Staff Development

Staff development sessions can be tailored to the needs and curriculum of individual schools or groups of schools. In the sample staff development activity below teachers would be invited to work through the student task, reflect upon it and then plan how to transfer the task into their own scheme of work. To arrange a staff development session contact this site.

Sample activity: Using historical fiction to teach the writer’s technique of alliteration, used to bring places to life. This example is for Year 7 (11-12 year old) students studying the Roman Empire

TASK 1 Look carefully at this extract from Man Eater by Marilyn Todd, (Macmillan, 1997). One of the characters, Quintilian is crossing the forum in a town in southern Italy.

Being the third day of the Festival of Mars, the forum was packed to capacity. Butchers’ cleavers splintered their blocks; mongrels plundered the scrap bins. Shouts of “stop thief” or “make way for the chariot” mingled with smells of pies and poultry, pickles and pancakes. A spice seller skidded on a fish head, and a thousand exotic scents exploded into the air. Cinnamon and nutmeg and cumin clung to Quintilian as he bumbled his way through the shoppers and the charlatans. You could buy anything here today from pastry cutters to ivory plaques, cucumbers to scribes.

And the sun beat mercilessly on it all, pounding his head like a pestle.


1. There is a lot to see in this market scene but the things described are not just given to the reader in a long list. The writer uses alliteration to catch your attention.
Alliteration is a phrase where adjacent or closely related words begin with the same phoneme (letter sound). E.g. ‘A spice seller skidded on a fish head.’
2. Highlight two other examples of alliteration.
3. Now use this technique to help you write your description of the scene somewhere else in a Roman town such as a baker's shop, the street, the theatre, the arena, ....

Through their active use of the text students learn how effective alliteration can be in bringing a place to life. They can then incorporate their description into their own Roman story and/or reuse the technique to write convincing settings for different incidents in their story.

Later in the year the same students are invited to reuse the technique in their writing on the events at Hastings in 1066. Finally, to consolidate, they are alerted to the work of the popular historian, Simon Schama, and his words, that at the site of the battle of Hastings, ‘We will find bones beneath the buttercups’. A clear example of an historian consciously using alliteration to connect with his audience.

Using the author perspective

Steven Pressfield is a successful author of historical fiction, titles such as Gates of Fire (about the battle of Thermopylae) and Alexander. Below is his account of his way of working. You might use this with your pupils to help them explore how historical fiction is written. They might use his techniques in their own writing or when they are exploring how an historical event has been depicted in historical fiction, whether film or book. 

How I research by Steven Pressfield
Of course it's easier for me than for a true classical scholar. I'm not writing history; the standards governing me have more wiggle room. I'm writing fiction. I can make this stuff up. That said, I do go to extremes to "get it right"-or as right as one can reasonably get it, given the vagueness of so many ancient sources and the conflicts and contradictions among the modern. Here's how I work:

I don't use the internet. I've never been able to find anything on it. Maybe it's me; maybe I'm an idiot. I go to a university research library (since I live in Los Angeles, that means UCLA) and I take books out. Nothing more mysterious than that. I'm a big believer in reading stuff over and over. If I can buy a book and have it as my own, I do it. I'll wear that book out. Many times I type entire passages, pages and pages, just so it'll sink in. It's amazing how long it takes, and how many times you have to go over something, before it all starts to come clear.

The art with ancient texts is reading between the lines. Sometimes I wish I could throttle Xenophon and Arrian for leaving so much out. I liken the case to some poor reader, 2500 years into the future, who digs up one of our contemporary novels (assuming for this example that most of the intervening historical records have been lost.) He reads, "I went down to the store." How does he know there's such a thing as a car? How will he imagine a gearlever and clutch? A glove compartment? A pair of foam-rubber dice hanging from the rearview mirror? The writer of historical fiction has to do that imagining for his reader. He has to suss out how things would really be and then make that explicit. The historian can't do that. He's bound, as he should be, by rigorous academic standards. No wonder historians hate writers of historical fiction.

I believe in parallel research. Trying to reimagine Alexander's Companion cavalry, I ran out of primary material fast. So I read everything I could find on Napoleon's horse troops, on Prince Eugene's, on Frederick the Great's. Trying to construct the world of the Amazons for a different book, I used the model of the horse cultures of the North American Plains Indians. Trying to get inside Alexander's head, I read everything on Caesar, Rommel, Patton.

I believe in stealing. If I find something good, I rip it off and never look back. I don't mean plagiarize. That's a no-no. But if, historically, it was impolite among the Lakota Sioux to walk between one's guest and the fire, why can't I borrow that and use it among the ancient Amazons?

I like to talk to experts. Researching for the combat scenes in Gates of Fire, I spent two days in Arizona with Hunter "Chip" Armstrong, a Japanese swords master and weapons athlete. He had no specific expertise in hoplite warfare (who does?) but we went out into the field with swords and spears and the texts and used our imaginations. We took stuff from everywhere. In one of Archilochus' fragments, he says, "Hold high the wall of shields, brothers!" That's solid gold. One vital fact Chip impressed upon me, that I never would have thought of myself, is that wounds produced by edged weapons (like, say, a slashing sword) are rarely fatal, but that even slight penetration wounds (as from a spear) will kill almost every time.

What gets tricky, as we all know from working with ancient sources, is that the old-timers weren't too big on details. Without stirrups, how did Alexander's cavalry brace themselves to thrust the long lance? How could Philip's infantry carry thirty days' rations? How many horses did each cavalryman have? I pick the brains of hunter-jumpers, dressage riders; bakers and barley growers. Just last week I learned about groats, porridge, and "hurry bread." I can use that.

What I do when I'm trying to get a handle on a specific sequence-say, the battle of Gaugamela-is type out in one file everything Arrian says, and Curtius, and Diodorus. Then I add, in the same file, everything from Robin Lane Fox and J.F.C. Fuller and E.W. Marsden. Of course each one tells a different story. One says Cleander's 6700 "old mercenaries" were cavalry; another swears they were infantry. You have to be a detective. You have to read everything. Wait ... here later at Ecbatana, Cleander shows up again, with about 6500 men, and they're infantry. Aha!

In writing fiction, you have to use your imagination. Did the Spartans really carry little charms and totems inside the bowls of their shields? No historical source tells us so. But every combat vet I know is superstitious as hell; he can never have enough rabbit's feet and aces of spades. There's a concept in Gates of Fire called "phobologia"—the Science of Fear, in which every Spartan youth is schooled, to steel himself for the terror of battle. It doesn't exist. I made it up. This is legitimate though (at least in fiction) because if such a thing didn't exist, it ought to have. Every warrior culture from the samurai to the S.A.S. has a philosophical doctrine undergirding its code of action. Of course the Spartans had one. They just didn't write it down (or, if they did, historians haven't found it yet.) So the fiction writer must make it up.

In fiction the test is: does it ring true? Does it sound right for the era?