Exhibit A is the Booker Prize, awarded each year for the best novel written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. Eight of the last ten shortlists for the prize have included a novel set during the 19th century, according to The Guardian.

All the more reason to sit up and take sharp notice of James Forrester’s thought-provoking blog essay on “The Lying Art of Historical Fiction.”

Most historians to whom I’ve spoken on the subject look down their noses at the genre as a necessary evil, at its best bringing some light, however dim, on the past for the unwashed masses, while at its worst poaching the precious hidden eggs that they and their fellow scholars have been slowly and carefully incubating, sometimes for decades.

Imagine my surprise and delight, then, to find that Forrester—the pen name for Dr. Ian Mortimer, acclaimed British biographer of medieval subjects and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society—has offered up a rather empathetic view of the conflicting demands placed upon the historical novelist.

I’ll leave it for the reader to enjoy the full breadth of Forrester’s measured judgment in his article, but suffice it to say that he refuses to lash the historical novelist to the mast and flog him for deviating from “the facts” when justified by the demands of the story.

A couple of appetizers to send you off to the main course:

– “The path a historical novelist has to tread is clearly beset by dangers. There is an inherent tension between trying to do something new and something old at the same time.”

– “Historical accuracy is like quicksand. Stay too long in the same place and it will suck you down and there will be no movement, no dynamism to the story.”

– “In creating good historical fiction, it is essential to tell lies.”

The readers’ comments on the essay are also entertaining. Taking issue with Forrester’s assertion that ‘[t]he historian will assure you that the facts are the story,” one protester, apparently a historian himself, replied:

“No we won’t. You really ought to get out and meet more historians who’ve learned their trade since oh, I dunno, probably about 1955.”

Excerpting from his contribution to Views from the Loft: A Portable Writer’s Workshop, Rabasa offers a list of what he calls Ten Exhortations for the Literary Researcher. All ten rules are gems, but four in particular ring  true for me:

* Keep in mind that someone out there reading your book knows more about your subject than you do.
* Don’t worry too much about that person.
* Don’t confuse facts with details. Facts are stones. Details are wings. The astute researcher smells out the telling detail like a pig rooting after truffles.
* Whenever you don’t know something when you’re writing, make it up. You’ll be surprised how true it is when you check later.

And here’s a prescription by Rabasa that’s sure to raise the hackles of those who want their historical fiction to lean more towards history and less towards fiction:

My last point is that as much as I value solid research, the novelist shouldn’t let reality get in the way of a good story. Facts are overrated. A writer’s view is necessarily personal. The rivers in the landscape bend to his or her purpose. The lives of the rich and famous can take delightful turns in the service of fictional mayhem and scandal. On the other hand, if you’re writing about opera singers, death row inmates, crooked accountants, or native speakers of Catalan, you’d better get it absolutely right. You’ll be surprised how many readers you have when the mail comes in deriding you for inaccuracies in the depiction of brain surgery, tightrope walking, or murder by gunfire, poison, or pillow.

– James Wood, literary critic for The New Yorker in his review of Adam Fould’s novel, The Quickening (June 28, 2010; p. 67) .

Henry James was a master of free indirect speech. With this technique, some aspects of the narrator, who may be much more prescient and educated than his character, are merged seamlessly with direct thoughts or spoken words presented in the first-person POV.

To learn more about how James pulled off this difficult trick in his novels, check out Mira Sethi’s recent essay on James in The Wall Street Journal (Weekend Edition, July 24-25, Page W14). Sethi , a Bartley Fellow at the Journal, discusses James’s attraction to new, impressionistic forms of narration in his later years.

Focusing primarily on his 1897 novel, What Maisie Knew, Sethi explains how James gave the reader continual access to the mind of his main character–a child of divorced parents–while still offering his cherished philosophical insights.

Sethi offers this example from the novel: “[Maisie] puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been a center of hatred . . . that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so.”

As Sethi points out, words such as imperfect signs and prodigious sound too intellectual for a child, but by finishing the internal thought with everything was bad, James manages to merge the POVs of the narrator and the child.

Free indirect speech is a technique fraught with peril if not used with discrimination, but play around with it the next time you have a historical figure whose education may be lacking, whose age may be too young, or whose worldly perspective may be too narrow to support the depth of narration you want to provide to the reader.

The article quoted two accomplished practitioners of the historical mystery genre:

The best writers ground their captivating story lines firmly in what is known about the period they write about. Many sate the reader’s curiosity about where they have and have not diverted from the historical record in informative postscripts. However, as author Andrew Pepper correctly points out, “There is no such thing as a pure and untainted historical record. All history is narrative, and all histories are shaped according to contemporary issues and agendas. Verisimilitude, not accuracy, should be the benchmark for the historical writer.” Along the same lines, Priscilla Royal, who has written six medieval mysteries (Poisoned Pen will issue Valley of Dry Bones in October), notes, “Even if we rely on primary sources, we must remember that document survival is accidental, alternative points of view often did not survive, and thus we are left with a skewed view of the period.”

Smolens put his prescriptions to work in his sixth novel, The Anarchist, which was published by Three Rivers Press in December. It tells the story of Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated President William McKinley, September 1901.

Among the many tips that Smolens offers to the historical novelist, one of the most intriguing is inserting “what-if” elements into a story that involves real characters. The novelist, he assures us, is not required to tell history as it actually happened, but how it might have happened.

In the Anarchist, Smolens used as an example a bit of research he discovered involving a film that simulated his main character’s execution. Although there is no record of President Teddy Roosevelt having watched this film, Smolens set this possibility into motion and turned it into his final scene to gain the necessary emotional confrontation between the two men.

I won’t spoil the full effect, but here’s a taste:

The writer’s apprenticeship — or perhaps, the writer’s lot — is this miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, disappointment. In the 20 years that I’ve been publishing books, I have fared better than most. I sold my first novel while still in graduate school and published six more books, pretty much one every three years, like clockwork. I have made my living as a writer, living off my advances while supplementing my income by teaching and writing for newspapers and magazines.

As smooth as this trajectory might seem, however, my internal life as a writer has been a constant battle with the small, whispering voice (well, sometimes it shouts) that tells me I can’t do it. This time, the voice taunts me, you will fall flat on your face. Every single piece of writing I have ever completed — whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review — has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess.

That’s the cheery part of the essay. Read the rest with the job ads on Craigslist nearby.

And the more recent the history, the more hazardous the occupation.

The most recent exhibit is a Washington Post article by Christian Davenport (Feb. 28, E 1) about the backlash being launched by some Iraq soldiers and veterans against the Oscar-nominated movie, ‘The Hurt Locker,’ a gritty drama about a bomb-defusing specialist who becomes addicted to the adrenaline rush of his near-suicidal job.

The story compares soldiers’ reactions to ‘The Hurt Locker’ and “Generation Kill,’ an HBO drama set in Iraq, adapted from a book by Evan Wright.

Davenport writes:

Each writer’s search for truth lands at a different point on the spectrum between art and reality. When screenwriter David Simon made the series ‘Generation Kill” for HBO, he considered it more important to have Marines find his work an accurate portrayal of their culture and experience invading Iraq than to win critical acclaim. “The real fun isn’t trying to convince the average viewer” that we have it right, he told the Marine Corps Times. “It’s trying to convince people who have been in the game.”

The article recognizes that filmmakers often worry that maintaining “spot-on” accuracy in depicting modern military life would leave audiences “cold.”

When Davenport posed the conundrum of accuracy to Dr. David McKenna, the Columbia University film professor said that the movie “isn’t as much about Iraq as it is about one soldier’s addiction to war. It’s a character study, an exploration of courage, bravado and leadership told through ‘a series of suspenseful situations. I suppose it could have just as easily been set in outer space.”

McKenna added that if veterans have a problem with such interpretations, “well, this is an opportunity to go make your own movie.”

This is tough enough to accomplish in a novel; the author has a few more tricks and a bit more license to take his time in developing the story. But in a movie or miniseries, the task is  even more daunting. A screenwriter has to quickly capture and hold the attention of the audience while at the same time avoid confusing it with front-loaded images and dialogue needed to slip in essential background information.

History on the ground rarely unfolds in the traditional mythic structure. Thus, it as always been the bard’s job to sift the grains of history into a mandala of sorts that will satisfy our yearning for a sense of fate, inevitability, and meaning.

In his preview of the new HBO miniseries, ‘The Pacific’ (The Los Angeles Times, Feb. 28, D1), David Ferrell offers a fascinating glimpse into how the creative team solved the problem of relying on true-life accounts of the bloody World War II campaign against the Japanese while carving out a narrative that could be sustained over ten hour-long  episodes.

Bruce McKenna, the primary screenwriter, chose to apply what he called the ‘Traffic’ approach, a reference to the 2000 movie that explored the war on drugs with a collage of four separate stories.

Inundated with research material and hundreds of interviews with veterans, McKenna related to Ferrell how he finally gravitated to the stories of three soldiers. Yet he faced a conundrum: All three men fought in different battles. How could avoid writing what in essence would be three different movies?

McKenna did what all great writers do–he kept digging, determined to find a thread. His luck turned when he discovered from interviews with family members that one of the featured soldiers, Eugene Sledge (who fought on Okinawa) had a best friend who served in the same company on Guadacanal as another of the series’ heroes, Robert Leckie, a Marine machine-gunner.

McKenna discovered what he calls his “handoff” from scene to scene. “They weren’t buddy-buddy, but it was a good-enough connection that I knew we had a miniseries,” he told Ferrell.

HBO is taking a big gamble with the Spielberg/Hanks project, which premieres March 14 and has a production tab of $200 million. Yet if it meets the high standards set by its predecessor, ‘Band of Brothers,’ the miniseries will be one for the ages.

That’s the gist of a sobering new article by Russell Shorto in The New York Times Magazine (Feb. 11) about the campaigns being waged by religious fundamentalists to pressure Texas school administrators and textbook publishers to portray the founding fathers as devout proponents of a Christian nation.

I always shake my head with a mixture of bemusement and chagrin whenever I see a reviewer of historical fiction take an author to task for deviating from “history.” More often than one might think, the charge is lodged by an embittered grad student who cannot abide a novelist stepping onto his small patch of supposed expertise and gaining a hundredfold more readers than will suffer through his dry dissertation on the subject.

If you had any doubts about the unreliability of accepted history, you must read Shorto’s chilling account of how so-called facts and interpretations only a few decades old are skewed and twisted by the demands of ideology, religion, and propaganda.

I dare say you’ll not soon forget Shorto’s description of a cowed Texas State Board of Education. With a swift show of hands, its fifteen members pass proposed conservative amendments  offered by Christian activists to school curriculum like the Committee on Public Safety sending off aristocrats to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

The process became so cavalier and unsavory that one board member, a Republican, exclaimed in embarrassment, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!”

Shorto quotes one long-time observer of the process: “It is the most crazy-making thing to sit there and watch a dentist and an insurance salesman rewrite curriculum standards in science and history.”

None of this is surprising to historical novelists, whose job it is to dig into the source material and underweavings of history. If such blatant revisionism can take place under the scrutiny of modern communications technology, just imagine how many of the so-called “facts” of history during medieval times and earlier were shaped and sifted by the royal courts and the Church.