I’ll begin this post with a shout-out to M.K. Tod, who writes a wonderful blog at A Writer of History. Last week, she wrote a post entitled, Unique demands of historical fiction, in which she discussed interviews conducted by Katherine Grant, a judge for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, with this year’s award finalists. I won’t repeat Tod’s summaries of these interviews, but I want to highlight one final comment that addresses one of the greatest challenges of writing historical fiction.
Tod concludes her post as follows:
Katherine Grant mentions that the judges have also “read books whose writers paste twenty-first century mindsets, morality and preoccupations onto people living in times that had completely different mindsets, morality and preoccupations. Such books may be novels but they aren’t historical novels and it’s a bit depressing when they’re labelled as such. Historical novels should respect the past. If you don’t respect the past, this genre is not for you.”
As this quote indicates, it’s all too easy to impose our own modern values on characters from another era. When we do this, we stray from history, and our books cease to be true historical fiction. That idea—that historical novels must respect the past—is worth emphasizing.
I’m often asked how I handle issues like racism, sexism, and other cultural differences between our time and the 19th century, which is the period I write about. My approach has been to present these beliefs as facts of the era—they happened, and primary source material from the time shows us that these biases shaped the lives even of the most educated and most decent people of their times. My fictional protagonists are no more enlightened by today’s standards than their historical counterparts, though I try to make my protagonists less unenlightened than the “bad guys,” if that makes sense.
Part of my motivation for writing is to educate. We all need to understand history if we are to avoid repeating it. (I’m not the first to say this, though the idea has been stated in a variety of forms with a variety of attributions—from George Santayana, to Edmond Burke, and to Winston Churchill.)
My current work-in-progress deals in part with relationships between white emigrants and Native Americans. It also deals with the differing perspectives of men and women regarding the pros and cons of emigrating to the West. While these cultural perspectives are not the main focus of my book, they influence my characters’ actions.
The primary focus of my novel is the relationships among four women traveling together in one wagon company. They are all part of the same family, so family dynamics drive much of the conflict. My goal is to be true to how women felt about life on the trail, as well as their reactions to life in the Pacific Northwest once they settled.
I’m enjoying the process of getting to know these characters and delving into their physical and emotional development. It’s a challenge to be working with new characters after my seven-book series about the fictional McDougalls, Pershings, Abercrombies, and Bramwells.
I am 60,000 words into the first draft now—or about halfway through. It will need a lot of editing before it is publishable, but so far, the first draft is going well. I’ll post more as the novel develops.
What do you hope to learn when you read historical fiction?
When reading historical fiction -and when writing mine – I hope to be immersed in the atmosphere of that place at that time.