Using Artistic License to Alter History
Writing historical mysteries is a juggling act. Writers must create a fictional plot with fictional characters around a historical time period with real people . . . and somehow suspend the readers’ disbelief.
Many writers of historical fiction choose a particular time period and stay with it. I’m thinking Anne Perry, Phillipa Gregory, Charles Todd. I, on the other hand, am intrigued by so many time periods, I skip around. Each of my mysteries takes place in a different place and time, which enables me to do the thing I love most: research. The risk, of course, is that I will know only a little about each time period as opposed to Anne Perry who knows a great deal about Victorian England.
Once I settle on a time period, I read and read and read about it. I visit the places in question, interview experts, historians, and read and read and read some more. By this time, I usually have a kernel of an idea for the plot and maybe even a character sketch or two.
Building fictional characters around authentic ones is key. Unless your character is transported from modern times to the past, he/she must act, speak, dress like the time period. In using real people from the time period, they must be as genuine to history as I can make them.
As the story develops and takes twists and turns on its own, I find I am bending the truth a bit – creating an “alternate history.” This is fiction, after all. The book I am working on now, “Pure Lies,” will be a totally new take on history. It is about the witches and witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and will provide a different motivation for the girls’ hysteria. The backdrop and many characters are authentic, but the storyline meanders considerably from what we know to be historically accurate.
The questions I ask take the form of “what if” and I let my imagination run free. It’s a rare writer that can devise a plotline that hasn’t already been done. But even a clichéd plot can be made new and fresh with unusual twists, powerful characters and exceptional prose.
As I put the final touches on “Pure Lies, I realize I am bending history to fit the story. That’s the advantage of fiction. And its strength.
I smiled when I read re bending history a bit. History is by default the history of the victors … Untold history gives room enough for fiction and making a difference after all.
There’s an interesting book out there called “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” that addresses this. Kind of like how the north and south view the Civil War, oops, excuse me, the War of Northern Aggression. Thanks, Leonardo.