How much to "fudge" history?

Can you find another theater of operations for such an exchange to have actually taken place prior to June '44, (Guadalcanal or similar) and then have critical personnel transfered to where you actually need them to be for the rest of the story?

Personally, I wouldn't let it bother me. This is fiction, not fact, after all. There could always be exceptions for individual boats, after all. Not to mention that the average reader isn't going to know all these kinds of details to have it throw them from the story. And, honestly, if you make it a good enough story, odds are those who do know will be swept away and not realize any errors until later.

And there's always the author's note at the end to explain "Yes, I know better, but I chose to do this for REASON1, REASON2, etc." That way people who don't know will learn something and people who do know won't necessarily think you're stupid.

Good luck to you.

It didn't bother the idiots who wrote U571 and had the Americans capturing the Enigma machine. If it's well-written and plausible enough, most people won't care.

But an author's note explaining your changes is a good idea.

My personal feelings on it are that the further back in time you go, the more you're able to fudge, because who really KNOWS exactly what happened long ago? But there are WWII-obsessed readers out there who know EXACTLY what happened when, so I'd beware of what you propose, unless you can come up with a creative explanation for why one PT boat is there when it is, and set that out clearly (but subtly) from the outset.

If you're writing historical fiction and plan to market it as historical fiction and not fantasy - don't fudge. Puma

Don't forget...

your readers. If your book is branded historical then your readers will expect your research to be immaculate.

It is better to stay with the known facts.

If you must move something, alter a date or place or event, then the readers must be told that you did know but...and apologise sincerely to them. And expect flak!

Your credibility as a writer is at stake as far as most historical readers go. If you can't get basic facts (and several expert readers - and they will be expert! - will know far more than you,) straight you've lost readers and historical readers talk to each other. They love finding errors and booing the author. Their reviews are the most cutting. They expect a lot from a writer who dares to write historicals because those writers are tampering with their images of the time/event/place. It's almost as we tread on historical readers' dreams!

As far as the 'morality' of changing history, I think it hinges on the degree to which the reader looks upon the work as accurate. In fantasy, anything goes because the reader is aware that the tale is wide open. But the closer the reader is led to trust the work, the more questionable it is to alter history without some sort of warning.

Even much that is presented as non-fiction is untrustworthy, at times. Bob Woodward, perpetrator of a number of Washington insider books feels free to "re-create" conversations and even incidents, such as his deathbed conversation with William Casey, something which certainly didn't happen.

In the movies it's worse, of course. The Longest Day, based on a factual book, was turned into near fiction, leaving us thankful that the invasion did still take place in Normandy, but sure of little else.

tallus -

You'll probably get as many different answers to this question as you have readers. It's true some folks live to point out inaccuracies in historical fiction, just as some folks live to point out bad physics in SF. I have, alas, not been the victim of such an attack yet (because I would have to be published to be attacked in a review), but I know it's so.

That said, here's what Bernard Cornwell had to say about the subject at a conference I attended in July, paraphrased, of course:

Above all, don't forget you are a storyteller. Don't let the history get in the way of the story.

Click to expand...

He's doing pretty well as historical fiction writers go these days. Of course, he did go on to say you should at least know what you have changed, and put it in your Author's Note. Obviously, you need to know the history and not just make stuff up willy-nilly. And he's been doing it for a while now; it may be that it's no longer possible to break in on the strength of a good story alone.

It seems to me that whatever you write, some people will love it and some hate it. Our job is to write so that the former outnumber the latter, and while we're at it, to catch as many as we can of those in the middle. If I figure out the secret to how, I'll let you know.

For what it's worth.
HN

tallus83 said:

...The start of the story has an American PT Boat squadron being shown the 'ropes' in the North Sea by a Royal Navy MTB squadron. The date would be January of 1943.

However, American PT Boats did not show up in England until June of 1944.

Click to expand...

Errrr.... if you do it, include a note. People like my grandfather & my husband's grandfather who would LOVE a story like this ... will know & will rail about it.

People like my husband, who are amateur history buffs, who have gotten into a shouting match with their brothers over which ships were in which theater during WWII (and which ended in name-calling on the BIL's part when he lost the argument) ... they'll notice & will rail about it.

Who is your intended audience? Will that audience notice? On many things I think it doesn't matter, but with a subject like WWII on the History channel night & day, vets still around, a huge subject for trivia ... I would make sure it was accurate. You don't want to read an unfavorable review where someone accuses you of not doing research (which is obviously not true or you wouldn't have posted this). You know? Stephen King is still getting letters over making a mistake on a gun caliber (I described it to my husband, also a gun buff, and he said, "that is the dumbest mistake ever! How did no one notice??"


wee

Sigh, then you have to decide what to do about any ‘real’ people in the story. For reasons of plot that were unchangeable I needed a character to be in Berlin in Sept ‘41. Unfortunately he wasn’t released from prison until Oct ‘41. Working on the idea mentioned here that even the relative unknown players at the time were known, I decided to skip the ‘real’ people and make up all my active characters.

But I’m think a ship is like the railroad tracks, they are there or they aren’t. Unless of course it was a classified operation and you could explain why it was classified.

Stlight

I expect to be...

yelled at, but I do find this dragging in of real people into one's fiction annoying. Is the idea to add verisimilitude to your work? To me it's more like over-larding the roast, resulting in a tasteless and irritating mess.

Fiction is your own precious creation and you don't need more than a passing mention of Prime Ministers, known Generals, famous people etc. to set a time for the reader. Why pinch a real person, especially as some reader is bound to pop up and tell you off for not having a clue about Name Person and having portrayed them 'all wrong'?

It's become very popular for mystery writers to 'bag' a famous person and turn them into a sleuth. Last year I had to review one about Beau Brummell as detective. He was well documented as a person, so it was highly infuriating to find that the writer had made no effort to research this, but presented hir own highly coloured version of the man. This version often did not tally with the real man's own words.

If one is writing fiction why is there this need to drag reality, in the shape of real people, into the make believe?

pdr said:

yelled at, but I do find this dragging in of real people into one's fiction annoying. Is the idea to add verisimilitude to your work? To me it's more like over-larding the roast, resulting in a tasteless and irritating mess.

Fiction is your own precious creation and you don't need more than a passing mention of Prime Ministers, known Generals, famous people etc. to set a time for the reader. Why pinch a real person, especially as some reader is bound to pop up and tell you off for not having a clue about Name Person and having portrayed them 'all wrong'?

It's become very popular for mystery writers to 'bag' a famous person and turn them into a sleuth. Last year I had to review one about Beau Brummell as detective. He was well documented as a person, so it was highly infuriating to find that the writer had made no effort to research this, but presented hir own highly coloured version of the man. This version often did not tally with the real man's own words.

If one is writing fiction why is there this need to drag reality, in the shape of real people, into the make believe?

Click to expand...

I remember we had a thread somewhere here about those historical mysteries. It does seem to be a trend right now. I think the idea of having historical people in the novel is kind of similar to that discussion we had a while back on whether the story should involve real events or just take place in the period, and whether it's acceptible just to have a completely made-up family or what have you as opposed to someone famous.

Me personally, I tend to avoid it if at all possible, for the same reason that I avoid changing anything historical within the book - the less of that I do, the less likely I am to get things wrong. So far in my WIP, Oliver Cromwell appears for about thirty seconds, rides in, says something, rides out again, purely because he was actually there at the time and so would have been involved, but I think that's it.

On pdr's question about real people ... It's accepted, always has been accepted, to drag "famous" real people into fiction works. What's the difference? Puma

Huh?

Didn't get that, Puma. Of course famous names are mentioned in books but not as MCs. Are you glumping at me?

I'm complaining about people who can't make up their own characters, who latch on to a name with commercial posssibilities and write mediocre stories using the name as an MC and selling point!

Hate it! Hate being asked to review it!

pdr said:

I'm complaining about people who can't make up their own characters, who latch on to a name with commercial posssibilities and write mediocre stories using the name as an MC and selling point!

Click to expand...

I'm pretty certain we've been over this ground before, but in my opinion, this is more a matter of the quality of the writing and the story than whether or not the MC is a person known or anonymous to history.

Several of my favorite works of historical fiction incorporate real (and often very prominent) people as the main characters. Off the top of my head I would name The Killer Angels, The Sunne in Splendour, and the seven books of Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series as standout examples.

In my own case, I was drawn to the Second Punic Wars by the prominent figures of the era. Sure, I could have made up plenty of fictional characters, but why, when Scipio, Fabius, Flaminius, et al offer such fertile ground for storytelling and conflict as is?

My recommendation is to fudge as little as possible.

Of course, this is easy for me to say, because the period I'm writing about, while well-documented considering the time, has nothing like the detailed records or history of WWII. There are a lot of contradictions and outright holes in the history of the Second Punic War. As such, a lot is open to interpretation, from where a certain army pitched its camp to which Romans were elected to which minor offices in a given year.

But it is one thing to fill the holes or decipher two conflicting accounts of a battle. It is something else entirely to ignore recorded fact. Most of your readers may never catch it, but those who know the period will, and as a result they will be on the lookout for any further fudging (or, in their eyes, any further instances of lazy research).

I'm pretty much agreeing with pdr all around, here. But just to add a thought...

I think a lot depends on why you're changing or inserting something.

One could write an alternate history where the whole point is changing one thing and then speculating logically from that point onward. What if... Roosevelt had been assassinated in 1942? Or Germany had developed the atomic bomb first? In that case, even nit-picking readers will accept your changing that one thing, if you then speculate as realistically as possible afterwards. On a lighter note, I suppose one could say the "real people as detective" genre is like that: what if Attila the Hun decided to solve a murder mystery?

Or one could write a book about a famous person, with the goal of telling his or her life in a more vivid way than could be done from the information that survives. In that case, the point is to be faithful to your vision of the historic person, even while making up whole scenes entirely, because the goal is to evoke the person for the reader.

Or one could write a book set in the past, the way books are set in the present, entirely making up your main characters or towns or businesses and inserting them into the real world, yet still having them seem realistic and believable. Though all the characters may be totally fictional in a modern romance, that doesn't mean the author can casually toss in other made-up things, like headlines about England bombing Canada, without readers going huh?

I think readers have a sense of what's okay to make up, and what seems like just a mistake. Obviously it'll vary from reader to reader, but I think it's well worth figuring out why a novel will be better if historic information is changed or rejected, other than just for the convenience of the plot, because readers will notice and wonder--and the ones who notice the most will be the readers who are already most passionate about the subject and therefore, potentially, your book.

It snows in the mediterranean sometimes

Hi pdr - Now that you've explained what you were talking about, it makes sense. Where I was coming from is I think there are probably some darn good never told stories involving real but insignificant people. Puma

Ah ha!

Got you, Puma. Yes, there are hundreds of great stories about unknowns that deserve using as plot material with a nice little note about the original.

Forgot to add that yes, the Med is not quite as tough as the North Sea or Atlantic, but if you're thinking it's a nice quiet sea the answer is no. And yes it does snow in countries all round the Med.

My sailing colleague (sports sailor) here says you don't sail the Med in winter, it's nasty, and proof is to look at all the wrecks around in the coastal water.

P.S.
I'm pretty certain we've been over this ground before,
Yes, Doogs we have, and will, with monotonous regularity. This is, like many of the questions which are asked up in Novel and Short Fiction, one which people will bring up again and again. I've been teaching writers for long time and hear the same questions like a repetitive chorus each time. The answers get that way too. What else can one say?

tallus83 said:

The date would be January of 1943.

However, American PT Boats did not show up in England until June of 1944.

Click to expand...

But did they exist in 1944? If they did, that makes this kind of change more justifiable.

If you're writing a great novel and a fudge is absolutely necessary to the storyline, I say go for it. Fiction, after all, is fictional!

I tend to forgive fudges (or even outright holes in research) if the novel is excellent.

Just my opinion.