I've just finished watching season 2 of The Crown on Netflix. It's a good series, with strong writing and insightful acting. Claire Foy's accent work bowls me over, and Matt Smith is astonishing as Prince Philip. But the whole project raised a question in my mind: how do we go about drawing conclusions when it comes to the lives of real people like that? It feels like a chancy proposition.

Of course, the characters in The Crown aren't really the Queen of England, her husband, and their relatives. They're actually just made-up characters who happen to have the same names and life stories as real people. The series isn't a documentary – it's a fictional series arranged chronologically and thematically around historical events. Sort of like Mad Men, but with recognisable figures. The writers and actors are playing 'let's pretend' with real lives: they're imagining what they think might have been going on in the minds of those particular people in those specific circumstances. Only the actual people could tell you if they got it right – and they're under absolutely no obligation to tell us that. It's already an exercise in intrusion as it is.

One of the notable effects of this series – at least to an audience member who is not British, and therefore has no opinion one way or another about the Royal Family – is to cause one's sympathy to vary a lot from episode to episode, or even within episodes. One episode in the series was a case in point. It dealt with two different reactions to the same school. Using flashback, the director showed us how Gordonstoun School provided a home for Prince Philip during a traumatic period in his life. We could understand and sympathise with a boy's struggle to feel less alone in the world. We felt for him as he dealt with rejection and the loss of his family members in a plane crash. We could intuit what the school meant to him.

But in the same episode, we find ourselves getting angry at the adult Philip for forcing his oldest son into a situation that was traumatic for him. Philip seems to think that, because Gordonstoun was so important to him, it will provide the same nurture and encouragement to Charles. Of course, it doesn't work out that way. We are struck by Philip's uncle's remark that, 'Someday, you will be a father; you can make your son hate you as much as you hate your father.' It seems tragic (in the classical sense) that this is exactly what seems to be happening.

As I said before, all of this is no judgement on the very real individuals whose lives are being used as fictional material here. We have no idea if what the dramatists are showing reflects those individuals' feeling at all. They're just guessing. But if we ignore the gossip factor, and think about the situation in the abstract, we can learn a lot from what the writers and actors are showing us. We can put ourselves into a situation and try to assess the reasons for certain actions. We might find ourselves nodding with understanding.

Usually, when we're watching historical fiction, we're watching stories about people we don't know nearly as much about as the people portrayed in The Crown. We're looking at stories about people who are long gone, probably long before any of us were born. That's safer for a dramatist. After all, there's nobody around to say, 'No, they weren't like that at all.' I was thinking about that the other day, when I turned off Spielberg's Lincoln after about twenty minutes. I don't care that none of us were around back then – that didn't look, sound, or act like the Lincoln in my head, thank you very much, so I thought I'd pass on that attempt.

How do we get into other people's heads, be they historical figures or made-up characters? Some writers don't really try. They make all their characters act the way they would themselves. Their dialogues sound like monologues in stereo. (I'm looking at you, Quentin Tarantino.) Of course, they also have Bad Guys in their stories. The Bad guys sound like whoever the writers don't like: their mothers, their ex-husbands, the telemarketer they just hung up on. . .

If we want to get into other people's heads, we need to realise that other people aren't us. They have their own ideas, their own logics. They have had other experiences, experiences which shaped their thoughts and actions. A good writer knows there are other people in the world. A good writer is not a solipsist.

How can we figure them out, these other people? Try starting with their actions, whether real, historical ones, or fictional ones dictated by the narrative. Why would they do these things? What kinds of past experiences would lead them to these present actions? What motivates them?

• If a character lies or cheats, what in their background made that seem like a viable option?
• If a character is overcome by fear, what might lie behind that fear? Conversely, if the character is brave, what made that possible?
• If a character is self-destructive, what pattern is being acted out? Can the character break the bonds of the past? What might open up that possibility?

You see where I'm going with this. People may not be destined to do what they do – okay, if you're writing about historical figures, you know what they're going to do, but it only seems like destiny because you're looking backward. But even if you're making them up, your characters have to look like something found in nature. They don't do things for no reason. On the other hand, their reasons may not be your reasons. Try to walk a mile in their shoes, and see where it takes you.

Your fiction's going to get deeper that way.

In the meantime, we have absolutely no idea whether Her Majesty and His Royal Highness had that conversation about Stephen Ward and his parties. Or if they did, what was said. We do know that Claire Foy and Matt Smith looked and sounded like real, plausible human beings when they acted that story out. Let's read it as good fiction and leave it at that.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

19.03.18 Front Page

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