How True Must Historic Fiction Be?
Avoiding anachronisms is one challenge of writing fiction using real people and events from the past. The other is bargaining with yourself about how true to history you need to be.
Journey, American begins in World War I, then continues through the ragged glory of the American Century. I have only begun to introduce characters (this is difficult for me because I tend to write in the style of Raymond Carver having learned the beauty of brevity writing and writing thousands of inches of sports copy in Conyers, Georgia - a long gone world where nothing that existed then, exists today.
The Rockdale Citizen was a scrappy 10,000 customer daily that printed Monday through Friday. When I started in 1982, there were five of us in the newsroom with me being the sports editor, which really meant I was the sports department and, during the school year, I would work seven days a week covering football, basketball, baseball and, eventually, soccer which was quickly growing in that exurban county.
I learned a lot of good and difficult lessons during my 11-year transition from 21-year-old college graduate who knew virtually nothing about sports (despite my father being a successful and prominent high school basketball coach) to becoming somewhat of an authority on at least the local sports scene.
Looking back on it now, with the clarity only hindsight can give you, perhaps I should have kept writing sports and not pursued a career in newspaper management. Yes, I made more money, but the pressure I allowed myself to sink under (perhaps bow to) was not worth the money, or the lost marriages, or the lost sense of self. While I feel guilt about so much that went on during those years, losing myself and my dream of truly writing may have been the worst thing I did to myself.
Newspapers were fun then and the absolute best place to train oneself as a writer. First, I generated tons of copy. Second, every week I had to put together stacks and stacks of youth soccer and youth baseball results. Stale and meaningless, but core to the small town daily ethos (and ending such practices are one reason The Citizen and its ilk barely exist any more).
I learned to write a lot and fast. And short
Now after countless short stories, and two novellas, I am attempting a novel with a goal of writing 75,000 or so words.
A major challenge I have found is wanting my characters to be where I need them when I need them, rather than sticking with where they actually were when they lived and breathed.
That is where I am at today. Louise Brooks has met Journey at Beverly Hills Motor Speedway, which opened in 1921. She meets Journey in 1922. She is a movie star and has already been in a relationship with Chaplin.
But Louise Brooks never went to Beverly Hills Motor Speedway as far as I can tell. She In 1922 she was still dancing in New York City and had yet to be committed to celluloid (and when she was it was in NYC, which is where the American movie industry was truly born.)
Brooks was not a star until the late 1920s, and didn’t hit it truly big until 1929 when Pandora’s Box was released - a film she made in Berlin.
Louise really did date Chaplin, but she hated Hollywood and let her disdain show by being difficult to work with, not playing by any rules but her own and being careless with her money, which cost her dearly at the end of her life.
Despite all my research and my commitment to trying to be accurate about the time I am writing in, I have chosen to bend history to my needs. It’s my novel and my timeline.
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Comments and criticisms are always welcome.