"Roundheads and Ramblings"
New Research
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Posted on Thursday, May 26, 2011 4:54 PM
Here are some of my rules for writing historical fiction. They may not apply to all writers, but they guide me in the choices I make and the kinds of research I do. Read them first. Then later this weekend, I'll show you how they helped me choose which of my diary copies would become my writing guide.
1. Be true to the time period.
Don't ever guess at the order in which events took place. Double-check dates and times so that you don't run a chance of turning a cause into an effect. There's a difference between saying that a man shot a dog because the dog attacked him, or that the dog attacked the man who tried to shoot him. In the first instance, we're dealing with a vicious dog; in the second, the man may be the one who is vicious.
If your story is about people who live in a particular time period, be sure you know the appropriate details of dress, food availability, household furnishings, modes of transportation, and social customs of the period. Also check details of local vegetation, climate, and wildlife habitats. Don't let your native of Oklahoma pull a salmon out of the local river.
If your story also involves actual political or military events, your responsibilities multiply. Your descriptions and discussions must reflect the facts as they were known at the time. Don't let hindsight lead you astray here. We now know that a pregnant woman who takes the drug thalidomide runs a grave risk of birth defects in her unborn child, but the doctors who prescribed the drug to cure morning sickness back in the 50s did not. Don't blame someone for lack of knowledge if that knowledge was unavailable at the time.
2. Be true to your story.
Most historians hate playing "what if" with history. No matter how many alternative universes you may describe, it won't change the one in which your events actually took place. What if Germany had won World War II? Maybe Hitler would have managed to turn the entire world population into blond, blue-eyed Aryans. Or maybe he would have turned out to be a really nice guy whose genetic experiments resulted in the cure of cancer and other life-threatening diseases. Or maybe he would have been hit by a bus and we would have discovered that we didn't need to fight that war after all. Now we're talking fantasy, not history. And while fantasy may be amusing, it doesn't increase anyone's understanding of anything.
Don't change the facts to suit your story. Change your story to make it fit the facts. The people who read historical fiction may be people who know the period well. Or, if they don't know much about the history, they are probably hoping to learn something from your story. It's foolish to try to hoodwink the first type of reader because they will just dismiss you as clueless. It's unkind to mislead the second type of reader, because you will be betraying their trust. Either way, you will lose readers, not gain them.
3. Most important, be true to your character.
If you are writing about a real person, you owe it to yourself and to her to find out as much as possible about her. Don't exaggerate her education or experiences. Work with her own life to make her struggles more understandable. Don't rely solely on gossip or what others thought about the character. Ask what she thought about herself. That's why diaries and personal letters are so helpful when you are trying to flesh out a character.
Judge the characters in your story only as you could have judged them in person. You must not criticize someone who made a well-considered decision simply because it turned out badly. You need to look beneath the result to discover the intention. Don't just blame Lincoln for not acting earlier to emancipate the slaves. You must try to understand what he hoped the Civil War would accomplish before you can judge his efforts. Before you judge a slave-owner, you must at least try to understand why he needed to have slaves in the first place. Only then can you start to examine his treatment of those slaves.
Finally, let your characters be real. Nobody's good and kind all the time. We all have thoughts and temptations we're not proud of. We all have weaknesses. At the other end of the scale, nobody's pure evil. The meanest boss may have a penchant for big-eyed puppies. A kid who terrorizes the neighborhood has a mother who loves him. The heartless mother will willingly sacrifice her life for her child. Don't try to gloss over the unattractive elements of your character's personality. If she's perfect, everyone will hate her by the end of the first paragraph.Your readers want real people -- people with whom they can identify, people they understand because they recognize them.
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Posted on Wednesday, May 18, 2011 9:52 AM
A couple of days ago, Margaret Frazer, one of my favorite writers of historical fiction, posted an article on how to judge historical fiction. She makes such a good point that I think it's worth repeating here. If you write a novel about a historical event by taking all the known facts into account, that's historical fiction. If you change an inconvenient historical fact to make a better story, you're writing historical fantasy. (You can read her whole article here on Patricia Stoltey's blog.)
Now there's nothing wrong with fantasy. We all enjoy it occasionally. Along with millions of other viewers, i am looking forward to a new season of "True Blood." I'm willing to believe that Sookie is a fairy, Bill is a vampire, Sam is a werewolf, and Eric is 4000 years old. It's pure fantasy and good entertainment for an hour or so. But no one will ever confuse it with fact. The very principle that governs theatrical performances -- the suspension of disbelief -- goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and who are we to argue with them?
Nevertheless, the writer of historical fiction carries an additional burden. A historical novel must never give its readers reason to believe something that is not true, and it must never destroy a dead person's reputation for the sake of a good plot line. Those requirements are the motivations that send writers like me back to the libraries, archives, and piles of crumbly newspapers. The challenge becomes even more difficult when those resources do not agree on the facts.
I am struggling at the moment with a particularly knotty historical problem. I haven't talked about the work-in-progress for a while, so I'll remind you that I'm writing about one of the abolitionist women who went to South Carolina in 1862 to work with newly-freed slaves. Laura Towne spent the next forty years of her life in the Low Country. She established the Penn School, which became a model of educational excellence and one that has developed into a major center for the preservation of Gullah culture. I look on her accomplishments with awe.
And yet . . . . And yet . . . . Trying to write about her has become a difficult and frustrating effort. The problem? She kept a diary. Now, under most circumstances, that would be exciting news. A diary provides a way into her innermost thoughts, a way to understand her motives, her doubts, her worries, and her triumphs. In this case, however, there are just too many competing copies of that diary, and worst of all, the original little composition books she used have disappeared.
Laura died in 1901. Her best friend and partner in all her efforts, Ellen Murray, died in 1908. Shortly after Ellen's death, Laura's diary became public knowledge. Laura's grand-nephew authorized a typescript copy of the diary and circulated it among the trustees of the Penn School. In 1912, a friend of the nephew published an edition of her diary and letters. The book is still available; I just bought my copy on Amazon. Sometime later, it was re-issued by a Negro publishing house. In the microfilm collection of Penn School Papers, housed at the University of North Carolina Library in Chapel Hill, are two different typescript copies of that book, one typed on an old manual typewriter, and the other on a slightly more modern electric machine. Both have been extensively marked up, scratched out, and edited. And they do not match -- either each other or the print editions.
The real purpose of my trip to Beaufort last month was to track down the original diary. Everyone I talked to said, "Oh yes, we have a copy" or "Oh yes, I've seen a copy." A copy. Not the original. But while there, I learned of another copy. This one was purported to be in Laura's own handwriting. It had passed through Ellen's estate to her grand-niece, and then to a woman who wrote a history of the school in the early 1980's. She returned the handwritten original to the grand-niece after making a xerox copy. The University of South Carolina now holds the xerox copy and agreed to make a copy for me.
It just arrived -- all 212 pages of it -- written in a lovely and legible 19th-century hand. Now I can compare it to the print edition to see what changes were made by that editor. Problem solved? No way! The two are entirely different in tone and in vocabulary. The attitudes and beliefs stated are sometimes diametrically opposed to one another. In places the handwritten copy is more detailed than the print edition. In others, the print edition contains long passages that are not contained in the handwritten copy. There is no way to determine which one is an abridged version of the other.
Which details are fact and which are fantasy? Somewhere beneath all these various copies lies the real Laura. But can I find her? At this point, I'm not sure.
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Posted on Sunday, April 24, 2011 1:27 PM
Our trip was an amazing adventure. Despite a few losses (which you may have read here), I've returned absolutely brimming with ideas for the upcoming book. Beaufort, South Carolina, has been one of the settings in both A Scratch with the Rebels and Beyond All Price, so I should know it pretty well by now. However, it still holds secrets about its history, and each time I discover one, my appreciation for the area grows deeper.
This time I wanted to walk in the footsteps of the missionary-teachers who arrived in Beaufort in 1862. That path took me to the oldest part of town -- The Point -- when early 18th-century mansions still stand in the midst of old oak trees so huge that even the largest houses seem to shrink in comparison.
I hadn't seen these places before. The streets are incredibly narrow and the foliage and undergrowth hide them from the view of casual passers-by. Still, it is possible to catch a glimpse here and there and imagine what they must have looked like to Bostonians and New Yorkers who arrived as aliens in this strange land.
The paths also took me out to St. Helena Island, where history is even
more a part of the present. We visited the Penn Center, which
commemorates the school founded by Laura Town and her friend Ellen
Murray. We drove the back roads past the shell of an old church and marveled at
the overhanging oak trees, one of which is still known as "The Hanging
Tree" because it was used to hang runaway slaves as a warning to their
fellows.  We bumped down dirt paths leading to old plantation houses, ignored all
warning signs about private roads, felt the light shimmer along a path
the slaves thought was haunted, and then turned around quickly and fled
back to civilization when a distant figure turned to stare at our car
approaching on a posted road.
In more formal research in the town archives, I delved into old accounts of slave experiences, while my research assistant (aka trusty husband) sought plantation pictures and biographical details of the planters. All along the way we met incredibly gracious people who were interested in what I was doing and eager to help my efforts. I left copies of my books strewn across the city and came home with valuable contacts that will be even more helpful in the future.
In the next few days, I'll be posting detailed discussions of some of the sights, both to organize my thoughts about them and to let you share in some of the excitement I feel every time I return to South Carolina. In the meantime, I invite you to visit a new page of trip photos elsewhere on this website. Take a look, and then I'll tell you the stories behind the pictures. |
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Posted on Tuesday, April 12, 2011 10:36 AM
When I hear the word
"research," I usually think of huge libraries and dusty
archives. That's where I spent the
most time during my academic career. Now, however, I'm learning that there are
all kinds of research opportunities, and some of them involve wonderful holidays. I'll be setting out on one of those
soon.
In working with the
Laura Towne letters and diaries, I discovered that the abbreviated print
versions do not include the answers to some crucial questions. The
original documents do exist, but they have been removed from circulation. So
where do I go? Well, I've found that a research collection in Beaufort, SC has
a microfilm of the original documents. Reading microfilm is not one of my favorite
occupations, but in this case it's going to be necessary if I want to know what
was really going on in 1862 and 1863.
Fortunately, Beaufort
has much to recommend it, not the least of which is a chance to do another type
of research — soaking up the scenery and atmosphere of the Low Country. As often as possible, I intend to be
out of that library and exploring the island where Laura lived. The house she bought and the school she
founded still exist. I want to see where she lived — how much of the water she
could see from her front porch, where the sun rose and set in relation to the
house, what kinds of wild birds and vegetation made up her surroundings. I want
to smell the pluff mud and listen to the water. I want to meet the descendants
of her students and taste some Low Country cooking.
The Penn Center,
founded by Laura, still operates, and their York W. Bailey Museum contains a permanent exhibit, "Education for Freedom:
the Penn School Experiment 1862—".
It showcases some of the oldest professional photographs of African
American people, the original 1863 school bell, and artifacts related to Sea
Island and African American history and culture. The photographs and artifacts
housed there offer just a glimpse into Laura's world, but it will be enough to
make me more confident that the descriptions in my book accurately reflect that
world.
I'll be
sharing my discoveries when I return to my office keyboard. But while I'm
preparing to enjoy and exploit all that South Carolina has to offer, I hope you will
come back here often to meet the wonderful volunteers who will keep this blog
rolling.
· Nina Amir is a writing coach. She
offers inspiration, guidance, and motivation to help writers get on with the
business of writing. She'll be
talking here about ways to overcome procrastination and to evaluate your book
ideas.
· Michele DeFilippo is a book
designer, whose advice and guidance can make the difference between producing
an amateurish book and a professional one. She'll have columns on editing and
choosing publishing formats.
They
will be taking over starting on Thursday.
Please make them feel welcome by commenting and asking questions. They are here to help.
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Posted on Tuesday, March 29, 2011 10:23 AM
April is going to be a
very busy month for me. Lions
Leaders Weekend, the year's most important public relations event for Mid-South
Lions Sight and Hearing Service, takes place on April 8th and 9th. As the incoming first vice president of
that organization, I'll be involved in preparations as well as hosting. The
next weekend involves three days of State Lions Convention in Chattanooga. Then comes a chance to get away for a
short road trip with my husband — time to relax and indulge a bit. It leads me,
however, to an invaluable research opportunity and a few days of access to
documents I've been hunting for a long time. Then it's Easter, and the month is about over.
I'm looking forward to
it all. Details are set,
reservations made, maps assembled, and plans laid. Even the house and cats are taken care of. We're lucky to have wonderful house/cat
sitters, who just take over, keeping the house lived in, dealing with mail and
newspapers, administering meds to the 16-year-old cat, and endlessly
entertaining the younger ones. No one will even know we're gone — except for my
faithful readers and followers here in internet land. And here is where I need
help, since I won't have much free writing time.
April is wide open
with slots for guest bloggers. I'm
particularly looking for articles that offer tidbits of advice to new
researchers, writers, and self-publishers. Your experiences, your successes or catastrophes, your
accumulated wisdom: all can provide helpful suggestions that my readers need.
Here are some guidelines:
1. Blogs should fall
into the range of 600 to 1000 words.
2. They must contain
information that readers can use — not just blatant self-promotion of your own
work. You may, however, provide links to
your own works or website.
3. They should be
well-edited. I reserve the right,
however, to make spelling/grammar /punctuation corrections as necessary.
4. The blogs must be
signed and should provide contact information in case a reader wants to get in
touch with you.
5. Small illustrations
are welcome, if submitted as separate files in .jpg or .gif format. You may
also send your own picture if you would like to have it included.
6. You must be willing
to allow further publication of your materials in a proposed e-book of tips for
new writers.
7. I will promote you
and your writings during the month.
In return, I will expect you to link to my blog or website, so that your followers can find the blog.
8. The deadline for
all potential blogs will be Wednesday, April 6th. That will just give me time
to put you on the schedule and let you know when your article will appear.
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