Historical Fiction

[Shadow9216]

@phil1861- thanks for the tip! I'm writing the whole story and having a colleague in the same line of work review it, and once the whole thing's complete I'll make a decision on releasing it.

 

[Diana9]

I sometimes wonder if there are more errors of fact in supposed learned treatises than good historical fiction. I admire research and love to analyze someone else's research but I have read any number of works by professional historians to understand that they frequently reach conclusions that are mutually incompatible. They both cannot be right and at least one of them has to be dead wrong (actually both may be dead wrong).

I also wonder how many readers of history have been repelled by the absolutely turgid, verbose, cramped, stultifying style of pedantic authors whose audience seems to be other stultifying, verbose authors. On the other hand I wonder how many historical enthusiasts, the ones who go to historic sites, buy history books, grow to appreciate our heritage and read websites like CivilWarTalk got started in their love of history (yes, some of us love history the way some love golf or baseball) from reading the kind of historical fiction that others disparage as garbage. OK, some historical fiction is garbage and it takes some discrimination to learn what authors get it right, but some do and what they can offer us, what they offer me, is a chance to take myself back in time and place me in the historical drama itself. With them as my first sergeant, I can storm the cliffs of Quebec with Wolfe, tremble with Prescott's Minutemen as I await to see the whites of their eyes, quiver with trepidation as I await the order to go over the top at the Marne.

Until we invent a time machine that can take us back to the March 5, 1836 to find out what Travis actually said to his Texican troops at the Alamo or to Thermopylae and Leonidas to his Three Hundred, both knowing they had but hours to live, I'll settle for a good writer, an informed one, who can take me with them.

Very well said. I feel exactly the same as you.

 

[Albert Sailhorst]

I suspect that many users of this website are readers of historical fiction. I hate to admit this, but it is my own favorite genre. Some of it is pretty good, where the author has done his research. I am sure Michael Shaara's Killer Angels comes to mind. His son, Jeff has written a number of historical novels ranging from the Revolutionary War World war II. I enjoy his books.

Recently I have come across Ralph Peters who I was surprised to realize is a featured guest on cable news where military matters come up. I found his "Cain at Gettysburg" hard to put down and the same for "Hell or Richmond". I wonder though, if the salty language, actually some pretty raunchy stuff was actually used by the troops at that time. Reminds me of a police locker room. Also I think he does not know how to load a cap and ball percussion revolver and like almost all writers of works of history, including non fiction, he does not know the monetary system in use during the Civil War. He has a character saying that "he would not give a nickel for..." when, of course, the five cent piece of the time was the silver half dime. But for the most part Ralph Peters gets it right.

So my question is do you read historical fiction, yourself? If so, who do you find to be both accurate and interesting and who would you recommend as an author of historical fiction?

I just now stumbled across this thread, so forgive me if I repeat previous sentiments....

I do NOT read Historical Fiction, with few exceptions....MOST historical fiction is so crappy, so cliché and written with NO research, that it distorts reality to the point of confusing fact from fantasy among the impressionable, uneducated reader (for example "Gone With the Wind").......Of ALL the historical fiction that I have read, only 4 books are worth reading "Killer Angels" and "Shiloh" by Shelby Foote, "Andersonville" and "Gettysburg" both by Mackinley Kantor......Books like "North and South", "Blue and Gray" etc should be banned......

 

[Shadow9216]

@Albert Sailhorst looks like I'm getting you a coffee mug for your birthday then

 

[Nathanb1]

I had an amazing professor at Sam Houston named Caroline Crimm. She specializes in the history of Mexico and early Texas....well, the Southwest. She's written several nonfiction books, and they're based on months of research in moldy archives in Mexico City and Spain. Her credentials are impeccable. She retired from teaching a couple of years ago to concentrate on writing and research. Last time I talked to her, she'd decided to write historical fiction because, as she noted, it makes more money. Can't win.

 

[Albert Sailhorst]

@Albert Sailhorst looks like I'm getting you a coffee mug for your birthday then

Shadow, I appreciate your efforts!!
Like I said in my previous post, I don't like cliché, and bad research....I did like the fiction that I mentioned......Sooooo, as long as your work is not cliché, is well researched and has a good storey, I wish you the best and I may pick up a copy to read!!
Good luck!!......**wonders if I can get a signed copy instead of a coffee mug for my birthday??**

 

[Shadow9216]

Sooooo, as long as your work is not cliché, is well researched and has a good storey, I wish you the best and I may pick up a copy to read!!

Well, 1 out of 3 isn't bad...

Good luck!!......**wonders if I can get a signed copy instead of a coffee mug for my birthday??**

You're better off with the coffee mug- you'll be able to use that for something

 

[Albert Sailhorst]

HA!!....I wish you the best!!

 

[Nathanb1]

Well, 1 out of 3 isn't bad...


You're better off with the coffee mug- you'll be able to use that for something

Shoot. You can throw a book more than once. If it's a nice thick one, you can hit someone over the head with it. Try that with a mug more than once! BTW, that's why I married my husband. He whacked me over the head with his 8th grade history book and I decided to make the rest of his life....really fun. I tell him the insanity is all his fault.

 

[JPWalton]

Eh, but that's just my opinion. In some ways it had a very authentic atmosphere, but in others it was not. Most important in my mind was that it committed the sin of taking liberties with the facts that simply weren't necessary to tell the kind of sex-driven soap opera they wanted to do.

Same thing with the Tudors. There were all kinds of things they could have done with Henry VIII's sister that would have been both more authentic and more accurate than marrying her off to the King of Portugal, where she poisons him. Nothing like that ever happened, not even close.

I base my comment on a statement from a history professor on a radio program: authentic, but not accurate. I am open to more information.

 

[Dave Wilma]

Eh, but that's just my opinion. In some ways it had a very authentic atmosphere, but in others it was not. Most important in my mind was that it committed the sin of taking liberties with the facts that simply weren't necessary to tell the kind of sex-driven soap opera they wanted to do.

Same thing with the Tudors. There were all kinds of things they could have done with Henry VIII's sister that would have been both more authentic and more accurate than marrying her off to the King of Portugal, where she poisons him. Nothing like that ever happened, not even close.

That's why the comment distinguishes between authenticity, the sense and texture of the time and events, and accuracy, the precise events that took place. Authenticity in Rome is reflected by the sets and costuming, the characterization of the culture and technology, and the political situation. Accuracy in Rome is much softer where events were compressed and manipulated to make the story work on the screen.

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series is not at all accurate, but it is authentic.

 

[yankee blue]

I do not really read historicle fiction but I do like TO MAKE MEN FREE.

 

[damYankee]

Just to clarify what set me off on Griffin's Battleground, The cover has the Marine Corp emblem, then below it the title of the book.

Battleground.
The continuing saga of The Corps.

Would you not look at the title and believe it to be a history of the Corps?
Write historical novels and historical fiction, but label it as such. The next thing you know Hollywood will make a movie about a modern air craft carrier armed to the teeth with state of the art weapons system sailing through a time warp and fighting the Japanese Fleet at Pearl Harbor! How silly would that be?

 

[JPWalton]

Ah, but Aubrey and Maturin only represent real history when they intersect with it.

Take the meeting with John Jervis, Lord St. Vincent. Aubrey is a fictional character, so no such thing ever took place obviously. To keep the meeting authentic, O'Brian has to present a likely version of Jervis. Some have, in fact, quibbled with his interpretations, but that is where I make my point about the difference between disputing a fact and insisting one's interpretation is fact. Jervis could have been as O'Brian presented, and that is all that really matters. That is authentic.

On the other hand, when Mel Gibson wants William Wallace to have an affair with the Princess of Wales that not only could never have happened, but would never have happened just for the sake of having a second love interest in Braveheart, that is neither accurate or authentic. I don't care what the costumes, settings, and dialogue are like. The very plot element itself is a huge stretch, back-breaking stretch and one that wasn't really necessary to telling the story.

People criticize the accuracy of the Battle of Stirling Bridge because, they ask, where is the bridge? Where is the castle? Those are important details and the film could have used them, but chose not to. The result was inaccurate, but arguably authentic.

Rome was full of things like that, and when you consider the point was to have an R-rated soap opera... well, it's not like the Roman Civil Wars weren't full of all manner of sexual deviancy, intrigue, and violence. You don't need to go do ridiculous things to make that work. These are your definitions, but what I'm saying is that while accuracy is a more objective and narrow thing, but your definition of authenticity means the worst **** imaginable could be OK so long as it gets dressed up properly.

That's why the comment distinguishes between authenticity, the sense and texture of the time and events, and accuracy, the precise events that took place. Authenticity in Rome is reflected by the sets and costuming, the characterization of the culture and technology, and the political situation. Accuracy in Rome is much softer where events were compressed and manipulated to make the story work on the screen.

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series is not at all accurate, but it is authentic.

 

[kevikens]

The creation of all historical narrative is, to some degree, a fiction. What historians try to do is accurately recount past events so that we come to know as precisely as possible what occurred at a particular time and place. The problem is, as we all know, is that the best history is still an approximation of what happened. We cannot know with absolute metaphysical certitude that the motive for the American rebellion in 1775 was that the Colonists felt themselves to be over taxed. Some probably did while for others it was a peripheral issue. So any historian, or the local high school history text, declaring it so is on as much tenuous ground as some historical fiction author claiming Sir William Howe lost the war for Britain by spending too much time with Mrs. Loring.

Historians and historical enthusiasts alike need to keep in mind that any historical writing, whether it be a supposedly scholarly tome or a bodice ripping, pot boiling historical romance, is to a greater or lesser degree an approximation of past reality. While we might hesitate to take the latter for perceived wisdom and revealed truth we might also do well to remember that neither is the former.

 

[Shadow9216]

Historians and historical enthusiasts alike need to keep in mind that any historical writing, whether it be a supposedly scholarly tome or a bodice ripping, pot boiling historical romance, is to a greater or lesser degree an approximation of past reality. While we might hesitate to take the latter for perceived wisdom and revealed truth we might also do well to remember that neither is the former.

This is a great point, and one I was trying to figure out how to make- does it make a difference based on the target audience? Killer Angels is about Gettysburg, so it's held to a high standard of accuracy (the historical records) and authenticity (does it reflect what we know about the events/people)...if it was a story about a Confederate soldier's romance with a Gettysburg widow, and the war was merely the pretext for bringing them together, where do "we" set the bar? The target audience is most likely going to be very different- people who read the "Fifty Shades" novels are (I'm going out on a limb here) unlikely to care whether the author captured the details of Seattle's cityscape accurately.

Does the marketing of a novel have any role here? Several of you have mentioned Rome- the target audience here would be different than the audience for something like Vikings, which has been noted for its attention to history while crafting a dramatic series...

 

[phil1861]

Historiography - the study of the study of history - has gone through several shifts when it comes to how the civil war is written about even in the scholarly tomes. When there were still eyewitnesses alive to fill pages and magazines with articles it was to defend actions or to counter attack assumptions.

As the veterans died off and we no longer had access to faded memories historians began writing with the view to coalesce the secession/union narratives into their histories and some with the view to build the southern mystique or to attack same or to revitalize the abolitionist northern sensitibilities. The histories written from the post WWI and WWII eras were a mix of fact and factoid with a lot of presumption/myth written in.

The Vietnam and Korea eras also brought out a focus on the slave issues as they related to the civil rights struggle, as the community sought to establish a history written by black scholars and not just a history almost entirely written by whites. A focus on the writtings of Fredrick Douglass, for instance, and the reprinting of his speeches and auto biography mark this time period.

We're still in the current phase of what I call the narrative histories, both commercial and scholarly, where the focus has been on not just the telling of facts but the telling of a story within the framework that is still considered non-fiction. Catton and Foote's multi-volume sets comprise this genre but also a focus on a blend of scholarly commercial writings and battle narratives written by non-scholarly historians (those not in the active university systems) like Rhea or Cozzens. With the discovery and curation of volumes of personal soldier letters, diaries, and the digitizing of unit histories the histories have a blend of fictional story telling with the focus on historical evaluation and interpretation.

Within this we also have the resurgence of historical fiction that has been highly influenced by this latter period and instead of interpreting is focusing on the story telling within the factual framework. It isn't Gone with the Wind (though there is still a current HF that is historically set in a time frame in order to tell a romance story that is active and very popular) but it isn't the Overland Campaign either. Probably the most famous is Shaara's Killer Angels.

Both fiction and non-fiction history also seems to be very tied to the overall societal view of the time, right now being one where the anti-hero or the anti-war play a big part in how someone reads a story or what they expect or do not expect to find in one.

If you write historical fiction, what is your focus and why?

 

[Dave Wilma]

If you write historical fiction, what is your focus and why?

I like to learn things and then use them to tell a story. My current project involves the Underground Railroad and the Fugitive Slave Law. It's otherwise entirely fictional, but I hope to do a compelling story with as much authenticity as possible. With any luck, the reader comes away entertained and a little more understanding of the time and events.

 

[Northern Light]

As an academic, I read non-fiction as a professional necessity. Historical fiction is my preferred leisure reading. I find them an interesting way into new areas of research. Novels such as Robert Hicks' "The Widow of the South" about the battle of Franklin and "A Separate Country", a story of J B Hood's post-war life, introduced me to aspects of the ACW that I had not explored before. "My Name is Mary Sutter" led to an exploration of Civil War Medicine, a trip to the Museum of Civil War Medicine, and on to several more scholarly works on the topic. At the same time, I know that these books are fiction, and while based on historical events or characters, are written with the object of selling the story, and that a certain amount of literary license is expected to bring about that end. What it boils down to is; if the story is good, then most people don't care about the facts, and if they care, they will seek out the truth.

 

[Shadow9216]

If you write historical fiction, what is your focus and why?

My focus is the use of intelligence during the war, at various levels; although it wasn't as formalized and professionalized as it is now, intelligence collection and analysis took place on both sides- in many ways, it was really the beginning of US military intelligence as a profession. Espionage, counter-intelligence, cryptography and cryptology, message interception- all took place during the war and I explore all of these; at the same time, it's a story and somewhat of an allegory to situations I've been involved in at various points in my career...times may change, technology will evolve, but the fundamental problems stay the same.