How I Built Miles Franklin's Edwardian world #nonfiction

How do you build a world in nonfiction? World-building is more associated with fiction, but in nonfiction - also known as creative nonfiction, world building is drawn from the small details recorded as much as the big events. I built Miles world using newspaper archives of daily life and news. I used TROVE, the wonderful digital newspaper archive resource, managed by the National Gallery of Australia and edited by 'voluntroves'. Miles' local papers, and the metro news in TROVE, recorded evocative details in the book, like a hurricane wind coming in from the west in early January 1902. My favourite story was that a giant cat - thought to be someone's escaped leopard or tiger, (brought back from the Boer War) was killing sheep in the area. It was called the Marulan Tiger.

Miles in 1902.

Internationally, I used the San Francisco Examiner and the Chicago Tribune, as well Miles own journalism and Jack London's article about the earthquake. Details like the earthquake shaking the pavements; opera glasses trained on the sky at Halley's Comet are soured from articles in newspaper archives at the time. News is the first draft of history. Miles also left a huge archive at the State Library of New South Wales. As well as her manuscripts and drafts like 'When I was Mary-Anne, a slavey' and an early draft of My Career Goes Bung (the sequel to My Brilliant Career); Miles recorded years of meticulous daily diaries, she kept fan letters, letters from A.B 'Banjo Paterson'; and Bulletin 'Red Page' editor A.G Stephens, and of course her dearest sisters, Linda and Laurel, her acid wit grandmother (who reminded me of the matriarchal Maggie Smith as Violet in Downton Abbey), her mother, and mentors such as Rose Scott and Vida Goldstein. Letters and diaries voice the ghosts and the pic section shows them in their fierce prime. To see where all these wonderful world building details are sourced, the end of the book lists all the notes.

Where there were gaps, I relied on what Keira Lindsay, author of The Convict's Daughter, terms 'evidence based imagination', and this is listed in the sources explaining the scene. Love to hear your thoughts!  If you have questions for your Book Club, I'd love to answer them. Get in touch via my contact form, come to an event, or leave a review on Good Reads or Amazon. I hope you enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed building Miles' Edwardian world.