Historical Fiction

May 25 2022

My Mother in the UK, 1939-1940

On the eve of World War II, my mother was engaged. His name was Richard (I’m not sure of his last name, but it might have been Hudson) and he ended up in the Royal Air Force, not as a pilot, but as an aircrew member in the RAF Bomber Command. Based on my mother’s age in 1939 (she was born in 1908, so 31), she and Richard must have decided to “wait” to marry until the war ended. Statistics for survival were slim. Forty-six percent (46%) of the 125,000 aircrew were killed. That’s 57,205 men. In addition, 8,403 were wounded in action and 9,838 ended up as POWs. That’s a total of 60% of those airmen. In June 2012, the Queen unveiled a memorial to them. Richard was one of the dead.

My mother was a trained “almoner,” the term in the UK for a medical social worker. She was stationed in Stirling, Scotland, but periodically travelled to London for her work. As a result, she experienced some of the London Blitz, which ran from September 7, 1940 – May 11, 1941. One of her experiences early in the Blitz was meeting the woman who became the main character in my book. This woman, in the French Resistance, had been “extracted” from France because the Germans were getting too close to her. “Extracted” was the term used to describe the process of taking someone out of danger, often via plane. Ironically, there she was, in London, during the Blitz, for “safe-keeping.”

She had an older brother. The siblings had been born in the same house in the region of Alsace in Eastern France. Her brother was born in 1917. She was born in 1920. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles that officially ended World War I included a section that ceded Alsace and its northern neighbor, Lorraine, from Germany to France. Between 1871 and 1919, the regions of Alsace and Lorraine had gone back and forth between France and Germany five times. As a result, no one worried about citizenship because there was constant shifting and there was no point in changing.

When the brother was born in 1917, he was German, as Alsace belonged to Germany at that time. When the sister was born in 1920, she was French, as Alsace was now part of France (it has remained so since that time). When World War II came along, the brother was drafted into the German army as a German citizen. She ended up in the French Resistance.

I knew I could make a story out of this.

Meanwhile, by 1940, both my parents had lost their partners and had to struggle on through the war with grief in their hearts.

Feb 13 2022

Writing a World War II Novel Based on a Real Person

I’ve never been in a war, never been bombed, and never been a refugee, but war has been a part of my life since my birth. Born in Scotland, I grew up with parents and relatives who’d come through World War II and had stories to tell. They were never the stories of hell. Not because I was a child, but because no one wanted to talk about hell. They were humorous or matter-of-fact or quirky. These stories were my “norm.”

I wrote a World War II novel based on one of those stories. I began when I worked full-time, but as an academic research librarian in higher education, work was ruled by the term and I couldn’t write consistently. I’d start a new term swearing not to get so caught up in work that I’d have to set my novel aside. In a couple of weeks, the term subsumed me. My feet hit the floor at 5:30 a.m. and I’d work all day and into the night, often falling into bed at 11:00 p.m. or later. At the end of term, I’d collapse. Towards the end of break week, I’d “come to” and wonder what happened to my story.

Unable to write a novel that way, I left work in August of 2018 to begin again, this time putting my novel first — every day. The story is based on a woman my mother met during the London Blitz. No one famous. An ordinary woman coping with what the world threw at her. I interlaced some stories and events I’d heard as a child, and discoveries from my research. I finished my novel in the fall of 2021 and began my agent search, which will no doubt be ongoing for a while.

My goal is to share some stories that didn’t make it into the book. Background stories or stories I cut from my novel because they didn’t serve this particular story. As I continue my agent search, I’ll share some of these tales in blog posts over the coming months. I hope you’ll find them interesting.

Dec 02 2020

Why Historical Fiction? Part II

In Part I, I addressed the issue of “truth” in historical fiction, focusing on facts and bias. I promised to address the “emotional truth” of historical fiction in Part II.

Emotional truth is about feelings which may or may not have anything to do with actual facts. An author attempts to convey how characters “felt” about their time and the facts, the research, provides the context for those feelings, whether those feelings relate to the character’s family, historical events, or the character’s philosophical beliefs.

And that’s the key. How characters face the challenges of their own time and how they feel as they wrestle with ethical dilemmas and make decisions help us to understand issues of our own time. The distance of history and the mask of fiction enable us to draw parallels to our own time and consider our problems through a new lens. That’s the joy of both the “history” and the “fiction” aspects of this genre of writing.

Growing up, I devoured historical fiction. I read works by Jean Fritz, the American children’s writer of biography and history, and learned about the founding fathers of this country. As a teenager, I read the historical novels of Jean Plaidy (real name, Eleanor Alice Hibbert) and remember particularly her novels about the Tudor period. I loved the intrigue and the romance, no matter how badly it ended up.

Now, I read historical fiction all the time. I still enjoy the adventure and romance, but I value what it teaches me about my own world. I’ve read a lot of historical fiction about World War II as part of the research for my own novel, as well as history and biography and reports and diaries, because I wanted to know how other authors present their “emotional truth” of the period. I want to add my own perspective of that truth, based on what I read and what I learned from the stories my parents and their generation told me when I was young.

We are at a point where the survivors of WWII are now dying. Shortly, their time will be fully “history” and we will no longer be able to hear their stories directly. We will have only written, oral, and media presentations of that time. This is my chance to add a perspective from what I read and from what I learned from those who lived through that time and conveyed their stories to me. I want to honor that gift in my work. I anticipate completing my novel in 2021 and look forward to sharing it with the world, adding my own perspective to the collective view of that time in history.

Image: https://celadonbooks.com/what-is-historical-fiction/

Nov 17 2020

Why Historical Fiction? Pt. 1

I’ve been working on a historical novel set in WWII, most intensively in the last two years. Why another WWII story? Because I see parallels to our own time, I grew up in Britain in the aftermath of that war, and my premise is based on a “true” story from WWII that was told to me by my mother.

The key is my first reason: parallels to our own time. George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The challenge, however, is not remembering the past, but figuring it out at all. As we approach a time when those who lived through WWII are slipping away, and those of us who were brought up immediately after that war and were affected by it, I wanted to explore the war from the intimate perspective of family.

A historical novel is undoubtedly biased and wouldn’t claim to be “true” in a factual sense, although authors of historical novels strive to set their work within an accurate context. A historical novel presents a view of events that attempts to bring the reader closer to the emotional “truth” of those who experienced that period in history. Before I address the idea of “emotional truth” in a blog post in a couple of weeks, it’s important, first, to address the nature of history itself.

History is a slippery slope. Records are lost, suppressed, formally locked up for a certain number of years, interpreted. Where does that take us? To bias. Even primary documents can be biased. Diaries, obviously, but even a simple factual form. Someone chooses to check the wrong box for his/her/eir age. Why? Vanity? Fear? Some practical reason? Someone falsifies a document in order to survive; another person is forced to write what a person in power wants to hear. Who can blame them? You survive in the moment. That’s why I often put the word “true” in quotes.

Our biased behaviors probably go back to the beginning of the human race. A classic example is Galileo. He believed the sun was the center of our universe and that got him into trouble.

Enter the Roman Inquisition. In 1615, they decided his belief was heretical because it contradicted the sense of Holy Scripture. When Galileo defended that belief in print, this was interpreted as an attack on Pope Urban VIII. Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, found heretical, and forced to recant.

Why was Galileo was put on trial? Politics (court intrigue, problems of state) and emotions (anger, fear on the part of the Pope). The nemeses of historical truth.

As an addendum, Galileo didn’t originate his belief. He learned it from the work of Copernicus (b. 1473). It is believed that Copernicus came to his conclusion independently of Aristarchus of Samos (born around 310 BCE), who probably originated the idea. So someone knew how the universe was structured centuries before the majority of people accepted it as truth.

In one way, this pressures a historical novel writer to be as accurate as possible as regards facts. In another way, the very instability of history gives the historical novel writer permission because “truth” is far from absolute.

Written: November 17, 2020. Pt. 2 coming Dec. 1.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_heliocentrism

Feb 09 2020

Research and Creativity

As my blog readers know from previous posts, I believe in deep research for fiction, particularly historical fiction, which naturally calls for research. I’m not satisfied when others in the writing business suggest that I can get what I need on Google, Google images, Wikipedia, etc. Of course I use these tools, sometimes to get started, but more often for “place holders” to note where I need to dive into resources that will give me either answers or show me that what I propose to include in my fiction “could” have happened and is viable to include. It is fiction after all.

On Medium today, Jeff Ryan published an article on Medium: Honoring the Critical Link between Research and Creativity. https://medium.com/@19RoadsLessTraveled/honoring-the-critical-link-between-research-and-creativity-5c2dc38fe9c4

Ryan speaks about standard factual research (records, documents, etc.) which he uses extensively, but he also talks about “contextual” research, i.e., researching beyond needed facts to understand what else was going on in the worlds the characters inhabited. I’ve always thought of my research as all of a piece, but I find his separation of factual and contextual research very helpful. He also shows how the discovery of a very small detail can change the direction of a novel.

From now on, I plan to tag my “place holders” with F or C or FC to indicate the type(s) of research I need in a particular section. This will help me to decide where I need to introduce some element from world events occurring at the time my characters live, where I need backstory, where I need speculation, and so on.

Ryan says that adding contextual research to his process enables him to create more multi-dimensional characters and provide his book with urgency.

I also recommend Paddy Sutton’s Research and Creativity Go Hand in Hand. https://www.research-live.com/article/opinion/research-and-creativity-go-hand-in-hand/id/5028992 Written in 2017, Sutton, a creative director at Argo, talks about researching for ads. He believes creativity is about questioning and challenging. “As the legendary Robin Wight of WCRS advised, ‘interrogate the product until it confesses to its strength’. That’s research.” He describes research as analytical, creativity as intuitive and gives examples of how the two work together.

Perhaps that’s why I like writing. It uses my whole brain—left and right. What could be better?

I highly recommend you check out the above links. They’re quick reads and impactful.

Image credit: https://www.research-live.com/article/opinion/research-and-creativity-go-hand-in-hand/id/5028992