WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION: CHAOS, CREATIVITY, AND THE BROKEN MIRROR OF MY MIND

There was once a TV reality show, Junkyard Wars, where two teams of contestants were placed in a junkyard and then challenged to build a machine that would perform a particular task. That pretty much describes my creative process. My task as a historical novelist is to take the odd bits and pieces from my life—experiences that sometimes I'd rather forget, facts that did not slip through my mental sieve, and the backlog of tears and laughter—and put it together into an entertaining story that takes the reader into another place and time.

What follows in the first draft is a rapid and wild process. I'm always reading history and have a good idea of the great expanse of my ignorance, so I usually don't commit unforced historical errors. Otherwise, everything is up for grabs. I may change the main characters' names halfway through; the plot veers this way and that, with no regard for continuity. Punctuation is spotty. I ignore spelling corrections because I don't want to stop the momentum. The result is a mess that I hope no one ever sees. However, a few of the characters have begun to talk back to me, complaining about the plot, making suggestions about what they actually should be doing and saying, demanding to fall in love with that character, not the one I had chosen for them.

In other words, if I didn't love to edit, I wouldn't write. Part of my editing process is vetting every scene to fit into its time and place. The research takes at least a year, thousands of google searches, and skimming hundreds of books to find the information I need. What they wore, what were the catchphrases of the day, the smell in the air, how the ground felt underneath their feet, how they articulated their feelings? I look for details of their everyday life that are unusual to the modern reader. I am often surprised. They said "I ain't" but not "he, she, they, et cetera ain't" in the eighteenth century. The way to pluck a goose was to put a bag over its head. Sir William Johnson, known as the Mohawk Baronet, had a household that resembled the cast of The Lord of the Rings with dwarves, a giant, and a blind woman who played the Celtic harp at dinner. I am never satisfied because I only succeed in part. Others do better. However, I am not so humble as to not feel smug when I spot an error in another historical author's work.

I have a few self-imposed guidelines. In my dialog, I can push back any word or phrase that first appears in the written sources a couple of decades, assuming that the spoken language precedes the written. I will also bend time just a little bit for the story's sake. If a historical character appears at a battle on this date, I may have him arrive a few days earlier. I'm a great fan of "What might have been so" as long as it doesn't overly conflict with "What was so."

By the time I finish my novel, I have developed a rapport with the characters as one does with friends. As I edit and refine, different aspects of them, good and bad, surprising and disappointing, come to light. As for my grasp of their times, I flatter myself that at the end of my creative process, I could sit down at a meal with smugglers at a tavern in Southern New Jersey or with a squatter family in their cabin beyond the Proclamation Line and fool them for almost an hour I am not a very strange person, which we historical authors maybe truly are.