From poring over historical land records to taking a walk, archival research can be found everywhere.
NCW tutor and novelist, Elizabeth Lewis Williams (Deception Island, Erebus), presents five different ways that writing of all kinds can be informed and inspired by archival information, and the many places this information can come from.
Archives are not just stuffy libraries full of drawers and folders. Discover several accessible sources of research that are perfect for finding information, and inspiration, for poetry, fiction, non-fiction, memoir and more.
Here are some tips and writing exercises to help you expand your understanding of archives and boost your creative inspiration.
It is easy to think of archives as dull and dusty, difficult to access, and only really relevant for people doing historical research.
However, there are many different kinds of archives: public and institutional records, smaller personal collections, film and sound archives – even natural archives like rock or ice. There are therefore many different kinds of writing which you can develop in response: literary fiction, plays and sequences of poems, as well as historical fiction or memoir.
Place and the archive
The word ‘archive’ is derived from the Greek arkheia, both the place in which records were kept, and the name for the documents themselves. Modern archives usually have some form of online presence, even if you have to make an in-person visit to see particular items or collections. If you visit the East Anglian Film Archive and navigate to the highlights page, you will find a number of links which could provide inspiration for poetry, as well as an atmospheric set of films which could be used to enrich settings or help with the evolution of characters and their backstories.
If you were to construct a building for your archive – one you are working with, or one you imagine – what would it look like? How would it be organised? What does it contain? And if it was a person, what kind of person would they be? How would they speak? Is there a role for ‘the archive’ as a character in your writing?
Finding your way
You may not have considered using archives as inspiration, and therefore may not have specific questions. Try the National Archives to see the range of archives available online. There are some surprising sources of stories: The Old Bailey Online, for example, offers thousands of tales of criminals and trials, with a helpful guide on to how to use the search function. Your findings may not make it into writing, but your search may become part of the story.
The anthropologist Tim Ingold makes a distinction between navigating, in which your route from A to B is plotted before you set out, and wayfaring, in which you discover your pathway (and your destination) as you go along. The quest narrative, which has a journey as its spine, is an archetypal plot; quest stories speak across cultures. Consider this in your writing; What networks, connections and pathways do you discover on your archival journeys? Where do the signposts run out?
Archival voices
Archives are full of voices, whether of people speaking audibly in films or oral histories (see, for example, the British Antarctic Survey Oral History Project or one of the local hubs for the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage). There are other voices, too: of the administrators, of the holding systems, the ghostly voices of those who are not represented. Objects with material specificities and forms bear tell-tale traces of their history, like watermarks from rain, or the shine which comes from use.
Can you find a form of language to animate these voices, make them speak? You might be able to make these experiments form the basis of a script.
The natural archive
The earth has its own archives: ice which contains the climate record in trapped bubbles of air, the mineral composition and structure of rocks which tell dramatic histories of continental relationships, their collisions and separations, their slow drift around the globe. And then there are fossils, the haunting fragments of vanished species.
All stories arise from particular places and times. But what if these were set within the different timeframes of the earth’s archives? What would introducing the voice of air or stone add to the development of your own story?
A personal archive
An attic is an archive of sorts. It contains a personal history, organised (or not) by the people who take things up there. When processing acquisitions, archivists pay careful attention to the sequence of objects as they were arranged by the person or organisation from which they have come. They also try to recognise ownership history, and keep together materials originating from a particular creator. By doing so, they try to provide researchers with a stable, contextualised, and authentic record.
Imagine there is a suitcase in your mother’s attic, packed with things from other family attics, which she couldn’t throw away. Can you use the investigation of order (or disorder) in the collection of objects to create a sequence of poems, or create a structure for your narrative?
Writing From the Archives with Elizabeth Lewis Williams (six-week course)
Discover how to use archives to craft narratives in this six-week evening course led by writer Elizabeth Lewis Williams.
Whether you have a project you would like to develop and are seeking guidance on how to integrate archival research into your work, or would like to unlock inspiration for new writing, this course will provide you with the tools needed to progress confidently.
Tuesday 14 October, 7–9pm, Dragon Hall for six weeks.
Elizabeth Lewis Williams
Elizabeth Lewis Williams is a Norwich-based poet and teacher. After many years spent teaching in schools, she completed an MA, followed by a PhD, in Creative Writing at the UEA. Her first book, Deception Island, was made into an immersive installation in a replica Antarctic hut, and her second, Erebus, was published in October 2022.
She is currently working on a book of creative non-fiction on Antarctica, as well as several other Antarctic poetry projects. Her piece Arriving appears in Hinterland Issue 16.
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