Giving books for the holidays can lead to lasting memories. Christina, a mom, recently wrote to tell me that she likes using teaching guides on authors’ websites to discuss books with her two boys. “We read the books out loud when we can, on our own when we can’t, but your teaching guide for the three Crispin books provided good clues for talking over what we read. My boys think I’m pretty smart!”
Historical fiction, invented by Sir Walter Scott with his novel Waverly (1814) is a remarkably flexible form, offering everything from what might be called costume drama to meticulously accurate depictions of real events and people. My own work shares that range. Books like Midnight Magic, or The Book without Words, reference the historical moment, but not much more. Crispin, is (I hope) very accurate as to place and time, but has only one real character, John Ball. The Man who Was Poe tries to depict Edgar Allan Poe’s real character in a real place, at a real time, but all else is fiction. The Fighting Ground is real as to place, event, and time, but all characters are fictional.
Sophia’s War, just published, goes another way. Here all events, place, and most characters, are historically accurate. Even minor characters are real. BUT—the main character, Sophia (and her family), is a work of my imagination. That said, it is Sophia, who, if you will, causes the real events to happen. How can that be? In the celebrated case of Benedict Arnold and John André, though studied countless times by historians, there are some key events which happened but which have never fully been explained. Coincidence? Luck? The hand of Providence? Enter Sophia, and those events are explained in as exciting a way as I could write it. It is my attempt to give life to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion, “All history is biography.” Sophia’s War is real history, as lived by a real, fictitious person.
I’ve always loved the illustrated novel. While the heyday of the illustrated novel was the nineteenth century, it exists today, if it exists at all, almost exclusively in novels for young people. I think it adds enormously to the reader’s pleasure. Consider the original Tenniel illustrations of Alice in Wonderland, Denslow’s Wizard of Oz, Shepard’s Wind in the Willows, or Wyeth’s Treasure Island. I read these books as a kid and cannot think of the texts without thinking of those illustrations. Good text and good art, together, make great books.
I often ask that my novels be illustrated, but only rarely get my wish. The great exceptions are the Poppy novels, so splendidly illustrated by Brian Floca. I may have written those books, but when I imagine the characters I think of his art. Floca has become a major illustrator in his own right (and write) but I’m proud that his first work was in our graphic novel City of Light City of Dark.
Paul O. Zelinsky’s first illustrated novel was my Emily Upham’s Revenge.
Traitors’ Gate was illustrated like a Victorian novel, with more than sixty illustrations by Karina Raude.
The most beautiful edition of Crispin is a South Korean edition.
Publishers will tell you the illustrated novel is expensive to create and difficult to produce. No doubt. They also say young readers don’t want them, a claim I do doubt very much. I so wish the illustrated novel would come back into favor—and into the hands of young readers. What’s your favorite illustrated novel?
I was recently doing a Skype visit with a library group when one of the young people asked, “How do you go about choosing names for your characters?”
There are all kinds of considerations. First, boy/girl. Then, the time period in which the story takes place because names become more or less popular. I was writing a novel set in the 1950’s. What was the most popular name for a boy then? JIM. That’s the name I gave my main character. Sophia was a popular name in the 18th Century. King George III (or last king) had a daughter named Sophia. And so, Sophia’s War.
If one character is named, say, Emily, I won’t use Evelina for another character. If someone is called Pip, I won’t use Rip.
In the Poppy books all the forest mice have names of flowers. Hence, Poppy, and her father, Lungwort, a mouse given to pompous speeches. My editor, Elise Howard, suggested the city mice in the book, Ragweed, have something city in their names. I decided on car parts, hence, Clutch. Sometime I name characters by way of suggesting what the person is like, both their nature and the way they act. Bear in Crispin is big, and bear-like.
In my own reference library I have books of names, modern, historical, and by nationality. And of course nothing is better for name choosing than a phone book.
What is your favorite fictional character name?
Jaxon, of Acme, Washington, wrote to ask, “What happened to Crispin and Owen after they got on the ship to Iceland?” Questions like that, what happened after the book ends? are not uncommon. You can consider them in a number of ways: that I have not completely satisfied my reader; that the story (and characters) are so real that the reader feels the characters must have a further life; that the reader has enjoyed being with the characters so much they want to spend more time with them. I suspect that these same thoughts work on the writer, too. I had not planned to write the six Poppy books, but I so enjoyed the characters, I wanted to write more about them. After writing Night Journeys I worried so about the fate of the characters, I had a dream about what happened next, and indeed, followed that dream to write Encounter at Easton (the only time that ever happened). In the case of the Crispin books, my first musings on the story were such that I contemplated four volumes, which would ultimately lead to, among other things, “What happened to Crispin and Owen after they got on the ship to Iceland?” A publisher’s decision, in which I partly concurred, meant that I did not write that fourth volume. But in fact, I do know (in my head) what happened to Crispin. And I will, someday, write that saga.