WORDS OF POWER: A CONVERSATION WITH HISTORY SCOTLAND.

HISTORY SCOTLAND: At what stage in life did you first become aware of the Jacobite period and the turbulence of those years?

KIMBERLEY JORDAN REEMAN: The first mayor of Toronto, where I was born, was a Scottish gadfly journalist and political agitator named William Lyon Mackenzie (the grandfather of Canada's wartime prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King). In December of 1837 Mackenzie led an abortive rebellion against the government of Upper Canada, and when I was little my grandfather, a third-generation Canadian, used to tell me stories about "Mackenzie and the hanging tree". When I was twelve I found a biography of Mackenzie in the school library and read it until it nearly fell apart, and in this biography, The Firebrand, was the intriguing sentence: "Both Mackenzie's grandfathers were Highlanders, and both had been 'out' in the '45." I went straight to my parents' encyclopedias to find out what the '45 was. And the more I read, the more powerfully it spoke to me: its origins, its consequences, its setting within the context of the 18th century. And then a soldier with a conscience walked into my mind: a professional who has been fighting the French for half his life, and who finds himself in the Highlands on a cold July morning in 1746 with the blood of civilians on his hands. And he asks, "Why?" That was the genesis of Coronach.

The weather plays a key role in many of the pivotal scenes of the novel. How important was it to you to include the weather and the terrain within the narrative?

It's vital to remember that this was a century of climatic catastrophe. Severe winters, copious rainfall, damaging winds, crop failure, blight, disease among the cattle, and famine: the environment was harsh and the weather was a relentless enemy, and determined a pattern of inevitability that led to the collapse of a doomed, archaic economy.

These were brutal times and to give a true sense of reality, the novel includes many scenes of violence. How did you handle these as a writer?

It was war, and I will not compromise my integrity by refusing to portray the truths of war. Coronach is based on fact. These things happened, and I reported them as I saw them, objectively and without prejudice.

Could you tell us more about how you work as a writer? Do your characters and settings arrive fully or partially formed in your mind or does this happen as you begin to write?

It is my gift to see the past and my vocation to take you, the reader, by the hand and lead you into it. To allow you to experience it, not as costume drama or fantasy but as the substance of your very life. And, in that reality, to see through the eyes of my people. The soldiers, the rebels, the civilians, the victims, the survivors of war and terror. The characters walk into my mind, and it is my job to peel back the layers of each personality and discover their pasts, their memories, their loves, their fears. I call this "method writing". And as I discover, so they lead me deeper into their world. I see what they see, I experience what they feel, I hear their voices, I see the play of light and shadow on their faces. I watch it like a film and direct with care, but I never control them. And, yes, sometimes they shock me. But war and its consequences are shocking. And, like a war correspondent, I bear witness to its truths.

Who is your favourite character?

Impossible to choose. Margaret, child of war and rebellion, an eyewitness to history. She is daughter, lover, companion, friend, surrounded by very dangerous men in a very dangerous age. Mordaunt, for his honour and his morality. Bancroft: passionate, yearning, imperious and yet vulnerable. And Malcolm: perhaps demon, perhaps hero, fiercely Celtic, irreparably damaged. I sensed his outrage when I revealed his past.

If you could meet one of them in real life, who would it be and why?

Lieutenant-Colonel the Honourable Aeneas Bancroft, based on the real colonel of the 4th Regiment of Foot, Robert Rich, whose hand was severed from his wrist by a Highland broadsword at the battle of Culloden. Bancroft is homosexual in a time when homosexual acts in the British armed forces are punishable by death; he has become addicted to opium; and his love for his profoundly disturbed second-in-command becomes one of Coronach's great tragedies. Bancroft haunts me. I feel the deepest compassion for him.

Are there any other novelists whose work inspired you and if so, how?

My husband Douglas Reeman, whose novels under his own name and his pseudonym, Alexander Kent, taught me about men and war, courage, honour, the love of comrades, the strictures of duty, the habit of command. My friend Winston Graham, author of the Poldark novels, from whose books I learned how to write dialogue, to listen to the characters speak, to allow them their humanity, to tell the story without flinching because, as Winston used to say, that was how it happened. Mary Stewart's magnificent Merlin trilogy, for its scholarship, majesty and sheer storytelling. Mary Renault for illuminating the past with such haunting beauty.

What advice would you give to some one who would like to try writing historical fiction?

Learn your craft. Know your subject. Find your voice. Speak your truths-- the truths of history and the truths of life-- and let no one and nothing dissuade you from standing by them. Learn the rhythms of your characters' speech: listen to them. And write, revise, rewrite, perfect. Because you are a wordsmith and a historian and a storyteller, and it is not just a hobby. It is the very essence of who you are.