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Historical Fiction

Midnight MagicThere is the term “his­tor­i­cal fic­tion,” and I think we can all agree that it is a work of fic­tion (that is, imag­i­na­tion) based on his­tor­i­cal fact. But his­tor­i­cal fic­tion cov­ers an unusu­al­ly wide range of lit­er­ary work. There can be nov­els such as my Mid­night Mag­ic, which, while osten­si­bly set in Renais­sance Italy (Naples) is rather like a cos­tume dra­ma that takes gen­er­al modes of thought from the time, but has vir­tu­al­ly no his­tor­i­cal fact. Then there are books like my Iron Thunder, in which I tried to repli­cate a deeply researched real­i­ty, so that even the boy pro­tag­o­nist was a real person.

There is, of course, a wide mid­dle ground, in which a writer such as me tries to cap­ture the his­tor­i­cal real­i­ty, and then inserts man­i­fest­ly fic­tion­al char­ac­ters (Sophi­a’s War and City of Orphans).

Sophia's WarI just fin­ished a new work of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion. It was a chal­lenge because the his­tor­i­cal moment, which all agree hap­pened, is usu­al­ly (if then) hard­ly more than an anec­do­tal foot­note. While I tried to stick to the facts, vir­tu­al­ly every­thing else is invent­ed by me—because no one knows what real­ly occurred.
At the con­clu­sion of the tale, I have a com­mon­er and a king (both his­tor­i­cal­ly real peo­ple) engage in a vital con­ver­sa­tion, in which the king says some­thing that I hope effec­tive­ly sums up what the whole book is about.

My edi­tor says, “But the real king would nev­er say that.”

City of OrphansMy reply, “I agree. But this is a work of fic­tion, and my book needs him to say that.”

In short, his­tor­i­cal fic­tion is fic­tion. That’s a fact.

3 thoughts on “Historical Fiction”

  1. I’ve thought a lot the last few years about the range of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, from “his­to­ry light”, where an author writes about an era with no spe­cif­ic events or his­tor­i­cal fig­ures (I’m think­ing of my May B.) to the sort where an author must get per­mis­sion from a family/historical soci­ety to write about a par­tic­u­lar per­son (like Maud, a 2017 nov­el based on the life of L.M. Montgomery). 

    While I can’t per­son­al­ly imag­ine tak­ing on the lat­ter, I’m so glad oth­ers are will­ing, so I can read their work!

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  2. Two works of His­tor­i­cal fic­tion will be out next year:

    The Unex­pect­ed Life of Oliv­er Cromwell Pitts. Algo­nquin. May 2017
    The Play­er King. Simon & Schus­ter, Oct 2017.

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