Demystify history
What counts as historical fiction, and how authentic does it have to be? Look at how to make writing set in the past vivid and relatable with advice from Margaret James
What is a historical novel? One set in the past, presumably? But when does the present end, and when does the past begin: ten minutes, ten days, a decade, a century, a millennium ago?
Do novels set during an author’s own lifetime have any claim to be historical? I don’t see why not. Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit, Sons and Lovers, David Copperfield and Frost in May are all set during the childhoods and early adulthoods of their central protagonists, who are fictionalised versions of the authors themselves. So, in a sense, they are all historical novels, aren’t they, reaching back into a well-remembered but now-vanished past, recreating those times for both fellow novelists and readers alike?
Novelists are often advised to write about what they know. The implication seems to be that it’s fine or even desirable to write autobiographically: to use their own lives and experiences as the primary subject matter in their work. The French call novels in which real people and/or events are lightly or heavily fictionalised romans à clef, meaning novels with a key, and many of these novels are fictional autobiographies: for example The Bell Jar and On the Road.
But what if you are writing (or hope to write) stories set in a time before you were born? Or fictional autobiographies of imaginary people, such as the Bookershortlisted The Industry of Souls, set mainly in one of the harshest prison camps of the former USSR, and narrated by a British man unjustly incarcerated there? How does that fit in with writing about what you know?
The easy (and possibly obvious) answer to these questions is, as various working novelists have often pointed out: write about what you feel.
What matters to you? Where does your focus of fascination in your fellow human beings lie: in their politics, their occupations, their leisure activities, their sporting prowess, their hobbies, their sex lives?
The curveballs life can throw at any of us, such as unfounded accusations, or the breakups of seeminglypermanent relationships? Sudden but also terrifying new opportunities? A desperate need to escape from someone or something?
When you have worked this out, you should be inspired to create characters with whose hopes, dreams, fears and anxieties you can easily identify, even if they wear farthingales, eat baked dormice, live in a cave, take a bath once a year, or never.
The fictional biography is one of the most popular subgenres of historical fiction. But do authors need to have lived the kinds of lives their characters did in order to write about them? I don’t think so, because we can refer back to the power of feelings now. How did it feel to be Alexander the Great? Mary Renault, author of the classic Alexander Trilogy, knew. Or, at any rate, she convinced whole legions of devoted readers that she knew. Anne Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth Tudor are perennial subjects for fictionalised historical biography.
What if you don’t want to write about yourself? Or your imaginary, alternative self? Or a stranger who was actually alive a few hundred or a few thousand years ago?
Maybe you could think about your own family’s history? Where does that take you? Those immediate or distant ancestors – do you think they would like to be reimagined as characters in a novel? Do you have photographs, diaries or letters that could inspire you?
What about writing fiction from the point of view of someone of the opposite sex, as William Boyd does in his fictional biography of the female photographer Amory
Clay, in his novel Sweet Caress?
As varied and wide-ranging as any contemporary fiction, don’t forget that historical fiction can be as cosily comforting as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, or as violently brutal as Bernard Cornwell’s stories set in Anglo-Saxon England.
When you write fiction set in the recent, remote or even the Palaeolithic past, do you have to tell the literal truth, at least as far as you understand it? I don’t think so, and
I feel that people who expect to find total historical accuracy in their reading should probably not hope to find it in fiction. What is total historical accuracy, anyway? Scholars, academics and archaeologists are re-evaluating and re-investigating the past all the time. As long as novelists don’t disgust readers by filling their work with anachronisms and inaccuracies, surely they have every right to imagine what might have happened to, for example, poor Amy Robsart – did she fall, or was she pushed down those stairs so her husband could marry the Virgin Queen – provided they don’t let a Tudor widower order special fried rice from his local Chinese takeaway on the same day. Of course, that’s an extreme example of the ridiculous. But bear in mind that Italian and Asian cooks had to wait for the New World to be discovered before they could start using tomatoes in just about every savoury recipe, so Nero could never have tasted them. When medieval chickens ate corn, it wasn’t the same sweetcorn or maize we know today.
As a novelist, is your own version of historical truth likely to be as valid as anyone else’s? Perhaps – but your primary objective should always be to persuade your readers to believe what you are telling them, at least while they are reading your story.