In early 2024, I sat down to begin writing The Poppy Girls, a commissioned historical saga for Michael Joseph. Set in the Poppy Factory in Richmond during the Second World War, I assumed the research would confirm what the title suggested: that, as in many wartime industries, women had played a vital role in its operations, replacing the men who had enlisted.

It didn’t.

Almost immediately, I discovered that women had not worked at the Poppy Factory during the Second World War at all. The historical record was clear: men disabled in the First World War continued to manufacture poppies throughout the war, and women did not appear on the payroll until the late 1950s.

This presented a problem. With the title and publication date already fixed – the novel scheduled for November 2025 to coincide with Armistice Day and the eightieth anniversary of VE Day – simply abandoning the setting was not an option. I had to decide how to proceed.

At this point I flagged the issue to my editor. The response was pragmatic: we would work it through and find a solution. Someone suggested an alternative framing, with the ‘Poppy Girls’ working in supporting roles such as the canteen. However, this solution felt unsatisfactory, not least because it risked disappointing readers who would reasonably expect women to engaged in more active wartime labour within the factory itself. I considered turning the commission down but this was not a straightforward decision. At the time, I was already working with the same publisher on two of my own novels, and the commission formed part of an ongoing professional relationship. Any decision therefore had to be made within that broader context, rather than in isolation.

I then spoke to the marketing and communications director at the Poppy Factory, which led to a significant development. I discovered that part of the factory premises had been requisitioned by the Ministry of Aircraft Production during the Second World War, and used for the manufacture of aircraft radios. Crucially, it was unclear from the very limited records whether this work had been carried out by men, women, or a combination of both. This opened an alternative and historically credible space within which to tell the story, without distorting the established history of the Poppy Factory itself.

Not all such negotiations, however, result in a clear or fully resolved solution. In another commissioned project, The Post Office Girls (Hodder and Stoughton), I successfully pushed back against suggested plot and structural elements that felt narratively unconvincing. However, I retained one aspect of the brief – the location of the protagonist’s home – despite later research suggesting she probably wouldn’t have commuted as far.

At the time, it felt like a relatively small compromise within the wider project. But looking back, it highlights a different kind of pressure in commissioned writing: not the need to resolve a major historical problem, but the quieter accumulation of small decisions that shape how believable the world feels, even if most readers would never consciously notice them.

These experiences made me think more closely about what saga fiction is actually doing. Readers often come to these novels not simply for entertainment, but as a way of engaging with the past. In my own case, much of the feedback I receive from readers explicitly thanks me for helping them to understand and learn about the wars. They appreciate that characters and plot are fictionalised, but the worlds they depict – and the representations of women’s wartime labour – are often taken to be, in some sense, ‘true’.

In this context, the kinds of decisions I have described within commissioned stories -both the larger, more visible negotiations and the smaller, quieter compromises – take on a different significance. They shape not only individual narratives, but also the patterns through which certain kinds of stories are told and retold. Taken together, these experiences show how commissioned publishing structures influence the kinds of historical knowledge that are circulated through popular fiction. Cultural memory, in this sense, is shaped not only by what writers choose to include, but by the conditions under which those choices are made.

This differs from my experience of writing my own original novels, where the initial idea tends to develop more organically from my own research and areas of interest. In commissioned fiction, the starting point is externally defined, which introduces a different set of negotiations between research, narrative, and expectation.

Commissioned saga fiction appears to be on the increase. My own agent has recently noted a rise in requests for commissioned projects, and this is echoed informally in discussions among authors, particularly in online writing groups where writers debate whether or not to take on such work. If particular settings, institutions, and narrative frameworks are repeatedly prioritised because they are commercially successful or already familiar to readers, this may have implications for how women’s wartime labour is remembered, reshaped, or, in some cases, overlooked. This seems to me to be an important area for further investigation.