Working with existing people...

Sat Nam! (Literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

So, how do you see them, hear them, smell them in your mind's eye, ear, nose? Write that. Damn the possible historical torpedos! Full speed ahead!

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

You just have to do the best research you can, and take it from there. If you have a solid grasp of the known facts & context, you have what you need to extrapolate the rest. Ignore the possibility of being blown out of the water by future research. You're writing fiction, after all. The story is more important than academic precision.

(Full disclosure: I abandoned a historical fiction project some years ago because facts that I knew were relevant and potentially accessible were in practice locked away in an overseas archive where I would never have the time to get at them. I have since revived the project, but am filing off the serial numbers to get around the inaccessible-fact problem & change some other things that History Got Wrong.)

This has been a serious challenge for me, too. I was nervous to put real people into my work because what if I portrayed that person incorrectly? But at the end of the day, it's fiction. If you don't violate a known fact about that figure, then really you can do whatever you want. Practicing definitely helped me. I can from the opposite side, though. I'm more comfortable inventing personalities for people who very little is known about them.

I put Andrew Jackson into a novel I wrote. He was one of the more fun characters, in so far as I had some idea of his distinctive personality traits. I could use those as a guideline, so I didn't have to imagine him from scratch. He was not a potted plant.

The flip side, is I don't think I did a terrible job of imagining the characters who came 100% from imagination. I thought about their origins, what they wanted, what they feared, the roles they played in their society, and took it from there.

So for someone who only is known as a name and a few records, do the same as you would for any other fictional character. As much as I like well-researched stuff, don't let some hypothetical reader who's going to slam your book against the wall at the least deviation from their version of strict veracity. That person, if they exist, isn't going to be pleased anyway. The reader that wants a story to confirm their per-conceived political viewpoint isn't going to be pleased either, they want propaganda.

So just write a good story, that covers a lot of little faults, real and imagined.

I have this challenge a lot, writing about real characters from the teens and '20s. Most were Hollywood folk though. So to me, Attila would actually be easier, because you can make up more. Who can ask him if he liked barbequed yak better than barbequed Siberian elk? He's been dead for ages. No one can tell a barbarian's story better than you, right?

For me, I freaked out that there might still be people alive (in their 100s, of course, but still alive...) and I got very lucky to find a stash of out of print older Hollywood bios at one of our thrift stores here (someone had donated them from an estate of a collector and Hollywood fan). So I went back every week and picked them up for a steal as they put more out for sale.

And for locations and other content (buildings, or architecture that no longer exists), I research the living #$%^ out of stuff, however I can find the info (Google, books at the library, books at the thrift store, books and pamphlets at archives, online archives, whatever...).

I couldn't make it to two really important repositories of information on my main subject, but I joined a Yahoo group about her, and one of the guys on there had been to both places. He was a walking library on my person, and knew more about her than just about anyone alive. So I asked him if he'd like to beta my book.

Yeah, it sucked--- I had to rewrite MULTIPLE entire scenes, and those scenes touched and affected other scenes, but I'm much more confident about the content now. He kicked my butt, and I'm glad he did. He saw parts of her personality I hadn't even been able to grasp, not having seen the original paperwork of this or that, and my timeline was always out of whack in one way or another. He nipped that in the bud too.

For some of the silent directors I didn't know much about, I found even the tiniest pictures I could in the old bios or on google, and made up details about their personalities. Even the most obscure old Hollywood bios mentioned many of them, so between all those research books, I could find one tiny tidbit to use about someone. It worked pretty well, I think.

Good luck!

I've worked with real and not-real historical characters. In some ways, I enjoyed the real historical characters better.

There is a lot of information available about the real historical figures I wrote about in my previous WIP (about the Affair of the Diamond Necklace). And you know what? I really, really enjoyed that. There was so much material to work with, and the story was so amazing. I thoroughly enjoyed filling in all the whys and wherefores. Why did these people do these things? What crazy thoughts were going through their minds? And in the instances where they gave reasons via memoirs and court testimony, what's true and what's bullshit? I enjoyed the psychological aspect of it enormously. It made great material for a book.

I try not to worry too much about errors that others might point out. I'm human, and my best efforts are bound to fail in some ways. You certainly can't control future revelations--if a fact in your book is disproved two years from now, you can't be blamed. Ex post facto. Cut yourself enough slack to write your story. Do your due diligence and be respectful, but don't think that you have to please everyone ('cause you can't).

Rachel Udin said:

Newbie question again...

I admit I've done fan fiction for self-entertainment... and all of that, but I'm a little nervous about working with real people where the records have been lost on what they were really like. (Besides I've only written for *finished* series.)

I would find it easier to say, write Picasso than Attila the Hun.

Reading back, I'm finding that a lot of the characters that actually existed are turning out flat, while the characters that didn't exist and I made up are much rounder. Which probably means it's a baseline fear... I keep hoping something will show up in the research, but nothing does, which was originally why I chose it for the first Historical Fiction project. (Ironic, isn't it?)

So how do you get past that for historical fiction? How do you round out characters that existed when the next grand academic paper could prove you wrong?

Click to expand...

What do you think will show up? The person's secret diary? A smoking gun? I'm not being rude here, I just mean to make a point: you have events A, B, and C. The research isn't going to give you everything in between. The fun should be in figuring that part out (by the way, some of your previous posts here show that you seem to be doing this, so maybe you're worrying too much!).

benbenberi said:

You just have to do the best research you can, and take it from there. If you have a solid grasp of the known facts & context, you have what you need to extrapolate the rest. Ignore the possibility of being blown out of the water by future research. You're writing fiction, after all. The story is more important than academic precision.

(Full disclosure: I abandoned a historical fiction project some years ago because facts that I knew were relevant and potentially accessible were in practice locked away in an overseas archive where I would never have the time to get at them. I have since revived the project, but am filing off the serial numbers to get around the inaccessible-fact problem & change some other things that History Got Wrong.)

Click to expand...

I did that as well. I wanted to write a novel around Frances Stuart, cousin of King Charles II, but all of her letters were in the archive at the British Museum. And then another author beat me to the punch, so I abandoned the idea.

It is for this exact reason that I generally shy away from using a historical character as a MC. The record reflects one thing thus giving me very little opportunity to exercise creativity. I reason that I (breifly) chose Frances Stuart was because there is some dispute about her character, motivations, etc. She was generally regarded as an empty headed courtier, but her letters revealed that she had a good head on her shoulders. So in my mind, there is a great deal of interpretation still left. For instance, why did she disguise the fact that she was smart?

Interpretation is probably the reason why there are so many novels featuring Anne Boleyn or Marie Antoinette. There are endless biographies on each of them and what they did or did not do and why. It leaves a lot of room for artistic license.

As for myself, I try to use historical characters in the background and will generally base my descriptions, dialogue, etc on historical fact. I've never really felt that they weren't three dimensional.

I write both, and sometimes I find the real people easiest. My current WIP had Emperor Hadrian in it, so his career, family is a given. He was a complex man: he loved Greek art, philosophy and music, but also a violent temper and is known to have blinded a slave in a rage; he was foul towards his wife Sabina, yet deified her after she died; he fell passionately in love with a man that Roman society frowned on, and mourned him until the day he died.

I don't think I could make that up.

I find my fictional MC much harder to deal with. Questions like can he fall in love with this girl? Is it proper behaviour for a Roman to do this? I feel for my fictional characters, I need far more research into culture than the real ones. For example, if my hero is reading love poetry to his lover, what is he reading? Catallus? Sappho? Ovid?