{"id":744,"date":"2011-12-05T14:32:55","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T21:32:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lindacollison.com\/blog\/?p=744"},"modified":"2012-05-18T13:51:48","modified_gmt":"2012-05-18T20:51:48","slug":"dead-on-the-page","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/dead-on-the-page\/","title":{"rendered":"Dead on the page"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Using Fact and Fiction to Create Verisimilitude in Historical Fiction<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last week I was participating in a thread on Historical Novel Society’s Facebook page<\/a>, where an author had started a topic asking if it was a historical or literary crime to manipulate the date of an actual event in their story.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking this question all week, remembering the advice I’ve received over the decades about the craft of fiction writing and applying it to historical fiction.\u00a0 Realistic historical fiction (as opposed to historical fantasy) is a genre that is particularly difficult because the writer is challenged to recreate a setting that must conform to the accepted model for it.\u00a0 Yet literary historical fiction (which is what I read) should be more than history-lite.\u00a0 I want more than History-101 spiced up with imagined sex scenes.<\/p>\n

Fiction is an art form in which we experience life from another point of view.\u00a0 It engages and transforms both the writer and the reader.\u00a0 Yet how to do it?\u00a0 What \u00a0follows is a pastiche of advice.\u00a0 When I have followed this advice I\u2019ve produced some of my best writing and when I\u2019ve ignored it, some of my worst.<\/p>\n

Before I begin ranting against obsessing on \u201chistorical accuracy\u201d when writing historical fiction, let me say that before I wrote my first (published) historical novel \u00a0(I have written many practice novels that have never seen the light of day) I researched the 18th<\/sup> century from a European perspective for four years and I continue to research the period.\u00a0 I spent time aboard four historical ships.\u00a0 I enrolled in\u00a0 college level history classes (and am currently enrolled in history classes, working toward a second degree.)\u00a0 The passion continues, research has become a hobby.\u00a0 But for me research is not the endgame.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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As a writer what I want to achieve is not historical accuracy so much as the “V” word.\u00a0 Verisimilitude.\u00a0 Too much emphasis on accuracy can suffocate the story leaving the characters dead on the page.\u00a0 The point of an historical novel, or any novel in my opinion, is not to prove what a clever fellow the author is.\u00a0 That being said, the historical novelist must know what it is she is writing about, as if she had lived it herself.\u00a0 This is where the art of writing comes in and if it were easy everyone would write and publish a novel.<\/p>\n

\"\"How to create verismilitude? Hard to say, yet we know it when we read it. Here\u2019s an example that we all can relate to. The stories of old people.<\/p>\n

My grandfather was a great storyteller; partly because he knew how to tell a short but interesting story and partly because he led an interesting life in interesting times.\u00a0 Born in 1900, at a time when automobiles were still rare, penicillin had not been invented and televisions and computers were the stuff of science fiction, John W. Leonard (not pictured, that be Rembrandt’s Old Man) was a youngster when the Wright Brothers made the first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, he recalled meeting the aviator Charles Lindbergh after he made the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean and he watched with millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took those first giant steps for mankind on the moon in 1969. \u00a0 “Bill” Leonard, whom we grandkids called Bebop, lived to hear about his granddaughter jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.\u00a0 He lived through the Great Depression, two World Wars, was married to one woman for more than fifty years and raised six kids.\u00a0 Bebop could play the piano by ear, he loved a good song, a good joke, a good road trip, and he knew how to tell a story and keep your interest.\u00a0 I always believed my grandfather’s stories because I knew he had lived them.\u00a0 His stories rang true, they were from the heart, they were from experience.\u00a0 My grandfather, like your grandfather, created verisimilitude.<\/p>\n

Yet I\u2019m sure more than once Bebop got a date wrong, had the sequence of events out of order, or confabulated something along the way.\u00a0 Does that make his stories less real?\u00a0 They were his truth and captured his essence and the life he lived far more than the most assiduous biographer could ever do.<\/p>\n

Historical fiction writers probably all wonder how accurate we should be.\u00a0 This is an angst that never really goes away but my resolution is to be accurate without deforming the story arc and overburdening the characters themselves with chronology.\u00a0 In character-driven fiction story comes from character and setting.\u00a0 As the writer I must know that setting intimately, I must live it.\u00a0 When I write it I might confabulate some details and ignore others, just like Bebop did when he told us his stories.\u00a0 That is my goal.<\/p>\n

One example of my own angst over facts from my own historical fiction is HMS Richmond<\/em>, a \u201creal\u201d frigate that took part in the \u201creal\u201d battle of Havana in 1762. What I have concentrated on is capturing what it was like to have been aboard a frigate of the British Navy during this time period.\u00a0 My Richmond <\/em>has a life after the battle of Havana that is probably different than the \u201creal\u201d Richmond<\/em> had.\u00a0 Parallel lives, if you will.\u00a0 But I strive to make my story believable, not by piling on information to \u201cprove\u201d I have done my research or inserting too much back story.\u00a0 Whatever isn’t necessary to the evolution of my characters or creating the mood or setting must go.\u00a0 If I know\u00a0 my setting, if I have been living in the 18th<\/sup> century this familiarity will seep through the page. \u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s the \u201ctelling detail\u201d\u00a0 not reams of description or fact-dropping that lend authenticity to the paragraph.<\/p>\n

If you find you are more enthused about writing the facts than the character\u2019s response to living in that long ago world, then perhaps the book you really need to write is nonfiction.\u00a0 When I read I don\u2019t want to be taken out of the story for a history lesson, I want to be transported back to the time and feel immersed in it.\u00a0 I want to vicariously live that history.\u00a0 Writing historical fiction is difficult because it involves time travel and astral projection, or at the very least, channeling past lives.\u00a0 I am only partly jesting when I say that.\u00a0 An author must do whatever she can to get to the heart of the story and find the truth in the historical setting.<\/p>\n

In writing a realistic historical novel I am not defending a thesis.\u00a0 On the other hand, writing memorable fiction is more than just making up stuff that might have happened.\u00a0 Fiction tells the truth the facts cannot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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