Here\u2019s the next installment about writing historical fiction, based on my workshop in July at Keystone college. I’ll be jumping all over the place to pick up the points I didn’t cover last time.<\/p>\n
If possible, we should read writing from the period we\u2019re writing about. When I wrote my historical novel, Dave at Night<\/em>, which takes place in 1926 and features, among other things, the Harlem Renaissance, I read poems and one contemporaneous novel, Home to Harlem<\/em> by Claude McKay. For A Ceiling Made of Eggshells<\/em>, which is about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, I read The Expulsion Chronicles<\/em> compiled by David Rafael, a book of contemporary accounts written by both Christians and Jews.<\/p>\n Home to Harlem<\/em> gave me details and the perspective of people in 1926. The Expulsion Chronicles<\/em> is light on details, but it gave me an idea of how events were understood by people of the time.<\/p>\n Historians are nice! As I researched, I longed to speak to people, or email them, who could tell me if I was getting things right. I reached out to at least half a dozen historians. The only one who failed to help me was David Rafael, who was very ill. One historian, Jane Gerber, whom I mentioned in the last post, became my mentor for the project. She guided my reading, corrected or confirmed my ideas, and even annotated my manuscript. I think the historians were glad to help. If we get the history right, we bring their field to life.<\/p>\n But we can\u2019t rely of their help. We have to educate ourselves, because the focus of most historians is narrow. The writer of historical fiction has to see the big picture. For example, a historian I consulted innocently steered me wrong about something, because his expertise was in the twelfth century, and I was writing about the fifteenth. Things had changed. I had to know enough to realize that he was wrong.<\/p>\n And historians have biases, which we have to know enough to be able to recognize. (This may sound intimidating, and I suppose it is. Historical fiction isn\u2019t for the fainthearted.) For example, many of the books I read were written by historians of Jewish history, but I also read a biography of Queen Isabella, which gave me a different perspective on events. In the books on Jewish history the Jews played a larger role in what happened than they did in the biography\u2013I don\u2019t know enough to say which is more accurate, only that the two perspectives were useful.<\/p>\n A neat trick to know about is Google advanced search. If we\u2019re having trouble finding the information we need, advanced search can help. Just type in “advanced search” and you\u2019ll see what you need to do.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re not sure whether a word represents a concept that didn\u2019t exist at the time of our story, we can look at the word\u2019s etymology in a dictionary.<\/p>\n There is a big annual medieval history conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I didn’t know about it until Ceiling<\/em> was finished, but\u00a0I went this year, because I\u2019ve become fascinated with the period. So there are likely to be conferences we can attend to help educate ourselves and to meet enthusiastic historians. (This is expensive.)<\/p>\n For detail, we should go wide for whatever we can find on popular culture\u2013fashion books, cookbooks, magazines. For food, I used a cookbook based on documents from the Spanish Inquisition, because people would be turned in for following Jewish dietary laws. In using the cookbook, I had to be aware of which foods came from the New World and not include them.<\/p>\n Briefly, I hired an assistant, which some of you may be able to afford to do. For me, it didn\u2019t work out. I wanted to see the source material myself, and, frankly, I was afraid that the assistant might miss something useful or critical. But other people do use assistants, and that\u2019s an option.<\/p>\n In the last post, I mentioned my timidity. I was so afraid of getting things wrong that sometimes I was frozen. A beta reader advised me to \u201cbe a novelist,\u201d and I had to accept that I couldn\u2019t learn everything. There\u2019s an Afterword in Ceiling<\/em>. Before I wrote it, I looked at Afterwords in other historical novels, and every one had an apology to the reader and to the past for all the errors in the book. Without a time machine, there are bound to be mistakes. We do our best.<\/p>\n We have to make a choice about scope\u2013large or small. I could have written about, for example, a butcher\u2019s daughter in a village and how her life was shaped by the worsening climate for Jews. That would have been a small-scale approach, and it would have been a fine way to go. But I chose to go big and put my MC in a prominent family, so that she can be on the spot for the major events of the day.<\/p>\n We fantasy writers know this already from seamlessly introducing our world building. Just as in fantasy, we should avoid info dumps.<\/p>\n On a one-to-ten scale of organized people, I\u2019m about a five. A ten would have an easier time writing historical fiction. Sigh.<\/p>\n I wish I\u2019d summarized my reading as I did it. Next time I will.<\/p>\n If we own a book, I recommend writing in the margins, which will make important parts pop out when we go back. If this is sacrilege for you, of course don\u2019t do it. Use post-its.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t expect to know everything or understand right away. One of the books I read about the expulsion was all about who owed how much to whom, who paid how much for something when a family had to leave. At first I thought, This is so dry! What about the emotion, the tragedy?<\/em> But later, after I\u2019d read more, I understood two things: first, that the tragedy was locked into the accounting, because people were grossly underpaid for their belongings when they had to leave. Not just fortunes were lost, but people arrived at the borders without funds to pay the exit duties. Then they had either to convert or to be executed. Second, I realized that there wasn\u2019t much in the way of records. People didn\u2019t keep diaries. The accounting records were kept and preserved. The historian assembled the big picture out of these little data points.<\/p>\n We have to watch out for our assumptions. For instance, I assumed that banking was primitive in the Middle Ages, but it was surprisingly sophisticated.<\/p>\n I think I have one more post on this, or maybe half a post, so I\u2019ll stop here.<\/p>\n \u2219 Your MC, an archaeologist and amateur detective, reads this article: https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-science-murder\/cold-case-scientists-encounter-prehistoric-murder-mystery-idUSKBN0OC2GD20150527<\/a> and is fascinated. (I just noticed that this link and the one below begin with a photo of a skull. Beware!)\u00a0Conveniently, the time machine has just been invented, although it may be used only for approved projects. Her application is approved, and she\u2019s off, into the very distant past to investigate a murder among an entirely different branch of the homo sapiens tree. Write the scene of her arrival and keep going.<\/p>\n