Blowing on a dead man's embers: the process of writing historical fiction

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I've been struggling with the third draft of The Next Novel, in part because it has been taking me so long to get these first four chapters moving. It's July already!

In off hours, I've been working on a guest blog on the definition of historical fiction, and in going through my files I discovered the first stanza from a wonderful poem by Robert Graves:

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start.

I'm blowing on the embers: blowing, blowing … .

To read the rest of "To Bring the Dead to Life," so evocative of the process of writing historical fiction: click here.

Forging historical fiction when facts differ — or are scarce

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In response to a question on a historical fiction list about forging fiction from little fact (or from differing "facts"), historical author Elizabeth Chadwick posted this wonderful answer:

You do as much background research as you can, both the narrow and the broad, into the person, their lifestyle, and the times in which they lived.

If there's not a lot available about them, then you research the people who interacted with them — their lifestyles, and the people who in turn interacted with them. 

You dig and then you dig some more. This way you build up the layers in the picture and get a feel for what's right and what's not. 

... If you do the research in enough depth, your story will have the integrity that does history, you, and the reader justice. 

How you utilize your research in the novel is down to your personal skills as a writer. Both story and history need to come alive for the reader and shine. No one can be 100% accurate and as writers our imagination is perhaps the most essential tool in our kit, but integrity matters I think.

If you are writing about someone who actually lived, then you keep as close to their personality as you can and portray their world as it actually was — or as close as you can get, and that includes attitudes as well as furniture. If your characters are imaginary then the same. That's my take on it anyway - for what it's worth :- )

(The emphasis is my own.)

I'm in Paris now, doing research. So much rewriting ahead! As always, I find on-the-ground research essential.

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Joyce Carol Oates on "biographically fueled fiction"

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Fact-based fiction? Biographical fiction? What does one call fiction that is based on the life of a historical character. I like Joyce Carol Oates' expression: "biographically fueled fiction."

Here's what she had to say about it in a review of a biographical novel about Emily Dickinson in the New York Review of Books:

In these exemplary works of biographically fueled fiction it's as if the postmodernist impulse to rewrite and revise the past has been balanced by a more Romantic wish to reenter, renew, and revitalize the past: not to suggest an ironic distance from its inhabitants but to honor them by granting them life again, including always the stumbling hesitations, misfires, and despair of actual life....

Just a snippet ... I'm packing for France: research with wine and cheese!

Apology for the Woman Writing

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I'm reading quite a bit of biographical fiction right now, I notice — that is, fiction based on a real person's life.

I've just finished reading Apology for the Woman Writing by Jenny Diski. It's a historical novel based on the life of Marie de Gournay, a 16th century writer and the editor (and protector of) Michel de Montaigne's Essays. She's a strange woman and this is something of a strange novel. Diski is a fine writer, and there were many passages I loved, in particular Marie's intoxication with books, and with the work of Montaigne in particular.

Because Marie is a writer, there is much about writing in this novel. I particularly liked:

"What writer is not emotionally unbalanced by the publication of a new book?" (page 94)

True!

As always, what interests me is that fuzzy line between fact and fiction. The author, in her Author's Note, states:

"What shall we call this one? I suppose 'historical novel'. It doesn't much matter to me, except that I understand that the designation brings questions to the mind of the reader. About what is true and what is made up. Well, it's all made up, of course, but some of it is true — at any rate verifiable by means of other texts." [page 278]

Diski includes a full bibliography for further study, as well as a fascinating account of the protective measures the French took in order for a historian to photograph Montaigne's much-written-over pages. (The pages could not be exposed to any light whatsoever, for example.) Sometimes, in the novel, the narrative voice felt like a historical telling, veering toward the fact end of the fiction/fact scale.

As with any biographical novel, what's of interest — to me — is what is left out as well as what is included. There were parts of Marie's life I would have wanted the author to go — her contact with the Court is overlooked, for example.

Diski is a polished, literary writer, and this novel is always beautifully controlled — but I was not always enthralled by it.