In Today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* About Writing Historical Fiction: Response
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quotes of the Day
“Fiction is so much fun and I find more truth in fiction than a lot of history.” Robert Calverley
“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.” Philip Roth
About Writing Historical Fiction: Response
Note: Because I’ve been an instructor for so long, when I receive an email I often (and sometimes wrongly) leap to the conclusion that the writer is asking my advice.
What follows is my slightly enhanced response to Bob Calverley’s email, which became yesterday’s post. As I wrote yesterday, I hope you’ll glean a few writing gems from this:
The simple answer is in two parts:
- I’d personally allow the characters to patch the birchbark canoe and take care of other day to day details. Knowing me, I’d gloss over the patching with something like “While I tended to haggling over the price of [foodstuffs, clothing, or whatever], Character Name patched the birchbark canoe.” (That’s in first person, obviously, but in third person it would be the same except “I” would be replaced with another character name), and
- I’d remember that historical or not, the operative word is fiction. Being fiction, the story doesn’t have to stick absolutely to historical fact except in what you know of the more major events and what you know of the historic personages. At least that’s my take.
My third point is by far the most important one: WITD isn’t a requirement.
As it sounds like you know, WITD is just a really great non-process that enables writing to be more freewheeling and fun. So it’s a tool to be used if/when you can and ignored when you feel you can’t. Not that big a deal.
That said, I don’t personally write fiction in which I have to stick to the widely believed ‘truths’ of major historical Events and even Personages.
(I put air quotes around ‘truths’ because we weren’t actually there, so we can only ‘know’ what we’ve been taught or told.) It’s kind of a case in point that you personally ‘know’ (were taught) two different versions, one in Canada and one in the US, of the beginning of that war.
[At this point in my original response I talked a little about my Wes Crowley Saga. In retrospect, much of that had nothing to do with Historical Fiction—the saga is a Period Western—so I’m omitting those few paragraphs here.]
But I still portrayed any major historical actors in that saga—for example, former Major General Lew Wallace, who was appointed the governor of NM Territory—as historically accurately as possible.
Also, I portrayed the clothing and weaponry used by Comanches and bandits/banditos and Rangers plus every bend in every creek and other bits of landscape accurately. But those kind of details are available in spot research done on the fly a few seconds at a time.
As an aside,
the writer’s background and life also play a strong role (of course) in what s/he writes and how s/he writes it.
My entire literary life began with poetry and essays and has been about words and the rhythms inherent in the language. Bob, on the other hand, cut his writing teeth largely on intensive research and factual reporting as a journalist.
So that life experience would both serve him better and maybe bend him toward writing historical fiction, which he writes primarily because he loves reading historical fiction. It also lends credence to his writing process.
WITD enables me to simply race through the story with the characters, doing my best to keep up as the story unfolds all around us in real time. But I’m only an observer, not an actor. For me personally and the way I do things, that’s WITD in its purest form.
But it isn’t like that for everybody, nor does it have to be.
Back to my direct response to Bob:
From your email, it sounds like your version of WITD is something that enables you to ‘flesh out’ the story after you’ve attended to the necessities of writing the purely historical parts, which you want to remain factual. If so, that’s perfectly fine.
Toward the middle of your email, you wrote, “The beginning of the war in Michigan is all part of the setting for a murder mystery.”
If I ‘interpreted’ that sentence correctly, once you’ve written the beginning of the war in Michigan and much of the factual history is behind you, you’ll be more free to run and play with the characters in the murder mystery part.
Of course, you’ll still want to portray the ‘little’ details accurately, but from that point forward if you get the little details right, the bigger ones will occur naturally and take care of themselves.
I have no doubt the murder mystery will be intertwined to some degree with the true historical events, but from that point forward you’ll be dealing more with everyday fictional (vs. ‘historical’) characters.
The thing is, fictional characters (like humans) operate largely on opinions and what they believe to be true. And opinions and beliefs, by their very nature, are fiction.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest