Camille Booker: 'It’s easy to get caught up in research when writing historical fiction'
BY Maya Fernandes
11th Mar 2025
Camille Booker was a student on our six-month online Writing Your Novel course in 2019. We caught up to discuss her novel, The Woman in the Waves – out now from Hawkeye Publishing.
Read on to hear about Camille's historical fiction recommendations and her advice for capturing a historical moment with authenticity.
Camille, you studied on our six-month online Writing Your Novel course in 2022. How did that experience shape your approach to writing?
I can honestly say that enrolling in the six-month online course completely transformed my approach to writing. This is firstly because, before the course, I didn’t have a writing group with whom to share work and exchange feedback. Secondly, the structure of the course taught me so much about how to read critically, give and receive criticism, as well as learning the value of engaging in a wide range of genres to shape my own writing.
Also, the access to the Curtis Brown Creative tutors was invaluable. I remember one specific lightbulb moment during the course, when our tutor, Laura Barnett, explained the concept of horizontal and vertical narratives, and that a good story should have both a temporal arc (the key events in the plot) and an emotional arc (how these events might affect the characters). Up until that point in my writing journey, I was so focused on action and pace and driving the plot forward that I had been totally ignoring the story’s emotional depth, and readers were often left wanting ‘more’ (i.e. a deeper connection to the characters through interiority, more depth of emotion or more resonance once they finish reading). This moment in the course was a revelation for me! Now while I’m writing, I always try to keep the story’s emotional journey as clear in my mind as the temporal arc.
Many of our students find their writing community on our courses. Do you still keep in touch with anyone you met during the course?
Yes, we do! A lot of students from our course have gone on to secure agents and book deals so it’s always exciting to catch up and hear updates. Most of the students on the course were from the UK, but a couple were from Australia, so we have a WhatsApp group and mostly keep in touch that way, and we’ve even had a couple of meet-ups in real life – one in Sydney and one in London. We still share writing and exchange feedback, which has been another great benefit from enrolling in the course because, as I mentioned, I really didn’t have a writer’s group before. Finding my writing community was a definite highlight.
Your debut novel What If You Fly? navigates the social and political challenges of World War Two, whilst The Woman in the Waves takes us to a small fishing town in the 1920s. Did you approach writing these different time periods differently, and how do you make sure you capture a historical moment with authenticity?
Like most historical fiction authors, I love the researching aspect of novel-writing. People often refer to research rabbit holes, but I like to think of it more as a rabbit’s warren, with winding dark tunnels that lead you in one direction, only to come to a dead end, or take an unexpected turn and end up somewhere completely different.
This was true for my debut novel because the setting was so broad – from a small leafy suburb in 1940s Sydney, and London during the Blitz, to Nazi-Occupied Paris, gulag-infested Russia and old-world Peking. I undertook so much research to capture each setting authentically. However, with The Woman in the Waves, I was quite narrowly focused on the small coastal town of Widow’s Peak, and I lived in Wollongong at the time I was writing it (on the south coast of New South Wales), so the setting came much more naturally to me. This meant that I could focus on other areas of the research that were just as integral to the plot as setting.
For example, we tend to associate the Roaring 20s with a time of giddy freedom, but my historical mystery explores the grittier side of that time period, with darker themes, bootlegging and characters who struggle just to get by. My research allowed me to uncover the fascinating, little-known history about Australia’s Prohibition era in the early 1920s. So, in order to capture this particular historical moment with authenticity, the tone had to be less The Great Gatsby and more Peaky Blinders.
Missy, the protagonist of The Woman in the Waves, is not your typical historical fiction heroine. How did you go about crafting her character, and what do you want readers to take away from her journey?
I wanted Missy to be made up of contradictions: physically strong yet naïve, gutsy but flawed, curious but cautious, unaware of her allure and, at the same time, covered in fish scales and grossly unappealing. Because Missy has grown up without a mother to teach her any of the traditional female roles, I tried to create a female character that wasn’t necessarily feminine in the stereotypical way: she wears trousers, smells of fish, and doesn’t take much care in her appearance. But still, she possesses a profound vulnerability that hopefully readers will find compelling and endearing.
She’s not a typical historical fiction heroine. On the surface she’s innocent, lonely and she inspires sympathy. But, like a siren, she is mysterious, beguiling and a little bit unknowable. I want readers to love her, be captivated by her, unsettled by her. I want readers to reach the end of the book and, maybe not agree with her choices, but understand why she made them.
For anyone currently working on a historical novel, what advice would you give to help them stay motivated throughout the process?
It’s easy to get caught up in research and historical accuracy when writing historical fiction. If we write with a fear of getting something wrong, we can drown the story with facts and details. Characters are at the heart of your story, and it’s through your characters that readers will experience the time and place in your novel.
For those moments when I feel stuck, or if the words won’t come, I like to collect images that help me ‘see’ my characters or my setting – Pinterest is great for this. I also love to watch documentaries, movies or tv shows set during the era of my novel. These are excellent ways to visualise your story, or stir something in you – a new scene, or a new plot direction.
Another way to stay motivated when you don’t feel like churning out words is to deep-dive into immersive research: things like cooking the food your characters might have cooked or eaten, listening to the music from the period, learning the skills that your characters might have had – sewing, tinkering with a radio, or in my case, how to clean a fish.
What does a typical writing day look like for you?
My kids are still quite young, so all my writing happens around them, and I value every minute of sleep, so I rarely wake up early to write. But, once lunches and schoolbags are packed and they are dropped off at school/preschool, I usually ignore all the chores, drink a big coffee and make the most of the quiet time to get some writing done. I find one to two hours of writing is usually enough to reach my productivity level, but throughout the day I also add words into my Notes app on my phone. Whenever an idea or a sentence comes to me, I make sure to capture it right away, so I don’t forget it. Sometimes I feel guilty for always having my phone in my hands, but honestly, I don’t think I’d ever finish a novel if I didn’t have the convenience of writing in my phone at any given moment.
At night, once the kids are asleep, I usually use that time for reading or research or editing – I find it too difficult to draft new words in the evenings. After 7pm my brain shuts off.
Are there any historical novels you’ve been loving lately?
I’ve recently read two historical novels that I absolutely loved. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden is a wonderfully written debut with an unexpected plot and masterful characterisation. I loved the post-WWII setting and how the author explores the past. The prose is filled with beautiful imagery laden with symbolic meaning and each line of dialogue brims with subtext. I highly recommend this one for writers looking to use more literary techniques in their work.
And, following with the themes of mermaids and New South Wales coastal settings, I’ve also been reading and loving The Sirens by Emilia Hart, which is a bittersweet feminist tale that weaves history, myth, folklore, sisterhood and female empowerment, set on the far south coast of NSW. I loved Emilia’s first novel, Weyward, so I’ve been eagerly anticipating this one, and it doesn’t disappoint. And of course, she is also a CBC alumna, so it goes without saying that she’s an auto-buy author for me!
And finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
My next novel, Code Name Funnel-Web will be released in April next year. It’s a rerelease of What If You Fly? and is basically a whole new book. In early 2024, my publisher asked me to cut 10k words from the original manuscript ahead of its third print run, and rather than cutting the word count down by skimming words from each page, I decided to cut the story right back to its core plot beats, apply everything I had learned from the CBC course, and then rewrite the entire novel, scene by scene. Along with a new and improved title and creepy, spine-tingling cover, it’s now a much richer, deeper, and slightly darker version of the original, with a whole new third act and a completely different ending. I’m excited for readers to see how much the story has changed, but also those elements that have remained.
I’m also currently pursuing my PhD in creative writing. My thesis aims to explore how contemporary novels are embracing the figure of the witch to reveal female empowerment and refusal, while the creative component is a novel of historical fiction. The Butter Witches is set in Bulli, a coal mining town on the south coast of New South Wales. In 1887, a mine explosion killed all the men and boys of the town, so the novel is a gothic, ‘coming of power’ story, with elements of magical realism and folk horror. It’s Hannah Kent’s Devotion meets The Craft (1996) with a Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) vibe.
Get your hands on a copy of The Woman in the Waves.
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