Report from the Key West Literary Conference on Historical Fiction

I’d like to offer additional questions for discussion at the Key West Literary Conference: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth. Much of the discussion has centered on two questions: a) why write historical novels and b) what are the requirements of accuracy? How about:

Eras in the past are marked by more than just a difference in fashion or modes of transportation; there have been profound differences in beliefs and mind-sets. How do you effectively write about people who believed that the world was flat, that pixies and spirits sprang from the dirt or that the sun-god had a direct hand in shaping daily events, without making your characters seem foolish in the eyes of the reader? (In the movie Troy, for example, the Trojans seem silly to consult and trust in the sun-god so much.) It’s a bit like a murder mystery where the reader knows the culprit before the characters unmask him.
Seems to me that some things that were of great concern in the past are not relevant or interesting any more: people’s focus on getting into heaven; the presence of the Devil in every-day life. Even social conditions that had a pervasive impact such as sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, even classism, can only be mentioned once: women weren’t allowed to do that…and the reader thinks ‘yes, yes, get on with it.’ What topics are now off-limits, or at least to be down-played? How do you handle this dismissal of such incredibly powerful social forces?

(I’m thinking partly of my project writing on Christine de Pizan; she is best known for being the first woman to make her living as a writer but saying ‘women didn’t write books back then’ isn’t really that interesting because they certainly do now. But she also wrote a manual on warfare, which elicits incredulity so it highlights the situation better than the book that is actually the one she’s known for (The City of Ladies, the first feminist treatise.) I’m highlighting the lesser accomplishment of the warfare manual, because it still has cultural relevance. So, in fact, you’re challenged to write about things that had previous cultural impact based on their current cultural relevance.

Some suggest that the new historical novel combines modern structure and historical topics. Peter Suskind’s Perfume or Jeanette Winterson’s Passion are very modern novels with historical settings and situations. They don’t unfold with the pacing of a Bronte novel. What are some of the techniques for handling that dichotomy?
The terrific editor, Tom Jenks, admonishes that one should write hot topics with a cool hand. The work presented here involves war, slavery and degradation, insanity, etc. How have the speakers applied, or not applied, the cool hand technique in their work?
In traditional fiction, area or region has a big impact: think of Southern writers for example. In historical fiction, it seems that era is more important than area, since the era has impact on the communication, inventions, and the social conditions. Writing about a 15th Century Frenchman, for example, who goes on the Spice Trail to China in the sequel, leverages your research more than writing of the same village 800 years earlier in a prequel. Do you think it’s true that era has more impact than area in historical fiction and will you write again in the era of your first book?
There was a lot of debate between what the historian does and what the novelist does but it seems to me that the historian works on the macro level and the novelist on the micro. The novelist is looking at the impact on the event, and vice versa, of emotion and psyche. The historian is looking at the impact of the event and vice versa, on culture (which of course is the psyche of the collective.) Also, one shows (novelist) and one tells (historian), though each does both to some extent.
There have been a lot of questions related to why the writers chose to write historical fiction. For me personally I like the social issues that are included, which gives a historical more tooth, if you will, than traditional fiction. And I like the texture of fiction more than essay. So you might say the form has more tooth than fiction and more texture than essay.
Historical fiction has become much more popular: do the writers see this declining in the next few years? How far into the trend are we?
What relationship do they have with historians? Work with them? Double-check the facts with them etc.?
Where’s the line re: accuracy? I personally would like to develop a mathematical system re: transportation, time etc. I think you can compress or extend time: 25 years, 50 years, no big deal. It took so long for information to move, relative to how it moves today, that 50 years is akin to 6 months in twenty-first century time. The dividing line seems to be between facts that are trivial and those that are essential. Whether someone walked on a particular road on a particular date doesn’t change the essence: they walked on some road. Additional years on someone’s life, though, perhaps crosses the line into unacceptable alteration. Also, while we may be protected by the word “novel” on the cover, some work is turned into movies and the public gets a lot of their history from movies while believing it to be reality.
One question that came up within my circle of (new-found!) friends: what are the legal ramifications of historical inaccuracies? Where and when does libel come into play?

Great quotes of the event:

Marilynne Robinson said “we channel consciousness from a much wider span than we understand.”
Madison Smartt Bell: “Losers remember, winners move on.” And in French (that I will misspell) “vous este dans le service d l’histoire” which means you are service to the story but it also means you are in service to the history; and in Haitian, which is what he was writing at the time, ‘service’ means to ‘open yourself to be possessed by’, which seems appropriate as well.
David Nasaw said “our wholes are only as good as our parts escape error.” He feels conflicted about authors putting non-factual information into the stories of factual people.
Russell Banks moved his main character from John Brown to John Brown’s son because John Brown was too iconic, he “was too hot. I’d get burned that close.”
Andrea Barrett says that Alice Monroe “can leap over great chunks of history with beautiful economy.”
Valerie Martin says she’s interested in how “consciousness has changed over the years.”
David Kennedy quoting Eudora Welty who said you shouldn’t write about what you know, you should write about what you don’t know about what you know.
Calvin Baker quoted Jose Marti: “even a diary is a spy.” Baker says that writing about a gender not your own is similar to writing about a time not your own. John Schwartz agreed by saying that “all empathy is historical.” (I would say that the heart of good fiction is empathy.)
John Schwartz also recommended choosing elements of your story based on whether it provides “capaciousness” or the expanded capacity of the element to carry the story.
Joyce Carol Oates is “only interested in emblematic characters…in the symbolic essence of a person.”

More soon...
<!--[if !mso]>

<![endif]-->  <!--[if gte mso 10]>

<![endif]-->