History Into Fiction

This Friday will witness the launch of an experiment in film-making: Tinseltown’s attempt to tell the story of the African-American freedom movement in North Carolina with a nuanced narrative and without featuring a white actor  in a starring role to draw box office.

If early reviews are any indication, the creative team for Blood Done Sign My Name has succeeded.

The movie is based on the award-winning autobiographical account of the period by historian Timothy B. Tyson, a former professor of African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and now a Senior Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. In his 2004 book, Tyson described how the death of Henry Marrow in 1970 ignited a resistance movement in Oxford, North Carolina, where Tyson’s father was a minister of a large church.

In the movie, actor Nate Parker plays high school teacher Ben Chavis, a former civil rights organizer who led a march on the capitol in Raleigh, a turning point that eventually spurred a boycott of white businesses in Oxford and resulted in full integration of the city.

The film is a personal triumph for my friend and former Columbia Journalism School classmate, David S. Martin, who is a co-producer on the movie.

Martin and a college buddy obtained the film rights to the book and persisted in their belief that Tyson’s account needed to reach the silver screen. Their instincts proved prescient when financier Robert K. Steel came on board and brought in director Jeb Stuart to shoot the film in the North Carolina cities of Shelby, Monroe, and Gastonia.

One can only hope that this is the first of many Hollywood projects for Martin, who has developed his keen eye for story material as a senior producer for CNN. I predict that the smartest of the development executives at production companies and studios in Los Angeles will soon be beating down his door.

Well done, David!

Robin Maxwell has seen the future–and now she doesn’t even have to change from her writing pajamas.

No more grinding book tours, begging publishers to pay for expensive front-shelf space, or competing for dwindling review space in newspapers and trades.

In a Feb. 2 blog article for the Huffington Post, the author of eight historical novels (including The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn and Signora da Vinci) describes her journey from traditionalist to digital publicist par excellence.

Maxwell recounts how she was taken under the wings of two younger historical novelists, Michelle Moran and C.W. Gortner. Fellow scribes in the genre will of course know those two accomplished authors from their tireless and generous participation in forums such as Historical Fiction Online. According to Maxwell, they opened her eyes to the near-miraculous marketing possibilities available from the use of blogs, websites, interactive communities, and online reviewers.

Two truths among many can be drawn from Maxwell’s fascinating journey. First, it indeed seems essential for an author to find a publicist who is on the cutting edge of the digital revolution. Second, the author must now shoulder most of the marketing roles once performed by the publisher.

In academia, the old saw was “publish or perish.” In commercial fiction, the new law apparently is “become interactive, or perish.”

Pity the poor writer who merely wishes to write. One wonders how the late J.D. Salinger would have fared entering anew this modern publishing world.

The creator of the Spenser series of detective novels died at his desk this week while working on a new manuscript.

Although Parker was best known as a crime writer, he also delved into historical fiction. Two novels of note included Double Play, which dealt with Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier in baseball, and Appaloosa, one of his trilogy of Westerns that was made into a movie in 2008 by Ed Harris.

Sarah Weinman, who blogs about the mystery-suspense genre, wrote an appreciation of Parker in the Jan. 20 edition of The Los Angeles Times (Section D, Page 2).

For me, two things about Parker stood out: His remarkable proclivity and his disdain for editing.

According to Weinman, Parker told The Wall Street Journal in 2009: “I normally write seven to 10 pages a day, which means I generally finish a new book every three months. It comes easily, and I don’t revise because I don’t get better by writing a new draft.”

I’m not sure which is more astounding: Parker’s collection of nearly forty novels and other non-fiction works, or his ability to churn them out with little or no revision.

Yet his penchant for speed and production may have come at a cost. Weinman noted that “[a]s a consequence, even as he remained a fixture on bestseller lists, Parker’s most ardent fans turned into his toughest critics, pointing to ever-increasing white space, decreasing word counts and long passages of dialogue that barely moved the action.”

It’s the age-old question: How do you capture the interest of a younger generation that thinks history is boring?

Herodotus and Thucydides probably wrestled with the same problem that now confronts Nancy Dubuc, the president of the History Channel.

Her answer–one that has garnered the cable channel higher ratings–is to create shows that meld reality TV with subjects that sometimes have a tenuous connection to traditional history: “Ice Road Truckers” and “UFO Hunters,” for example.

In the Jan. 3 edition of The Los Angeles Times (Section D1), media correspondent Matea Gold looks back on the three years of Dubuc’s tenure and canvasses both critics and admirers of the History Channel’s evolution.

I’ve long since given up shaking my head when I see one of those stubbled-jawed Indiana Jones wannabees crawling through a tunnel while breathlessly wondering if he will ever get out. No one ever seems to worry about the cameraman with him.

Even better entertainment is provided by the readers’ comments about the article on the LA Times website. One tortured lover of history wrote:

“Hysteria” Channel would be a better nickname as everything that I see deals with doomsday predictions found in ancient documents or obscure writings of medieval mystics or cheery thoughts like “life after humans” – - all told with the melodrama of a bad 19th century play.

I recently had the bittersweet occasion to read A. Scott Berg’s marvelous biography, published in 1978,  of Maxwell Perkins, the eminent Scribner’s editor who shepherded the literary (and often personal) lives of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe, among many other authors.

Sweet was the experience because Perkins was that rarest of the breed: Self-effacing, light with the critical touch, rock-solid in loyalty, intuitive, a friend always even when subjected to the alcoholic rages and depressions of his authors. Bitter because his kind seems long extinct. How many editors today would courteously escort an unknown (and unannounced) writer to a local hotel bar to spend hours listening to his troubles?

Perkins had a fondness for history and historical fiction. Those rare days he managed to spend away from work were often spent trudging over Civil War battlefields.

He guided the career of the prolific Taylor Caldwell toward historical fiction and encouraged her to read Sire Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas to gain a mastery of the genre. “What you have chiefly,” he wrote to her, “is the superb talent for telling a story on a grand scale. It is a might rare talent.”

Berg’s description of the editor’s philosophy of historical fiction  is instructive:

Perkins generally believed in letting characters direct the plot of novels, but he instructed Miss Caldwell to think this book [The Earth is the Lord’s] entirely through before setting pen to paper. He sent her all the historical information on Genghis Khan within his reach and books that described central Asia. He suggested that instead of making Genghis himself the central figure she should write a strong personal story about someone who accompanied him and suspend the novel from that.

Berg also found an editing note that Perkins had written to Caldwell:

Sometimes a book about periods far back like that, and about great epic movements, becomes too generalized, too little about a particular individual or particular individuals. That is a danger you must guard against, particularly with your imagination that tends to see things in the large.

Is there another Max Perkins out there today? I’d love to hear from fellow historical novelists or from agents and editors with recommendations on editors who have a particular talent for shaping and guiding the historical novel.

Prior to last year’s presidential election, I came across a fascinating television documentary about the Crusades produced by a Christian broadcasting network. The host, an evangelical minister, was recounting the horrors perpetuated by Christian knights during that era. He urged his congregation to understand the rage in the Islamic world today in light of these past  Christian acts of aggression. To seek forgiveness from Muslims, he reasoned, would prove instrumental in spreading Christ’s gospel of love and peace.

Later that day, I read an opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times written by James Reston Jr., whose splendid book, Warriors of God: Richard the Lionhearted and Saladin in the Third Crusade, has been rumored on its way to the big screen. Mr. Reston lectured former President Bush on his failure to study the Crusades and for his inability to understand why Muslims still consider Saladin a hero for driving back the Christian occupiers.

Given the current prevalence of such hand wringing, I have little doubt which of the two rivals—Saladin or Richard—will be depicted as the hero in the movie.

Crusaders, after all, have become politically incorrect.

Consider just a few of the remarkable events that have occurred in the last decade. During a visit to Syria in 2002, the late Pope John Paul II visited a mosque with the grand mufti and asked Muslims to forgive “Christian offenses and violence of the past.” Two years earlier, on the 900th anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem, five hundred Christians claiming to be descendants of crusaders marched around the walls of the Old City in an act of public repentance. In 2001, a Catholic school board in San Juan Capistrano, California, vetoed the team name “Crusaders” because of its offensiveness.

In his propaganda pronouncements, Osama bin Laden has repeatedly attacked what he calls “the new American Crusade against Islam.” One can’t turn on the television or read a newspaper today without encountering some ill-informed pundit decrying the Crusades and their destructive legacy for the Middle East.

Mr. Reston was partially correct in his lament. Not only former President Bush, but all Americans, need a history lesson on the Crusades.

But it’s not the lesson that Mr. Reston intended.

I find it both alarming and dangerous that so many Americans have purchased into this myth of the bloodthirsty medieval Christians invading peaceful Muslims without provocation.

Nearly four hundred years before the First Crusade, Muslim armies conquered Christian communities in Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. They then swept across the straits of Gibraltar and invaded Christian Iberia (now Spain and Portugal). Those Christians who survived this onslaught were forced to take refuge in the mountain keeps along the Pyrenees. Most of Europe might well be Muslim today had Charles Martel not defeated the invaders at Tours in France.

By the time Pope Urban IV issued his call for holy war at Clermont in 1095, the Seljuk Turks had already pushed across Asia Minor and were clamoring at the gates of Constantinople, the capitol of Christian Byzantium. The reasons for the Crusades are complex and controversial, but the immediate catalyst was a desperate plea from the Byzantine emperor for assistance against the rapacious Muslim Turks.

The longest occupation of another religion’s territory was enforced not by the Christians in the Holy Land, but by the Muslims in Spain. For 800 years, the militant orders of the Knights Templar, Santiago, and Calatrava fought to regain Spain from the fanatical Almoravids and Almohads.

Yet I’ve never heard of a mullah or mufti apologizing for the Muslim invasion of Spain and for the Christian lives lost during the Reconquista. Muslim fundamentalists choose not to mention this war when they rage against the ruthless Christian armies in Palestine.

No visitor can return from Spain without a deep appreciation of the scars that the Moorish invasion and Reconquista left on that country. Churches at Roncevalles and Burgos still display the chains of Christian prisoners who were herded around the caliph at the Battle of Los Navas de Tolosa. Depictions of Spain’s patron saint, James the Moorslayer, lopping off infidel heads are ubiquitous. Yet our Western sensibilities are such that these icons are often covered over when Muslim dignitaries visit Spain.

Muslim extremists have succeeded in perpetuating the myth that the sacrilege of holy sites is a peculiar Christian perversion. Spaniards, however, have not forgotten the Moorish desecration of the Cathedral of Santiago Compostela, which was plundered and abused by the dictator Almanzor.

I’m no apologist for the crusades, having written two historical novels critical of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but I believe the Western media has failed in its responsibility to expose the error in such revisionist history.

Dr. Jonathan Riley-Smith, a renowned authority on the Crusades, eloquently warned against such a misapprehension in the April 1, 2002, issue of Crisis magazine:

“I am fairly sure that those who are now demanding an apology for the Crusades are themselves, without knowing it or understanding how rapidly the ground is shifting beneath them, sharing in a new consensus which is au fond not very far from the war theology they are condemning. A stance that justifies a “humanitarian” war on moral grounds has placed itself at least in the same field as that once occupied by crusader theorists. The language that demands that our ancestors be posthumously anathematized is not too distant from that of the men who wanted the corpse of Pope Boniface VIII to be exhumed and burnt. We may be entering a period of conceptual uncertainty about the most difficult of all society’s dilemmas—when or when not to use force—and we need not emotion, but cool heads and an objective analysis of the past.”

Both Christianity and Islam have taken up the sword to enforce a belief in a monotheistic god who endures no rivals. Neither faith can claim the high ground in pacifist sanctity.

“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.