History Into Fiction

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.

A good friend in London recently begged me to read a book about Verdun by Jules Romains. When the book was delivered, I launched into the Prelude thinking that I was about to immerse myself in a lengthy non-fiction account of the grueling World War I battle.

Nearly a hundred pages in, I was struck by the close personal point of view adopted by the author in recounting the events that had led up to the battle. I’d never encountered such an unusual melding of fictional techniques in a historical work, not even in the New Journalism of the 1960s authors such as Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer.

I then turned to the copyright page and had two surprises: I’d been reading a novel and, what’s more, one published in 1938.

The lesson here—apart from the admonishment that a reader should always check his assumptions about a book before opening it—is that the historical novelist has at his disposal many tools to cast the spell of authenticity.

By adopting an omniscient point of view in his opening, Romains delays the introduction of any character until the reader is first educated as to the circumstances and context of the war. This unusual technique might not make it past an editor today, but it certainly worked for me. There is, of course, the hallowed rule that the author should never jolt the reader from the spell of the story; but rules are made to be broken.

Two additional observations on techniques used by Romain in Verdun:

* What should the author do when lengthy sections of dialogue or written material read verbally must be included? Romains broke up such potentially off-putting monologues by inserting personal mannerisms. Here’s an example:

“A small raid on the extreme eastern flank of Despois’s division. Several yeards of trench lost. Will be retaken, he says, at dawn today. Hm . . . ah . . . Wants you to have that section of 155’s moved at once from south of Hill 285 to a point southeast of Marrieux Wood.”
As soon as they were don with, the messages were dropped gently on a slowly growing pile. At a certain point in the procedure, however, he picked up a sheet of paper rather larger in size than its predecessors and, this time, condescended to bring into action two fingers of each hand.
“Here’s something from Marie’s division. . . ”

* An author published in a foreign country is at the mercy of his translator. Romains, I’m afraid, was not well served at times in the translation from French to English. The French soldiers who are the main characters are constantly referring to each other as “old chap” and speaking Victorian-sounding language such as “Pretty rough stuff, that.” There is also the occasional sentence structure at odds with the action being described. An example:

Suddenly—tzabc! A splitting bark that seemed to take them full between neck and cheek. Then a sharp whining sound which obviously came from behind them, slightly to the right, deepened to a more accentuated tone as it passed overhead, still to the right, continued its angry grumple skyward, while there came to their ears an echoing “boom,” as though a heavy door had been slammed in their rear.”

The above description is many things, but certainly not sudden.

With the presidential election upon us, I thought it appropriate to look back on an op-ed piece written earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal by historian Edward J. Larson, author of “A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, American’s First Presidential Campaign.”

In his essay (See WSJ, February 6, page A18), Mr. Larson mused how, in his experience, prominent Republicans and conservatives seem much more interested in, and informed by, history than do their Democratic counterparts.

Larson explained this perceived phenomenon by noting that “Republicans look to the past for inspiration but often to the future with trepidation. Originalists at heart, they tend to see only the shining city on a hill of earlier times and not its darker neighborhoods.”

Liberals Democrats, in contrast, “have always looked to the future with hope and embraced marginalized groups. When they look back, even to the deeds of their own former leaders, they see a trail of tears like the one over which Andrew Jackson drove out the Cherokee.”

Liberals with impeccable credentials for championing American history–such as Bill Moyers, Dale Bumpers, Tom Hanks, Mario Cuomo, Richard Dreyfuss, and Steven Spielberg–did not make Larson’s list.

Could it be that liberals and conservatives simply cherish different “histories?”

Volumes have been written on progressive subjects such as the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage, the New Deal, the abolitionist movement, and the Vietnam War protests. Few conservative authors seem drawn to these subjects. In contrast, conservatives have been particularly attracted to subjects such as Civil War military operations, Churchill, MacArthur, and Napoleon.

There are, of course, always exceptions to such broad generalizations. Former President Jimmy Carter and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, at opposite ends of the political spectrum, have both published Civil War novels.

Perhaps the fault, oh Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in our definitions of what constitutes history.

I have to admit that point of view was the one element that mystified me most when I first began writing fiction. I received so much contradictory advice from instructors and writing workshops on the subject that I all but gave up trying to understand its arcane and ever-shifting rules.

If only I had been armed with “The Power of Point of View,” a new handbook written by Alicia Rasley and published by Writer’s Digest Books.

Alicia and her husband Jeff are long-time friends from Indiana. I knew Alicia to be a fine novelist, having won the coveted RITA award from the Romance Writers of America. But had I also known that she was such an expert on POV, I would have thrown myself to the mercy of her adeptship years ago. She first became intrigued with POV while writing her master’s thesis on the stories of Edgar Allen Poe and his experimentation with the first-person “unreliable narrator” technique.

Without a doubt, the 265 pages of this impressive work offer the most comprehensive and understandable treatment of POV that I’ve had the pleasure to encounter. In addition to her in-depth analysis of the various persons and their permutations, Alicia provides exercises and suggested readings to demonstrate what she teaches.

My favorite aphorism from the book: “You don’t choose POV; it chooses you.”

For those who want more of Alicia’s wisdom, check out her website and blog about editing.

When last we parted–notice the arched syntax–we had explored the first three techniques for creating believable dialogue in a historical novel. (See The Mimetic Toolbox: Writing Historical Dialogue – Part Two, Sept. 8, 2008)

Let’s continue the tour:

4) Describe dialect without phonetically spelling it.

I had my characters in The Fire and the Light comment on the harsh differences they heard in spoken Occitan, Latin, and Norman French. In The Spider and the Stone, one of my Scot Borders characters expresses disgust at the heavy brogue of a Highlander. In both instances, the reader is offered a sense of the variant sounds without being forced to wade through them visually in the text.

5) Substitute a more recent and less intrusive language that retains an archaic ring to the modern ear.

Steven Pressfield is the Solon of this brilliant sophistry. I admire the lyrical narratives that he devises in his novels that are often set in the ancient Greek world. This example from his Tides of War can be studied from many angles:

Without the walls awaited war: within, pestilence. Now arose a third scourge: one’s own countrymen, made desperate by the first two. The poor cracked first. Driven by want, they took to plundering the homes of those of middling wealth, which stood vulnerable owing to their banishment of watchmen and stewards, all save the most trustworthy, who themselves took to crime to pay a physician or an undertaker, which professions amounted to the same thing. What good was money if you would not live to spend it? A gentleman would perish, bequeathing his treasure to his sons; these, anticipating their own imminent extinction, ran through their patrimony as fast as their fists could scatter it, abetted by every species of parasite and bloodsucker, seeking the juice as it spilled. You saw it, Jason. Disease would carry off a man’s wife and children; bereft of hope, he sets his own flat alight, then lingers in numb katalepsis, nor disclaims his offense to the brigadiers hastening onto the scene as the blaze consumes the tenancies of his neighbors.

In just one paragraph, Pressfield has effectively applied several of our tools:

* Arched syntax and changed mindset: “Without the walls awaited war: within, pestilence.” War and pestilence are forces with wills of their own. At once, we are launched into the ancient perspective of the world.

* Poetic entry: “Now arose . . .” We can hear the bard regaling us amid the flickering shadows of the hearth fire.

* Foreign term: “Katalepsis” is Greek, and yet we know what is meant here because of its context and English equivalent, “catalepsies.” The usage adds authenticity without obfuscation.

* The substitution of one archaic language for another that is even less comprehendable. Here Pressfield recruits Victorian words to stand in the stead of the ancient Greek: “middling,” “flat,” “gentleman,” “brigadiers,” and “tenancies.” We have no idea how ancient Greek really sounded. How then is a writer to evoke that period without coming off stilted and cartoonish? Some might mistake the use of these terms for imperial anachronisms, but Pressfield knows what he’s doing here. He performs a stunning sleight-of-hand by subconsciously firing our “history” nerve synapses. We hear these 19th century Dickensian mots and are transported into the past without knowing how it was accomplished. This may be the reason that a British actor who plays an ancient Roman or Greek hero in the movies or on stage sounds more authentic to American audiences.

Mary Renault used a variation of this technique when she created dialogue for her characters that inhabited the ancient world:

Greek is a highly polysyllabic language. Yet when writing dialogue for my Greeks I have found myself, by instinct, avoiding the polysyllables of the English language, and using, as far as they are still in the living language, the older and shorter words. This is not because the style parallels Greek style; it is entirely a matter of association and ambience. In Greek, polysyllables are old; in English, mostly Latinised and largely modern. They have acquired their own aura, which they will bring along with them. Their stare, like that of the basilisk, is killing. Take the following sentence, which I have just picked at random from a magazine: “High priority is to be given to training in the skills of community organizing and conflict resolution.” It contains no concept which Plato did not know, or, indeed, did not in fact deal with. But it comes to us steeped in notions of the company report, the social survey, and so forth. When I see writing like this in a historical novel I know what the author is after. He wants us to identify with the situation of his characters as if it were our own. But it isn’t, and identification thus achieved is a cheat. You cannot, as an advertising copywriter would say, enjoy a trip to fifth-century Athens, or Minoan Crete, in the comfort of your own home. You have, as fare as your mind will take you, to leave home and go to them. (Authors on Authors, p. 86)

6) Render the narrative language or dialogue more archaic.

Here’s a solution you may never have considered. Given all of the warnings against alienating the reader with heavy period language, why would a writer choose such a counter-intuitive approach? John Fowles explained his reasoning:

But I soon get into trouble over dialogue, because the genuine dialogue of 1867 (insofar as it can be heard in books of the time) is far too close to our own to sound convincingly old. It very often fails to agree with our psychological picture of the Victorians—it is not stiff enough, not euphemistic enough, and so on; and here at once I have to start cheating and pick out the more formal and archaic (even for 1867) elements of spoken speech. It is this kind of “cheating,” which is intrinsic to the novel, that takes time. (Afterwords: Novelists Talking About Their Novels)

As Pressfield’s Greek philosophers would admonish, all of these mimetic devices should be applied in moderation.