Tag Archives: The Man Who Was Poe

Real? Fictitious?

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historical fictionHistorical 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.

This writer’s day

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This writer’s day: Up at six, and by six-thirty (with coffee near) working on new book, focusing on the last third. Chat with my publicist about evolving website. An e-mail from the editor of forthcoming book, Sophia’s War, informing me that she is sending the first pass galley. For the first time I get to look at the book in print, always something of a shock, always satisfying. More coffee. We spend an hour and a half going through the book—she’s the leader here—adjusting words, sentences for clarity, deleting repetitions, confusions, what have you. Vital to do. Good editors do this well. Then I go off to the local library to get advice on retrieval of newspaper archives, for information I need for new project.

An hour’s break (a 3½-mile walk). Back home (more coffee).

S.O.R. LosersI work on an old text, S.O.R. Losers, which has been reformatted for inclusion in Breakfast Serials, the newspaper serialization-publishing venture. An e-mail from a different editor, with encouraging words about first 100 pages of that new project. It is energizing, so after dinner, back to that project.

Finally, happily, reading time, a book about Edgar Allan Poe. Always a fascinating subject. One of my books, The Man Who Was Poe, is about him. A long, but productive day.