When Does History Begin?

Hi Doc - Not sure I've seen you around before - so welcome!

From what I understand a loose guideline is - fifty years, so from 1959 on back. But I have seen a few places that say historical is anything prior to the writer's birth. But, I think any guidelines are somewhat subject to interpretation - for anyone writing about the Kennedy assassination or the Vietnam War now, I certainly can't see any other genre that fits other than historical (it sure the heck isn't mainstream or contemporary which seem to be what come after historical unless another genre like women's fiction over-rides it.) Hope that helps. Puma

Yup!

WWII is historical territory. So are the fifties.

I think this is an interesting question. To me ,anything that has happened, is now in the past and would qualify to be referred to as history.There is no time in the past when history begins
However, historical fiction needs to capture the events and atmosphere of a time period that is different to the readers experience.
This partly depends on the target reader age and partly down to how well the writer can invoke the feeling the story happened in a different time .So a teenager may well consider a story set in the eighties as historical.
Some publishers,and writers, have a different take on what they consider as historical fiction, preferring a time before most readers were born.

I suppose that as with most genre descriptions there are marketing-definitions and crafting-definitions. Mine is a crafting-definition.

History is a search to educate ourselves about how the past affects people. So from a crafting perspective, I think that historical stories concern themselves somehow with that. But this distinguishes stories that use a period for setting and then ignore impact (e.g. a modern romance written in Regency costume), from stories which let the period impact the characters (e.g. Hornblower). This might seem a little strict, but I think it is consistent with other genres -- e.g. a story must explore science and not simply use it to be science fiction; a story must explore crime to be crime genre; explore romance to be Romance genre.

So in a broad sense, histories can be about any period in the past, or they can be about now, or even times that haven't happened, or are yet to happen. What makes it history is if you explore it as history, and not simply use it as setting. Historical exploration uses the same sorts of questions, no matter where you set it:


By looking at how authors pose, research, explore and answer these questions, we can develop our own craft.

Doc said:

Ruv, I would love to give pages over to exploring the mindset of Germans traveling from pre Nazi social customs and behavior into the gradual establishment of the post Nazi new world but it would put the brakes on a fast moving novel. Nicht wahr?

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I know that's a rhetorical question Doc, but I guess that my literal answer is: I don't know that history has to put the brakes on action. I mean, in a literary sense that's what history is: action and dilemmas around social change.

I'm currently writing a steampunk pseudohistory about the evolution of privilege in an Edwardian imperialist world where WWI never happened and the Bolshevik rebellion failed. It's a pretty fast-moving novel featuring battles in the Soudan, a riot in London and intrigue and scandal among the British aristocracy -- and I have to spend time showing how steam-powered police units work when there are no electronic computers, and why Britain has railroads but not electric lighting, telephones or telegraphs. But it hasn't transplanted 21st century urbanity to the period. I'm using the period as much as I reasonably can, subject to certain deliberate adaptations.

My personal approach has been to not discuss any of it in detail. Just describe the obvious things, let the story happen, focus on action and dilemmas, let characters reveal their motives and beliefs and (hopefully) the sense of milieu and history will emerge with minimal info-dumps. But that's the intended reader experience. As an author I've had to read a tonne of stuff and form my own views -- so I do a lot of infodumping on myself. In terms of design, it's slow going for me, but hopefully not for the reader.

Speaking of evolution of Nazism though, have you read Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes? (Translated as 'The Kindly Ones' in its US editions). An American author writing a French novel about the fictional memoirs of a Nazi SS officer running an extermination camp. At 1,000ish pages I doubt that it's fast-paced, but it won two of the most prestigious French literary awards in 2006, and has since divided the literary world. Literary Review review here. LA Times review here.

If this is largely an action/mystery/thriller type book, I think you'd have more luck pitching it as a thriller that as historical fiction. If you can find agents who represent both, that would be the way to go.