A challenge of writing historical fiction — along with avoiding anachronisms, is creating a world out of something the writer has never experienced.
The story needs to be real for the writer and especially real for the reader.
In past posts, I have touched on how faithful historical fiction needs to be to what actually happened in the past. My conclusion is that sticking with the absolute truth doesn’t always serve the purpose of a novel. The arc of a story sometimes must deviate from that of history to keep it moving and entertaining.
There is an epigraph Samuel Delany used in his classic (and difficult) novel Dhalgren: “You have confused the true and the real”. I read this as a seventeen-year-old and have been turning it over in my mind ever since.
This somewhat confounding sentence applies to the subject: there is the truth of history as it is seen by the future. There is the real in how those truths have shaped the future.
Finding the space between them and creating a true world by making it real is my greatest challenge in Journey, American.
One of the most important lessons they teach in any writing program is the most basic: Show Don’t Tell.
In a recent chapter, I at first wrote: “Fake deputies arrived with shotguns and clubs to beat the workers into submission.” I threw this away.
I replaced it with “Clintito was home with his sister and her husband Santaestivan. They shared a tiny place.
There was a knock. No one answered. The butt of a shotgun came through the flimsy door.
“Get out of our house,” Julieta screamed. She took a club to the side of her head and flew across the room.
Santaestivan flew at them in a rage. A shotgun blast flipped him backward in a heap.
Clintito was beaten and dragged to the company baseball field. Then they shoved most of them into boxcars, locked them in like animals, and sent them by train to New Mexico.”
Of course, examples far better than mine of this throughout literature.
Salinger: “I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.”
Now that’s a description of falling for someone you just met.
Then there is Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited: “Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.”
Tall buildings to scale for a writer. But I do try.