Creative writing: Finding your way into the story

After writing two psychological thrillers, The Girl Before You and You and Me, my third novel, The Paris Dancer, a work of historical fiction, presented a new challenge to me as a novelist. How would I begin writing something so different? Set, in part, in the Second World War, the novel is inspired by Paris’s lost music hall, the Bal Tabarin, which was once as famous as the Moulin Rouge, but was sadly razed to the ground in the 1960s.

The Tabarin, which stood on 36 Rue Victor-Massé in Pigalle, was a remarkable place, largely owing to the artistic director Pierre Sandrini. The son of prima ballerina Emma Sandrini, he employed classically trained dancers to perform the French cancan – artists who’d undergone rigorous training, which wasn’t necessarily common at the time. More important, during Paris’s occupation by the Nazis, the director protected the Jewish artists who worked for him. Unlike other employers, he continued to offer them work and advised them not to register as Jewish.

One of the artists to benefit from his kindness and courage in this way was a South African dancer who arrived in Paris in 1938 as Sadie Rigal, but became Florence Waren for the stage – a name she stuck with after her time in France. The Paris Dancer is, of course, a novel – a fictionalised story inspired, in part, by Florence’s life, as well as those of other dancers and music hall artists who worked for the Resistance.  

In my novel, Florence’s fictional counterpart is the Canadian Annie Mayer. Like Florence, Annie auditions for the Bal Tabarin, where she goes on to form a hugely successful ballroom partnership with a dancer called Antoine. This partnership takes them on a tour of the prisoner-of-war camps in Germany with such stars as Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet, in which Annie engages in courageous acts of resistance, as she does back in Paris.

Many decades and miles separated me from the lives of the dancers in wartime Paris. Early on in the process, I asked myself: how would I find my way into a story inspired by their lives? After a week or two of research, the answer became clear: to focus not on what was different between us but what we had in common – a deep love of dance.
As a journalist, I have watched, interviewed and written about dancers for two decades. I first fell in love with the art form when I came across the Argentine tango in my twenties and ended up editing the tango section of Time Out Buenos Aires. Back in the UK, I went on to edit the ballroom and Latin magazine Dance Today from 2010 to 2015, where I was lucky enough to interview almost all of the Strictly Come Dancing professionals, and, later, I worked as assistant editor of Dancing Times, the UK’s leading dance publication.

In short, I have spent many hours watching dancers, listening to them talk about their passion and, whenever I can, dancing myself. I know how tough dancers are and how hard they work, all the while engaging in an art form that, done at its best, must look effortless. This information was very useful to me in considering how those skills might benefit Annie as she hid in plain sight in occupied Paris – still being able to perform under extreme duress and keep a cool head under pressure.

For me, the first fragment of the novel that arrived in my head made itself known while I was at my desk in the British Library, researching the life of Anna Pavlova. Though she died in 1931, it’s hard to overstate her impact on young dancers in the  1920s. The prima ballerina toured internationally, introducing ballet to audiences in countries where it had not previously been well-known. 'She injected me with her poison,' legendary Royal Ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton later said of his experience of watching Pavlova in Lima, Peru.

While I was researching Pavlova, a scene came to me, with some immediacy, of a little girl watching the great ballerina perform her famous 'Dying Swan'. 'This is how I imagine it,' a voice in my head said – that of my narrator, Esther, a friend of Annie’s. 'A young girl of six or seven, sitting in a theatre,' the voice continued. 'On the stage is Anna Pavlova on a trip to Toronto… The small girl sits up. As the music soars, she leans forward. Everything else drops away. She wants to tell such a story. She wants to move like this…'

During the process of editing, that passage moved around in the novel, as can happen, but it endured until the final draft, and I’ll never forget it as the moment the story 'broke through' for me. Above/below are some tips on how this might work for you.

Finding your way into the story – Nicola Rayner’s tips on getting started with historical fiction.

• 1) Begin your research. Read and read and read and read. If possible watch video clips, too (fortunately for me, there was plenty of footage of dance from the 1930s and 1940s). Look at photographs. Talk to experts or first-hand witnesses. If you can, visit the real-life locations where you might be setting scenes.
• 2) Stay patient and be open to when the world you’re researching starts 'talking' to you. It might be a character who appears out of nowhere or a phrase that gets stuck in your head. Don’t ignore these early sparks; start scribbling them down, even if they’re in fragmentary form.
• 3) For a while, continue with your preparatory work – your research and planning – while allowing these characters and situations to blossom and grow, taking notes all the while. I’m not an obsessive planner – I’m more of a 'pantser' at heart – but I have found over the years it’s incredibly helpful to have a basic map of the story written out, either as a synopsis or a chapter breakdown.
• 4) Put the research to one side – or allow it to slow down – and align your creative notes with your plan. For me, it doesn’t matter if I’m not writing in strictly chronological order, but start with the passages that have begun to come through.
• 5) Finally, keep at it. The magic happens in the regularity of writing, even if you can only manage an hour a day. Keep coming back to it and you’ll be surprised by how much progress you can make, little by little.

The Paris Dancer by Nicola Rayner is published by Aria (Head of Zeus) on 13th February 2025.

Read more about finding your path to the past with historical novelist Ellen Alpsten