History Into Fiction

Historical novelists and screenwriters are a masochistic breed. We watch in dismay as our books are shunted off to the fantasy and science-fiction shelves. We endure the rebuffs of agents and editors who consider ours a difficult genre to market. We suffer through meetings with Hollywood producers who want the Battle of Stirling Bridge staged like Custer’s Last Stand—and while you’re at it, get rid of the bridge. We toil away in an era when Generation X thinks Malcolm X must be a saucy spoof of the television show about a family’s middle-born child.

And yet, despite Gore Vidal’s lament that his embrace of the historical novel shadowed his literary reputation, we persist.

Why? Many of us were seduced early in life by a hoary tale of battle or a whisper from some ancient ruins. After undergoing such Eleusinian initiation into the Akashic records, how could we not assay the world by looking over our shoulders? Like Persephone, we were kidnapped and taken to another world. In recompense, we are seasonally permitted to surface from our lairs and describe for fellow mortals what the nether realms of the past were truly like.

The archons of History took dominion of my soul at age ten, when a great uncle took me to the Civil War battlefield at Perryville, Kentucky. Across those rolling bluegrass hills, hardly changed since 1862, his father, a captain in the Army of the Tennessee, had fought aside the decorated father of Douglas MacArthur. A few miles away, I traced the harried footsteps of Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark to the reconstructed stockade in Harrodsburg, the oldest town west of the Allegheny Mountains. Mossy stones there mark the graves of the first Kentuckians killed in Shawnee raids. Spirits still haunt that dark and bloody ground. They invaded my boyhood dreams.

All as a preamble: I launched this weblog to serve as a castle perilous where fellow time travelers, blurry-eyed from their manuscripts and pining for good company, can stop in to trade ideas and hone their black arts of conjuring the past. Readers and history buffs are also welcome to participate. I’ll offer my humble musings on the craft and post notices of events, reviews, and other news that inform the subject. Any leads or suggestions on how to improve the conversation will be appreciated. In the process, I hope to contribute a little and learn a lot.