How do you research a character's background if that background never existed?

(1920s jazz singer Esther Jones)

Maybe there’s some wisdom in the often-repeated idea that you should write what you know. At the very least, you minimize the chances of making the kind of ridiculous blooper that comes from inadequate knowledge of your subject, and at best, your writing will hopefully take on the ring of authenticity that is one of the marks of the competent writer.

Unfortunately, I am not a writer ever likely to take this advice because, frankly, it sounds so deathly boring. Why would I want to write what I know, when there is a world out there full of people who differ from me in terms of culture, sexuality, gender, gender identity, nationality, eye color, musical preferences, toenail-cutting habits and a million, million other things that I want to explore (excepting, possibly, the toenail habits) and understand and ultimately capture?

And I think I do mean capture. You can make beautiful speeches about the artistic process all you want, but in the end there’s something unpleasantly rapacious about the writer’s compulsive need to plunder the contents of other people’s brains and display them out in full view for the rest of the world to gawp at. It seems important then, to pay your victims the basic respect of getting it right.

This is fine and dandy if a little research can take you to the point where you know as much as or more about a subject than most of your readers. I can, for example, try to write from the point of view of someone in the Regency period. I’ve been compulsively reading Jane Austen for decades; I’ve gone on to read any number of books about Regency life, costume, manners, etc. The result is that I seem to be able to make a fair-to-middling stab at a background of that era , and getting it onto paper in a form that other people are prepared to deem acceptably authentic.

Slightly harder is getting inside the head of someone about whom some of your readers have far greater personal experience than you. That’s why the fact that Blades of Justice got an honorable mention in this year’s Rainbow Awards is so important to me. Get this: I, as a straight woman, wrote from the point of view of a lesbian woman convincingly enough that the anthology as a whole was described as having “complex characters, wonderfully crafted.” I’m proud of that.

But where it gets really tricky, I’m finding, is where you are trying to get into the head of a character who has never existed, even though you are placing that character in a background that does (or rather did) exist. So, for reasons only known to my muse (who, it’s fair to say, has a… quirky sense of humor) I chose to invent an African-born, mixed-race woman in British aristocratic society in the 1920s.

I’ve done my research – this never happened. There were certainly many people living in 1920s Britain who would have been considered black, and a not insignificant number managed, against the odds, to reach the ranks of the professional middle classes as doctors and lawyers. Black musicians and actors would certainly have mixed with the upper classes. Queen Victoria had an African goddaughter. And there was even a case of a mixed-race African man who only missed inheriting an Earldom by the fact that his parents married after his birth rather than before. But, as far as I can tell, there were no card-carrying British aristocrats in the UK at that time who would have been made, for example, to sit at the back of the bus in Alabama by merit of the color of their skin.

Now, I can research what it was like to be a British aristocrat the 1920s. I can research the experience of black people living in Britain in the 1920s. I can research what it was like to be a British girl growing up in Africa in the early 1900s and then moving to Britain. I can research the contemporary experience of people who experience racism – and I have tried hard to do all these things. But to put them altogether to create an account of a mixed-race woman who is the granddaughter of an earl in 1920s London that feels authentic – that’s a challenge, and one I’m far from certain I’ve risen to.

Enter racial politics. Is it even acceptable for a white woman to appropriate this woman’s story (imaginary as it is) given the long history of exploitation of black people by white people? As I said above, there is always something a little exploitative about the writer’s need to plunder other people’s brains. Does the power balance in this instance make it a little bit worse? Is it worse, for example, than a man writing from a woman’s point of view, given the traditional power imbalance between the sexes?

Certainly, it makes the need to get it right - to make the account feel authentic – more pressing than ever. In the end, rightly or wrongly, I went for it, and the novel I wrote is now being considered by agents. It is, if that’s worth anything, an honest attempt.