History Into Fiction

“Google MEDIAS RES,” emailed the literary agent in response to my submission. “It’s been used for a thousand years.”

Notice how I started this post in medias res?

Contrary to the agent’s assumption, I was indeed familiar with the literary device of “starting in the middle of things.” I chose for premeditated structural reasons (which become apparent later in the story) to begin my novel when the main character was a boy. Yet the agent insisted that I needed to start it with the character as an adult, and use flashbacks.

The technique of medias res can be applied in two distinct contexts–and they are often confused.

In both novels and screenplays, the writer is usually well-served to start a scene just before the confrontation or climax. Background information can then be threaded into the scene or chapter after the reader is drawn into the moment. I’m a big proponent of using medias res in this manner.

The second context–the one the agent championed–is starting the novel or story in the middle of a character’s life. This usage, in my opinion, is much more problematic and at times dogmatic. It also contains an undercurrent of bias against children or young adults as interesting characters.

Why is starting a novel when the character is thirty years old a more effective application of medias res than starting it when he is ten? Obviously, it isn’t. All depends on the preferences, skill, and goals of the author.

As I pointed out, the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope suffered from a similar ambivalence about the use of medias res. While acknowledging that it is sometimes the “least objectionable” way to start a story, he also warned:

But there is the drawback on the system,—that it is almost impossible to avoid the necessity of doing, sooner or later, that which would naturally be done at first. It answers, perhaps, for a half-a-dozen chapters;— and to carry the reader pleasantly for half-a-dozen chapters is a great matter!-but after that a certain nebulous darkness gradually seems to envelop the characters and the incidents. ‘Is all this going on in the country, or is it in town,—or perhaps in the Colonies? How old was she? Was she tall? Is she fair? Is she heroine-like in her form and gait? And, after all, how high was the garret window? I have always found that the details would insist on being told at last, and that by rushing ‘in media res’ I was simply presenting the cart before the horse.

The agent offered as an example the structure of the Godfather movies.  Ironically, a reviewer once observed that the director, Francis Ford Coppola, had qualms about how the flashback techniques would work when the movies were combined into a miniseries for television. Coppola apparently felt compelled to retreat to the chronological form of the novel. Here is what the reviewer wrote:

One reason I read the book is the niggling narrative gaps I frequently perceive when I watch the movies.  Some of these are filled in by watching “The Godfather: A Novel for Television,” in which Coppola re-edited the two films to tell the story chronologically, starting with II’s kid-Vito-in-Sicily sequence, and added scenes cut from the originals. . . . From these scenes and from reading the book, I managed to sooth all the little pinpricks of incompletion I experience when watching the theatrical releases.

Thousands of historical novels have successfully used the time-tested technique of telling a character’s story chronologically. One I just finished was A Crown of Aloes, Norah Loft’s 1973 novel about the life of Queen Isabella of Castile.

After a brief two-page prologue that starts on her deathbed–terminus res?–Loft launched into the story with Isabella as a child. She never wavered from leading the reader through the events of Isabella’s life in the order they transpired.

“It’s entertainment,” the agent told me in closing. “Not biography.”

Maybe I’m a hopeless traditionalist, but when did telling a story as it happened become outmoded and boring? Perhaps the traditional structure of the historical novel is doomed to go the way of the  paper-bound book.

Then we can all Kindle flashbacks to our heart’s desire.

Dean King’s fine biography of the Master and Commander of the naval epic revealed that even the most talented of historical novelists can suffer the ballast drag sometimes hung on our genre.

Writing in 2000, King made this observation about the early problems O’Brian confronted in getting his books published in America: “Perhaps it was the crossing of genres. It was, and remains, an axiom of publishing that a book needs to fall into a specific, nameable category to sell. Publishers want to know exactly which bookstore shelf a title will be sold on before they will commission it. The Aubrey-Maturin novels were too well written, too nuance-laden, and too challenging to be classified as adventure-genre stories. They certainly weren’t for children or even for any but the most advanced young adults. But could historical fiction, a genre generally shunned by critics and scholars, make it in the literature section? At this point, it look as if the answer was no.”

O’Brian had a fascinating theory regarding writers. He divided them into two categories: storytellers and novelists.

King summed up O’Brian’s view: “Oral storytellers speak primarily of events, O’Brian reasoned, and their characters are revealed by statements and inferences. The storyteller comes at his characters mainly from the outside. On the other hand, the capable novelist has far greater freedom and can come at his characters from the inside, even to the point of presently streams of consciousness.

O’Brian recognized a member of the storytelling lodge when he reviewed Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears for The Washington Post. O’Brian wrote that Clancy was “by nature a storyteller, like those sennachies who used to recite genealogies, history, legends and tales in the great Irish houses.”

O’Brian admired Clancy’s descriptive powers, just as he admired Forester’s, but, he wrote, when Clancy ‘deals with his people from within it seems to me that he is out of his element, that he labors too hard, that he becomes verbose.’”

O’Brian is correct about the tendencies of writers, I think. Yet I’d put it a bit differently. Writers by nature have an inclination toward either the cinematic or the introspective. I see my stories and scenes in my mind’s eye, as if they are being played out against a movie screen.

Other writers are more comfortable inhabiting the heads of their characters and entering their stories through thoughts and interior monologue. Writing is akin to practicing a sport. Like the right-handed basketball player who must devote extra time to practice dribbling with his left hand, the writer must constantly compensate for his weaknesses to prevent his natural tendencies from becoming too dominant.

One of the pitfalls to guard against when writing the sweeping historical novel is losing the reader amid a legion of characters.

The author becomes so immersed in the research and details that it becomes virtually impossible to understand what it will be like to read the story for the first time. Character rosters at the start of a novel can be helpful, but why require the reader to constantly turn back to refresh memory?

I like to think of the epic as a long, endurance-challenging horse race. The author is the literary equivalent of a track announcer who calls the race for the crowds in the grandstands. Veteran announcers at Churchill Downs and Hollywood Park know that a critical part of their job is creating and maintaining suspense. They do this by periodically resetting the ranking order of the horses and recasting the race from their omniscient point of view. At every quarter-mile turn, the announcer recaps his two-minute story and heightens the stakes by ratcheting up the excitement in his voice.

Authors of vast historical novels would benefit from applying the techniques of these track announcers. Periodically pull back from a tight point-of-view and provide an omniscient recapping of the story to that point.

There are many clever and subtle ways to do this without breaking the spell. Having your main character reflect upon how he or she has reached this stage of in life is one. Commencing chapters from an omniscient POV and easing into a character’s POV is another.

Sharon Kay Penman is the master of the reset. She’ll often start a chapter from a distance by describing the weather or condition of the country, then move to the city, the street, and finally, almost imperceptibly, the reader is spiraled into the POV of the character who will take us through the rest of the chapter. Consider this passage that commences Chapter 11 of When Christ and His Saints Slept:

     For Stephen and Maude both, it was to be a frustrating year, one of advances and retreats, check and mate. Matilda scored a diplomatic coup in those early winter months; sailing to France, she negotiated a marriage for her eldest son, Eustace, with Constance, young sister of the French king. But that good news was soured for Stephen by a rebellion in the English Fenlands, instigated by the Bishop of Ely, who’d been nursing a grudge since the Oxford ambush. Stephen raced north, and the bishop, fled south, taking refuge at Bristol.

     More trouble was already flaring for Stephen. . .

In the space of a paragraph, Penman has given us the track’s quarter-turn recap. Now we know the new ordering and condition of the horses in the race.

Historical novelists are always prospecting the deep strata of the past for untapped veins. Some of the richest lodes can be found in the lapses of logic and analysis that even the most astute historians are prone to commit.

Perhaps the best compilation of errors in judgment and interpretation is Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, published in 1970 by Brandeis University professor David Hackett Fischer.

Readers may remember Fischer from Albion’s Seed, his exploration of the impact of British folkways on American society, and Washington’s Crossing, his study of George Washington’s leadership with the Continental Army.

Fischer’s impressive overview of historiography should be kept close at hand. Most of the miscalculations he skewers—exemplified by excerpts from the writings of his colleagues, many of whom no doubt chafed at being called to task—apply with equal force to the writing of historical fiction.

In future posts, we’ll examine several of these fallacies, but three will suffice presently. The best known of these gaffes gave Fischer the title for his book.

The historian’s fallacy is the error of assuming that the leaders and decision makers of the past possessed the facts and perspectives of hindsight.

As an example, Fischer offers the popular belief that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor should have been foreseen from numerous warning signs. He cautions against the tendency of disregarding evidence that, at the time, might have clouded one’s judgment or even supported a contrary opinion.

Likewise, historical novelists should remain on guard against attributing to their characters more knowledge than is warranted. It’s easy enough now to criticize Robert E. Lee for ordering Picket’s Charge. The task of both the historian and the novelist is to recreate the fog of war at Gettysburg with such verisimilitude that the reader will come to understand why such Lee’s decision may have been viewed as rational (if not by Longstreet) on July 3, 1863.

The Civil War seems to have served as a target for every fallacy condemned by Fischer. Another infamous example is the discovery by Union scouts of the cigar-wrapped copies of Lee’s orders for the Antietam campaign.

Most history buffs have encountered the contention that this fortuitous turn for the Union set in motion a chain of events that ultimately altered the course of the war. Yet Fischer dismisses this conclusion as a product of the reductive fallacy,  the error of boiling down a complex stew of causal ingredients down into a single, simplified explanation.

In his discussion of another error—the fallacy of division, which argues that a quality shared by some in a group is shared by all—Fischer offers a faulty syllogism for our dissection:

Most Calvinists were theological determinists.
Most New England Puritans were Calvinists.
Therefore, most New England Puritans were theological determinists.

Fischer observes that modern scholarship (in the 1970s) suggested that the Puritans were not determinists, at least not as was commonly assumed. Here the historical novelist finds a nugget of gold : An idea for a story set in Puritan New England with a main character who, unlike his fellow congregants, believes in free will.

Many such themes against the grain are there for the picking for the writer who will persist in sifting events through the sieve of these historical fallacies.

In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown made great use of yet another historian’s error that comes under special opprobrium from Fischer: the furtive fallacy.

This is the assumption, as Fischer describes it, that certain events and facts of “special significance” are “dark and dirty things and that history itself is a story of causes mostly insidious and results mostly invidious.”

Of course, some of the best historical fiction would be cast onto Savonarola’s bonfire if a ban on this fallacy were enforced.

Fischer doesn’t argue that conspiracies never occur. Rather, he criticizes a more fundamental paranoia that, if left unchallenged, can undermine the very foundations of institutions. Reality is never fully seen. Real history is made behind closed doors. Practitioners of this fallacy start with the assumption that things are never what they seem. There can also be an attraction to the doctrine of Original Sin and the fundamental depravity of man.

Still, Professor Robert Langdon of The Da Vinci Code fame might remind his real-life academic colleagues that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

The enterprising historical novelist should exploit the delicious possibilities presented by these fallacies—so long as he or she does so consciously.

In the January issue of Smithsonian magazine, journalist James Reston Jr. has authored a fascinating article about his qualms and ambivalence regarding the manner in which the movie Frost/Nixon dealt with the presumed facts of history.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what is gained and what is lost when history is turned into entertainment,” said Reston in the article.

Reston is portrayed in the movie as one of the journalists hired by British talk show host David Frost to help prepare for the 1976 television interview with former President Richard M. Nixon. The movie, directed by Ron Howard, was based on a play of the same title written by British screenwriter Peter Morgan.

Consulted early on by Morgan for the writing of the play, Reston expressed concern over how Nixon was being portrayed as cracking very quickly emotionally. When Reston argued for a more nuanced and extended portrayal of Nixon’s concession of guilt regarding Watergate, he was told that theatrical requirements demanded a compressed collapse in the story, even if it may not have happened that way in Reston’s memory.

“No one seemed to care about what was historically accurate and what had been made up,” writes Reston, who felt that the transcripts of the Nixon interviews were sufficiently dramatic in their original form.

Reston, who has written plays, grudgingly accepts that the demands on the historian may by necessity be at odds with those informing the dramatist.

“Morgan’s attention was on capturing and keeping his audience,” writes Reston. “Every line needed to connect to the next, with no lulls or droops in deference to dilatory historical detail. Rearranging facts or lines or chronology was, in his view, well with in the playwright’s mandate. In his research for the play,different participants had given different, Rashomon-like versions of the same event.”

In a New York Times story last year, Morgan was quoted as reminding the interviewer of “what a complete farce history is.”

Reston suggests a middle ground, arguing that an author is “on the firmest ground when he does not change known facts but goes beyond them to speculate on the emotional makeup of the historical players.” He goes on to concede that the movie and play were not about Watergate or Nixon at all, but about larger issues such as “guilt and innocence, resistance and enlightment, confession and redemption.”

“These are themes straight history can rarely crystallize,” Reston concluded. “In the presence of the playwright’s achievement, the historian–or a participant–can only stand in the wings and applaud.”

In my opinion, arguments regarding the sanctity of the historical record lose force the farther the story being told recedes in time. Modern luxuries such tape recorders, transcriptions, television and radio clips, and online databases allow us to come a bit closer, if such an enterprise is even possible, to the actual truth of what really happened.

Reston’s article generated several impassioned responses in the February issue of  Smithsonian’s letters to the editor section. One reader was reminded of a quote from Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters:

“History isn’t what happened. History is just what historians tell us.”

You can probably cross feminist author Germaine Greer off your reading-invitation list for your next historical novel.

“Novels cannibalize historic truths, using the bits they like, throwing out the ones they don’t,’ Greer told The Wall Street Journal  last year (April 5-6, 2008, W1) during an interview discussing her biography of Ann Hathaway, the young bride of William Shakespeare. “I don’t approve. I didn’t want to turn this into a soap opera.”

Greer’s blast against the genre seems ironic, given that she has come under fire in some circles for creating a new composite of Hathaway based on a dearth of primary sources.

As WSJ reporter Cynthia Crossen observed in the article, very little is known about Hathaway. Some Shakespeare biographers have deduced from the poet’s silence about his wife a coldness in the relationship, or even an estrangement.

In Shakespeare’s Wife, Greer created a starkly different Hathaway, one who is seductive, smart, and stubborn. Known for her best-seller, The Female Eunuch, Greer took  Shakespeare hagiographers to task for giving Hathaway no credit for the bard’s success.

Greer revealed her distaste for historical fiction when asked why, given the speculative nature of her biography of Hathaway, she simply didn’t write a novel instead.

“All biographies of Shakespeare are houses built of straw, but there is good straw and rotten straw,” she told WSJ. “I was very careful to leave in all the probablys, might haves, could haves in the book, which was very hard. But I can live with uncertainty.”

Meg La Borde, the former COO of Greenleaf Book Group, told Publisher’s Weekly a while back that, in her opinion, packaging is more important than publicity in selling a book.

I couldn’t agree more—which is why I believe that authors should be allowed to take a more active role in the design process.

Most publishers and art designers will cringe at this suggestion. Traditionally, after a manuscript is purchased, the author is gently escorted aside while the editor and the design team take over. If the author has reached a certain echelon of success, he may be offered the courtesy of vetoing alternative design layouts once they’ve been completed. But is the rare author indeed who is allowed to participate from the start in the design meetings.

This tradition reminds me of another indefensible taboo, one that permeates Hollywood. A screenwriter is deemed guilty of a crime worse than blasphemy if he dares insert a camera direction into his script. Directors protect their presumed prerogatives like Croesus hoarding his gold. Yet the telling of a story and the mode of viewing by the audience are often intricately intertwined.

I’d argue that a book’s design is particularly critical for historical novels. Authors working with the past take great pains to evoke the time and setting of their stories. The look and feel of the book can offer a significant assist in the casting of the essential spell.

A recent trend in book design and production is worth noting in this regard. Artists and printers are becoming more adept at creating pages that appear ancient, weathered, stained, torn and burnt.

Two examples recently caught my attention. Neither book is a historical novel, but the design of their pages is brilliant: Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker (Harper Collins) and The Pirate Primer by George Chounas (Writer’s Digest Books). Next time you’re in a store, take a look at these beauties.

I interviewed the designers of both books to gain an insight into their magic.

Claudeen Wheeler, the designer for Writer’s Digest Books, told me she found a stock image of antiquated paper and layered it onto the text file in Adobe Photoshop. She used two inks—black and orange—to create an illusion of depth. The printing required a two-color process.

The acid-eaten look of the pages in Mister B. Gone was the brainchild of Mary Schuck, creative director at Harper Collins. Schuck said the art was produced from a stock image that had a weathered appearance. She tweaked it to make the book appear as if it had been saved from a fire centuries ago. The interior pages were printed on natural stock paper with four-color ink.

Of course, two-color and four-color printings are more expensive than the traditional black-and-white process. Yet once you’ve seen the pages of these books, you’ll yearn to have your historical novel similarly enhanced.

Is there a subject on which authors and writing instructors disagree more than point of view? Some insist that to change POV from one character to another in the same scene is the mark of an amateur. Dissent as I do from this bromide, I’ll nevertheless leave that argument for another time.

If you must get into a secondary character’s head, there are ways to do it without risking a warrant for your arrest by the POV police.

In Game of  Kings, Dorothy Dunnett gave us a splendid example of what I call the “projection” technique. The following passage features a conversation between Tom Erskine and Christian Stewart:

Christian said quickly, “Not afraid: no. My reservations are of another kind. And not any dislike of you: of course not.”

“Then there’s someone else? he said.

It had not occurred to her that he might think that. With an effort, she applied her mind. “Under the circumstances, that’s rather flattering of you. But no—there’s no one else. It’s simply that—”

That what? It was not simple at all. Love was no prerequisite, whatever Agnes Herries might think. He must indeed be wondering why she hesitated; wondering perhaps if she was after bigger game than himself. She had money and her birth was higher than his own. She had no need to be diffident about her handicap, but it was the only excuse she had. So she went on. “It’s just that, my dear, a blind wife is no asset to a future Lord Erskine.”

Dunnett could have chosen to switch from Christian’s POV. Instead, she had Christian wonder if Erskine was thinking what otherwise might have been placed in Erskine’s POV.

This clever technique in effect sets two minds into one head.

Of course, there are limitations to the reach of the projection technique. Christian’s internal estimation of Erskine’s thoughts must by necessity be tentative and uncertain. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re writing a story that requires military research and analysis, you might want to check out www.WarHistorian.org.

The website is devoted to the discussion and reassessment of those assumptions that have shaped martial strategy throughout history.

Professor Mark Grimsley, who specializes in American History at Ohio State University, created the site in 2003 as a forum for military analysts and historians to brainstorm ideas.

Grimsley says that “we borrow most of our categories, concepts, definitions, and questions from the armed forces. We think the way they think, ask the questions they ask, overlook the questions they overlook.”

In addition to offering reading lists, presentations and conference news, the site includes a weblog called Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, a riff on General Curtis LeMay’s infamous advice to “bomb them into the Stone Age.”

Participants at WarHistorian.org take a skeptical view of traditional but outmoded military wisdom. They are perpetually on the watch guard for that ilk of general who insists on refighting the last war.

Postings have dealt with questions such as: Should the Marines have bypassed Iwo Jima during the Pacific Campaign? Does our current psychological profile of Islamic terrorists places too much emphasis on economic disparities and not enough on individual political motivation?

Sometimes an author will opt to dispense with the use of quotation marks for indicating dialogue. Two examples that readily come to mind are Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain and Anthony Burgess in A Dead Man in Deptford.

Use of the initial dash instead of quotation marks is found more often in Europe. Some American and British authors will also adopt the dash to highlight unusual or affected dialect.

In an essay for the October 25-26 weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal, novelist Lionel Shriver lamented the growing practice of dispensing with quotation marks for dialogue in fiction. He attributed this trend to “the broader popular perception that ‘literature’ is pretentious, faddish, vague, eventless, effortful, and suffocatingly interior.”

By forcing the reader to labor in distinguishing speech from narrative–so this theory of the snobbish mindset goes–true literature winnows the many who are called from the few who are chosen.

In historical fiction, however, there can arise a compelling reason to trade quotation marks for the initial dash or to use no marks at all.

The dialogue dash creates a distancing effect that can be particularly effective in historical settings. For example, if you want to portray a character as cold or introspective, the dash choice, or no dialogue marks, can offer an added layer of emotional insulation. Frazier used the dash with fine effect in Cold Mountain to evoke the numbing effect of the Civil War and to mimic a mythic, Homeric tone for his story.

Also, the author who tells a story that alternates between two eras can create a visual and psychological switch by foregoing quotation marks in those chapters that are set in the more distant time period.

But author beware. Many readers abhor the loss of quotation marks. I’ve even read reports of shoppers who have refused to purchase a book because of this choice of technique.