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!

Adam Braver discussion on Readerville ... continued

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The Adam Braver discussion on Readerville.com is over (although it will no doubt remain on-line). A number of things were said about that favorite subject of mine: the line between fact and fiction.

Karen Templer:

... any historical record has gaps in it, things we don’t and can’t know. If a writer takes the liberty of filling in those gaps, then we’re looking at fiction rather than nonfiction. But there’s no bright line between fiction and nonfiction ... , and historical fiction (for want of a better term for books-that-include-real-people-or-events) is a long continuum. “Girl with a Pearl Earring” has real people in it, but the story is entirely fiction. Nobody knows who the girl was; Tracy made the whole thing up. So let’s say a book like that goes at the fiction end of the continuum. Then at the other end, what would be the nonfiction end, you’ve got a book like Capote’s, where it’s extensively researched and based not very loosely at all on real people and events, but narrative devices are used in the telling of those events. So it’s closer to documentary, but it’s literary documentary.

Adam Braver, in responding to a number of posts, said:

... the nature of storytelling has always been a combination of real details and added details--sometimes consciously for the sake of narrative, and sometimes unconsciously, as our memories reconstruct the events for a better narrative. So in that vein, I don’t mind these blends.

And then he said something very dear to my heart:

On an ethical level, however, I do think one has to be upfront with a reader, as there becomes an implied contract.

I think this "contract" — often in the form of an Author's Note — is important in fact-based fiction. The reader needs to know where he or she stands.

Braver again:

Most of the unbelievable stuff is the real stuff. My imagination works best at seeping through the cracks, not in creating the larger than life structures.

That's often how I work.

Here's from Karen again:

It makes no sense, I know, but when I hear “historical fiction” I think of events/people further back in history than the ’60s. But I’d also have a hard time applying it to a book like yours with a more (pardon the term) postmodern structure. Can a thing be postmodern historical fiction? I don’t know. But I think I’m sticking with “literary documentary” when trying to describe your work in particular.

And so, a new genre is born: postmodern historical fiction. I love it.

stories + memories + facts = history

I've posted before about Adam Braver's novel, Nov 22, 1963. It's a novel about that day, the day President Kennedy was shot, but mostly it's a novel about Jackie Kennedy. It's beautifully, artfully, achingly spare: a work of art in words.

I'm excited about his participation on Readerville.com this week: click here if you're interested. I'm especially interested, because of that subject so dear to me (for obvious reasons): the intersection of fact and fiction.

To quote Braver:

One of the things that I’d been thinking about for the past couple of years is the equation: stories + memories + facts = history. This doesn’t necessarily have to apply to history as “the historical record,” but also to our family histories, personal histories, social histories, etc. From a writing standpoint, it was also about finding the somewhat artificial distinction between genres--namely fiction and nonfiction. When you deal with facts, memories, and stories, I’m not sure it’s possible that anything can be pure fiction or pure truth.

I love this:

I really wanted to write a book that consciously combined those elements: where the facts were facts, the stories were stories, and the memories were memories. Put them together in one space, yet let each one speak for itself.

And this:

I’ve always been attracted to books that allow the quiet moments to tell a bigger story, and, I suppose, I was trying to follow in that suit. It wasn’t a matter so much of sifting through so much information, and then whittling it down. It was that conscious/subconscious radar for finding the little yet moving details.

I sent the current draft of the plot off this morning for a writers' group meet this coming Friday, so I'll have some time to following this fascinating Braver dialogue.

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.

Fact and Fiction revisited

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I've just finished reading Atonement by McEwan: what a masterful novel. I immediately searched the Net for discussions about it. It's a novel that's holds its grip. Now what will I read? Everything seems pale by comparison.

It is, technically, a historical novel. I recalled the plagarism scandal: McEwan had apparently too-closely borrowed from a non-fiction account. Here, for example, is from Lucilla Andrews's 1977 memoir, No Time for Romance:

"Bit sort of tight. Could you loosen it?" ... Then as I did not think it would do any damage to loosen the gauze bows, I let go of his hand, stood up, undid the first and, as the sterile towel beneath slid off and jerked aside the towel above, very nearly fainted on his bed. The right half of his face and some of his head was missing. I had consciously to fight down waves of nausea and swallow bile, wait until my hands stopped shaking and dry them on my back before I could retie the bow... [After he dies in her arms, a Sister says to her] "Go and wash that blood off your face and neck, at once, girl! It'll upset the patients."

And this from McEwan, in Atonement:

"These bandages are so tight. Will you loosen them for me a little?" She stood and peered down at his head. The gauze bows were tied for easy release ... She was not intending to remove the gauze, but as she loosened it, the heavy sterile towel beneath it slid away, taking a part of the bloodied dressing with it. The side of Luc's head was missing ... She caught the towel before it slipped to the floor, and she held it while she waited for her nausea to pass ... fixed the gauze and retied the bows ... The Sister straightened Briony's collar. "There's a good girl. Now go and wash the blood from your face. We don't want the other patients upset."

I remember the outrage over this and other "borrowed" passages. McEwan is beyond brilliant, but I think he could have integrated his research more, made it his own. I did feel that the war sections, although overwhelmingly powerful, were just a bit too research-thick. He is at his strongest, I think, when his focus is tight, when his characters are face-to-face.

I'm not sure, frankly. I'm still under the spell of this amazing novel.

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Now, two days later, I'm still puzzling over this novel; that's a wonderful feeling, when characters take up residence. I like the puzzles it leaves. I long for people to talk to about it. It would be an excellent selection for a book club, because there is so much to discuss.

Insofar as the plagarism accusations, I think there is a strong case to be made "for the defense." Writers are by nature magpies, stealing shiney things to make their nest. We are sparked by ideas, and throw them into the stew-pot of the novel. Had that nurse and patient story been told to me by a friend, I would certainly have used it. I gather my materials everywhere I go.

So is it so very different when the inspirational story is in written form? It's touchy. I do think one needs to be more careful. What I do: I break up an account into bits, use parts here and there. I make sure to put quoted sections in quotes in my notes, so that I know to reword it. Even so, the source underpinnings of a particular scene might be evident to someone who knows the material well.

The Life of Pi was inspired by another work of fiction. There is a scene in Geraldine Brook's prize-winning novel March I know I've read elsewhere — I just can't recall where. Novelists are blessed to find accounts that give them the true-life detail they need, and are apt to consume such accounts hungrily.