It’s 1941. Somewhere under London, a man named Nigel is squinting at a map in a damp bunker. Upstairs, a woman named Violet is quietly suffering. Neither of them will say a single true thing to the other for four hundred pages.Congratulations, you’ve just read sixty percent of the Fiction section.And yet here I am, writing another one. A historical novel. World War Two. British perspective. Because apparently there aren’t ENOUGH of those.

But here’s the thing about the British in World War Two: they had the GREATEST public relations operation in the history of catastrophe. Think about it. They got bombed into rubble for eight months straight and turned it into a brand. The Blitz Spirit! Keep Calm and Carry On! That’s not a slogan, folks; that’s a hostage situation with better typography. “Keep calm”? Your house is ON FIRE, Reginald. Panic is the CORRECT RESPONSE. Panic is what the nervous system is FOR.

And I love writing these people because they can’t say anything directly. Nobody in Britain in 1941 ever said a true sentence out loud. A man’s entire family gets vaporized by a thousand-pound bomb and he says, “Bit of a rough night.” BIT OF A ROUGH NIGHT. His CHIMNEY is in the next POSTAL CODE. That’s not stoicism; that’s a stroke.

So as a writer, this is a goldmine. Because all your dialogue is just people NOT saying things. Two hundred pages of characters almost expressing an emotion and then offering each other tea instead. That’s the whole novel. Tea as emotional currency.

Somebody’s husband is missing over the Channel and here comes Auntie Margaret with a pot of Darjeeling like it’s a defibrillator.
And the research! Oh, the research. You start out wanting to write about courage and loss and the human condition, and six weeks later you’re on page four hundred of a PDF trying to find out whether a woman in Coventry in March of 1942 could realistically obtain an ONION. That’s where you end up. Not the Battle of Britain. ONIONS. Because you know (you KNOW) that somewhere out there is a seventy-eight-year-old man named Derek who has been WAITING HIS ENTIRE LIFE for a novelist to screw up an onion, and he will write you a letter. Handwritten. With a stamp. He’ll have sources.

And you have to invent the rationing. Everything’s rationed! Butter, sugar, meat, eggs, petrol, clothing … they rationed BATHWATER. Five inches. There was a line painted in the tub. The King painted a line in HIS tub, supposedly, which tells you everything about Britain: even the monarchy was doing performance art about restraint.

Meanwhile, you’ve got the Americans showing up in 1942 with chocolate, nylons, and a complete absence of shame, and the British response was (and this is the actual contemporary complaint) “Overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” Which is the best insult ever constructed, because it’s really a confession. It’s three resentments stacked in a trench coat pretending to be a joke. That’s a whole subplot right there, and it writes ITSELF.

And then there’s the moral part. Because here’s what nobody tells you when you sit down to write the Good War from the side of the Good Guys: you have to keep leaving things out or it stops being inspirational. The empire’s still running! They’re defending freedom with a straight face while holding India by the throat! Churchill’s giving the “finest hour” speech and somewhere there’s a man in Bengal wondering when his finest hour arrives. You put that in the book and suddenly it’s not a beach read anymore; it’s a seminar.

So you’ve got a choice as a novelist: honest or cozy. And the market has OPINIONS about which one it wants. The market wants a woman in a headscarf cycling past a bomb crater toward a man she can’t have. The market does not want footnotes about colonial grain policy. The market wants the SPITFIRE. Everyone wants the Spitfire. Beautiful plane. Elliptical wings. Absolute murder machine, but it photographs well, so we’ve decided it’s romantic.

And you know what the real reason is that we keep writing this war? Because it’s the last one where everybody agrees who the villain was. That’s it. That’s the whole appeal. It’s the only historical event left where you can write a bad guy and nobody shows up in the comments section to explain his economic anxieties. We’re not nostalgic for the war. We’re nostalgic for the CERTAINTY. We miss knowing.

Anyway. I’m on chapter eleven. Violet has not expressed an emotion yet. There’s a lot of weather.

Keep in touch if you want to follow my trail on this, my first attempt at historical fiction. And it’s a special kind of self-harm, because I’m trying to write it in actual 1941 British slang. The real stuff. The idioms, the vernacular, the way people genuinely talked before television came along and flattened everybody into the same four sentences.

You know what that means? RESEARCH. It means research, my friends. It means sitting in the dark at two in the morning trying to determine whether a Londoner in 1941 would say “wizard,” “smashing,” or “top-hole,” and whether saying the wrong one marks your character as upper class, lower class, or a man who has never met another human being. These words had CLASS. Every syllable was a social X-ray. You say one wrong vowel and suddenly your dockworker sounds like a viscount and the whole book collapses.

And the rabbit trails. Oh, the rabbit trails. You go looking for one word and four hours later you’re reading a transcript of a 1941 BBC broadcast about pig clubs. PIG CLUBS. That was a real thing. People kept communal pigs. I did not need to know that. Nobody needed me to know that. But now I know it, and it’s in there somewhere, because once you learn about a communal pig you cannot UNLEARN a communal pig.

Honestly, I’m starting to get nervous. I’m afraid that one of these nights a large rabbit is going to show up in a waistcoat, checking an enormous pocket watch, telling me I’m late. Or worse, I’ll find a little bottle sitting on my desk labeled “DRINK ME,” and I’ll drink it, because at that point why not, I’ve already read nine hundred pages about onions.

Wish me luck. If you don’t hear from me, check the hole.