your ability. Then push it further. You did 100 push-ups yesterday. Do 110 today.’

But let’s face it, it’s hard when you’ve spent hours in an archive finding one tid-bit, to highlight and simply press that “delete” button. You love that paragraph. Such clever-sounding word melding. So original! Such a colourful anecdote. Hmm, you have to learn to be a dumper. If you’re more of a hoarder, we recommend you set up a little computer file on your Desktop named “Treasures” or perhaps “Precious Paragraphs”. Here you can store all the beautiful prose that was not needed in your piece of writing -what indeed was throwing it quite off-track. Save it for another day – in your own virtual recycling bin. You may never open that file again, but at least you know it’s there. If you have nothing to do one day, you can always go back and admire your sentences.

Historians write in many different venues, for many different audiences. In the book, we give advice about each of those different kinds of history writing.

Elite history or history for the nation?

There’s a new danger, however, that the gap between the academic writers of good, readable history and the popular writers could widen. The government’s new research evaluation framework, the ERA (or Excellence in Research for Australia) creates pressures to perform primarily in A* journals – possibly, as a colleague quipped, in the Journal of Historical Irrelevancies. At least this is how many Universities are interpreting this quantitative approach to measuring excellence, which promises real budgetary implications.

More than other disciplines, many historians have intentionally chosen to publish in more accessible places – in popular magazines, non peer-reviewed journals, and – horror – in paperbacks! Not only that, ones that are for sale in bookshops! Clearly not an indicator of true elitism. The emphasis on “metrics”, where one’s “outputs” can be fed into a computer, weighed for quality and churned out again, according “strikes” in certain ERA ranked journals, and things like history books, prizes, and numbers of readers considered harder to evaluate.

The pressures of funding formulas in the academy are very real; the pressures to “be elite” may not augur as well for history as for other fields of enquiry. Compared with many academic disciplines, history is relatively democratic, and many historians aim to produce non-theoretical, accessible writing that is relatively free of jargon. Many writers of history have chosen to evade the pressures of academe by working as independent writers. ARC research Fellowships assist some of them. In the long-term, such elitist pressures could mean fewer history outputs for the general reader. In the short-term, it is not so good for the morale of historians in the academy who write books and articles in more popular forums. One minute we’re told we need to get out of the ivory towers and do community outreach; next we’re told to stay in them and write for elite journals. History as a discipline, as a practice, will no doubt continue to resist this.

In his launch speech for Tom Keneally this year, Kevin Rudd had a lot to say about history: “The love for history is, I believe, the hand-maiden of country.” Not the nation, but “country”. Is love the hand-maiden here or love? “Country”, too, has different meanings; from “country” as in “my sunburnt country”, Queen and Country and the Aboriginal term for special land relationship: one that neither means transferable real estate or necessarily “nation”.

Whatever Kevin meant in this instance, we are fortunate to have prime ministers who care about our history. And indeed, a nation that seems to care too. Prime Ministers should be interested in history as they have a role in shaping it and supporting its practice – in the public eye, in informing policy. They are aware of their own potential to make history, although they are not its sole authors.

Prime Minister Rudd called for acknowledgment of the good, the bad and the rollicking in our history. He made the following exhortation: “…it’s time we called a truce to the history wars” But what did he mean here? He elaborated: “between the straight narrative history that brooks no contradictions, and extreme relativism that is only about interpretation and not about events..[sic].” Sound familiar? Rudd studied history, of course, at Nambour High, at the Australian National University and, dare I say it, in the political school of John Howard. Earlier in his speech, Rudd called for an acknowledgment of both the good and the bad in our history, but in the words I quoted, his “truce” sounds as if it is actually about authorial voice.

Perhaps Kevin Rudd’s first voice is the authoritative narrative – what we refer to in our book as the “voice of God – Charlton Heston in Hollywood’s Ten Commandments kind of voice” where he played both Moses and God. Rudd’s second voice appears to be not history at all but some kind of notion of cultural studies or textual analysis. How can we have history without events? Or without colourful people, good and bad?

History is a very open church; it’s very eclectic. As we have seen, it not only matters to our Prime Ministers, it matters to our novelists and to our nation. History is written in many different ways, by different people. Prime Ministers know they don’t have the last word on history. However they may wish to turn a new page, write a new chapter, etc. If they do – good on them! Before attempting to write such a chapter, historians might be useful on the policy advisory committees. This is the only way to ensure that the new chapters can be well informed by the old.

Final words

Our Epilogue is about what to do AFTER the writing is done. We call it “The After Party: Marketing, Celebrating and Reviews”.

I looked up the index to see if we’d recommended that an author should come and give advice to The Sydney Institute. Well no. There is a section that might help me, however, on launching your work – and on how to deal with criticism. I hope you, your kids, or your great aunt the family historian, find a nice book pillow to read our book and settle in. However, when a problem in your writing arises, it’s also easy to “dip in” via the index or chapter headings. I hope you will all discover something useful in our book, including plenty of words of encouragement.

We believe history can be riveting, entertaining, and richly informative. Even funny. We think it can explain the world and place us better for the future. We know that history can be a form of revelation about the world, of wonder and surprise at human foible, at human achievement. It can complicate that which we thought was simple, and make us wonder again about something we thought we knew. It can transform our understandings and teach us to think from other perspectives – whether these pertain to culture, class, age, lifestyle, locality or gender.

Historians do interrogate and interpret things – often events. They rustle through pyramids crammed full of hidden people and treasure troves of precious loot. These are the places that journalists often call the dingy, dusty, dry archives. And historians spend a lot of time in often brightly lit, marbled libraries, and in writing spaces beaming with sunlight intruded upon by the ever-present world outside. Why did anyone ever think that archives are dull and dusty? If our histories made them think that, we need to learn some tricks to make sure that doesn’t happen again. The alchemy of the archives is a more appealing phrase. I’d like to re-brand history as something glittering, sparkling, bubbling with life, where good and evil jostle each other, as a place with big and small characters. Now the historian has cried in the archives, and exercised a bit of tough love, the reader or the viewer, or the iPod listener, can engage in their carefully crafted interpretations and stories – their portraits of lived life.

Endnotes

Some of the content of this speech contains samples and excerpts from the co-authored book under discussion; Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath, How to write history that people want to read (UNSW, Sydney, 2009).

Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath, eds., Writing Histories: Imagination and Narration, Monash University E-Press, 2009. (1999)

I do not have Geraldine Brooks’ exact words here, so am paraphrasing them somewhat inadequately.

David Thelen, “The Movie Maker as Historian: Conversations with Ken Burns,” The Journal of American History 81, no. 3 (1994): 1031-50, 32.

This coinage is borrowed from Dr Nicholas Brown.

Prime Minister’s home page; media. http://www.pm.gov.au/node/6152

Tom Griffiths, cited in A. Curthoys and A. McGrath, How to write history that people want to read, Sydney, UNSW, 2009, p 48.