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Historical Fiction, Timeline of Events

TrapperViper

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Hi All,

I am writing an Afghanistan war novel that is very loosely based off of real life events.

In June of 2008 an Afghan prison was raided that resulted in the freeing of over 1200 Taliban prisoners. For the timeline of my plot, however, I'd like to have this event occur in may of 2009 instead of the summer of 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarposa_prison_attack_of_2008

The same prison was attacked again in 2011 and by way of tunnel 475 Taliban prisoners escaped.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarposa_prison_tunneling_escape_of_2011

So, my question is, can I get away with having one of these prison breaks occur in 2009?
 
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TellMeAStory

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You might consider appending an author's note, something like ...the events depicted as occurring in x year, actually occurred in z year. In this story, the date was altered for fictional effect. (hopefully, more gracefully worded than that.)
 

CathleenT

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OP, if I know an author has messed with a factual timeline, I won't read the work. I gather that some people don't care, although I don't know the percentages. I'm fine with adding characters and conversations. Fictional characters can have their own timelines, but to me, real events have to happen on time. So, if you've got a fictional family homesteading during the Civil War, all the battles and such better happen at the correct times. But the time table on the farm, and whether they got their crop in or what have you, that's all up to the author.

Otherwise, it's alternate history, something which I usually avoid. YMMV.
 
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Chris P

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Could you use a fictional prison and have similar events happen at the time you wanted them to?
 

Woollybear

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As a reader, I want to feel that I know what is reliable and what is not, in HF. I want clear indicators from the author as to what is real. i think this comes from emphasis.

In The Kite Runner, the emphasis was on relationships and general qualities of life in Afghanistan--Pashtun and Hazara and the relationships between the two groups. All the scenes that could have been historical events took a back seat, narratively.

So, I'd say it depends on your execution. As a reader, I would not want you to claim that the 2008 1200-inmate breakout of Sarposa occurred in 2009. But if you claimed a smaller prison had a smaller breakout, and all of that was fictional while the story attempts to say something true about ... you know, the human condition or what have you, I'd be OK with it.
 

TrapperViper

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OP, if I know an author has messed with a factual timeline, I won't read the work. I gather that some people don't care, although I don't know the percentages. I'm fine with adding characters and conversations. Fictional characters can have their own timelines, but to me, real events have to happen on time. So, if you've got a fictional family homesteading during the Civil War, all the battles and such better happen at the correct times. But the time table on the farm, and whether they got their crop in or what have you, that's all up to the author.

Otherwise, it's alternate history, something which I usually avoid. YMMV.

Shoot. Thank you for being direct and honest. That helps a lot.





Could you use a fictional prison and have similar events happen at the time you wanted them to?

Thank you for the suggestion.


CathleenT, if i keep the saraposa prison break in 2008 the same and mention it, but also create a different prison like Chris suggested, would you be OK with that? Perhaps I can use the fictional prison break to be the tunnel one that occurred in 2011 at saraposa?



Also, Cathleent, to avoid anyone wondering if the characters I write about were them, I changed some of the units. Would you be OK knowing that the national guard units I write about weren't there at the timeline of the story? I was planning on addressing this in the afterword.

Thank you all!
 

TrapperViper

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As a reader, I want to feel that I know what is reliable and what is not, in HF. I want clear indicators from the author as to what is real. i think this comes from emphasis.

In The Kite Runner, the emphasis was on relationships and general qualities of life in Afghanistan--Pashtun and Hazara and the relationships between the two groups. All the scenes that could have been historical events took a back seat, narratively.

So, I'd say it depends on your execution. As a reader, I would not want you to claim that the 2008 1200-inmate breakout of Sarposa occurred in 2009. But if you claimed a smaller prison had a smaller breakout, and all of that was fictional while the story attempts to say something true about ... you know, the human condition or what have you, I'd be OK with it.

thank you! I responded to chris and Cathleen before this. I think you answered the questions I directed at Cathleen, but feel free to elaborate!

Kite runner is fantastic, but I need to read that again. Been a while.
 
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CathleenT

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TrapperViper,

Doing the real break and then a fictional one would be akin to mentioning Antietam and then making up a Civil War battle. Just think for a moment about how pissed a lot of people would be over that.

I would say that if you're going to use a fictional prison and timetable, then all prisons and breaks need to be fictional. As a reader, I wouldn't want to have them keep switching back and forth between fact and fiction.

Changing the units, OTOH, is a good idea. You can justify that easily by saying it's to protect the identities of individual soldiers.

Why are you so keen to move an event from 2008 to 2009? Can't you just scene break to avoid any boring bits? Maybe this is something that someone here will have a solution for if we talk about it.
 
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Sonya Heaney

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Could you use a fictional prison and have similar events happen at the time you wanted them to?

I would do this.

I'm in a similar situation with the book I'm finishing at the moment. I needed a shipwreck and a flood that really happened to work for my story, and they ... didn't ... I was trying so hard to make my story fit real history, and it was mangling the book. In the end I used fictional versions but based them on real events.
 

TrapperViper

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Thank you all. I'm leaning towards fast forwarding the 2011 prison break to occur in 2009 instead of 2011 so that my narrator can experience it. I also think that doing a fictional 2009 prison break some place else t could work just fine too. Either way I'm changing history, and if that would demotivate readers like Cathleen I'd prefer to find another solution. Or just deal with it how it happened.

Why are you so keen to move an event from 2008 to 2009? Can't you just scene break to avoid any boring bits? Maybe this is something that someone here will have a solution for if we talk about it.

I'd like the narrator to show up to war right after 1200 Taliban prisoners escape. Then, before his tour ends, the prisoners break out again. To have him feel the futility in the whole thing. The prison break is not the climax but it facilitates the reader experience I'm driving for. It is not necessary, just icing on the cake.
 

frimble3

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How far forward can you move the start of his tour? If 1200 men escaped from a prison on their home territory, I'd think it would take ages to round them all up.
Him showing up 'right after' is kind of a variable - I imagine the troop would be wired up for quite a while - Talibanis running loose, patrols are out looking for them, the terrorists are jubilant, bases are probably jumpy about unknown people approaching the gates, etc. And, everybody wanting to talk about it to the new guys.
Heck, maybe he heard about the first raid when he was in training, and he's all keyed up.
Have your guy come in a little afterwards, and keep the second break-out where it was?

Because you're right, it has a nice circular effect: "Will this madness never end?" kind of thing.
 

TrapperViper

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Thanks Frimble. I thought about that (changing up the timeline of his tour) but I want Obama to get elected the summer of his tour. To have the MCs black commander react to the election and for the MC to experience that reaction.

It is funny, it only took two years to round up almost half the same number that escaped, only to have them escape again through a tunnel and an inside job.
 

CathleenT

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So, the main problem is that a tour of duty wouldn't last from 2008 to 2011? Are you certain? Could he be stationed there for more than one tour?

I don't know what to say concerning the election, except that in 2008 Obama was at least running. Even that was historic. I don't know if that can give you the effect you're looking for, but perhaps you could reprise a conversation with the same commander after the election.

You don't have to answer any of this stuff. I'm just spitballing. : )
 
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Lakey

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It’s pretty common in historical fiction to tweak timelines; it’s also pretty common to create fictional versions of real events so that you have more wiggle room with the timeline. I really wouldn’t worry about doing that.

There may be some readers this will annoy. But it is probably impossible to write a book that annoys no-one.

I can think of boatloads of examples of the kind of tweaks I’m talking about, but one that I just read last week is B.A. Shapiro’s The Muralist. She postulates a fictional artist who palled around with real people like Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollack, and Mark Rothko in the late 1930s. Oops: Krasner and Pollack didn’t actually meet until more than a decade later. In Shapiro’s book, the protagonist proves to be a missing link, an important unnamed influence on the birth of the Abstract Expressionist movement. (In real life, if there were such an influence, it was more likely to have been Krasner herself.) In the book, the protagonist becomes friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, who buys some of her paintings and displays them in her home, inviting all kinds of dignitaries to come see them; Charles Lindbergh writes an editorial blasting the artist and Roosevelt for doing this. Also entirely fictional. The protagonist gets mixed up with an activist group and ends up participating in an assassination attempt against Deputy Secretary of State Breckenridge Long, a real person, against whom there actually never was an assassination attempt.

There are probably people who would throw the book at the wall in a rage at any one of these bendings of history. I thought it was a pretty good story (though I had some complaints about its execution that have nothing to do with historical accuracy). And I read it with Wikipedia to hand so that I could look stuff up and find out whether it really happened — this is often how I read historical fiction, and it’s one of the ways I use historical fiction to learn real history.

The point is that you are writing historical fiction, not history, and that gives you some license to fictionalize events. Different readers have different tolerances for how much fudging you can do, and you’re not going to be able to please every reader. So do what serves your story, and what feels to you like not so much fudging that you’re substantively changing the history. There is plenty of precedent in historical fiction for the kind of change you’re proposing — making up a fictional prison break that has a lot of earmarks of the real one seems to me a good way to go.

:e2coffee:
 

Elle.

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One quick question: if it takes place in 2008/2009 shouldn’t that make it contemporary and not historical fiction?

Sounds like it’s inspired by real events which in my mind doesn’t make it to be completely accurate so I too vote for using a fictional prison instead of the name of the real one.
 

TrapperViper

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One quick question: if it takes place in 2008/2009 shouldn’t that make it contemporary and not historical fiction?

Sounds like it’s inspired by real events which in my mind doesn’t make it to be completely accurate so I too vote for using a fictional prison instead of the name of the real one.

From my research, other war novels that have recently published that take place during this same time frame are labeled by publishers as historical fiction.

Thank you for your input!
 

indianroads

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I'll go against the flow and will advise that you NOT alter events.

A lot of ex-military people read these sorts of books, many of which were deployed in Afghanistan/Iraq. These readers are very likely to catch your alterations and leave blistering reviews. Yes, you are writing historical fiction - fiction being the important thing to catch... all I'm saying is that you should be careful.
 

frimble3

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Okay, you'd need to run this by someone (or someones) who know more about the military than I do, but:
Your eager young man signs up and is shipped out in the spring of 2008 - the escape was on June 13, so, a little wiggle room - he may have come in a week later. His deployment proceeds.
In November 2008, Barack Obama is elected. (I believe the troops could vote? At least they certainly talked about the campaign and the election.) Life goes in the war zone.

Now, brief change to your story: I think that a tour of about a year is normal? Which is where the gap before the 2nd prison break becomes unduly long? You need about 3 years, total.
Without messing around with strange reasons for him to stick around, why not have him send home, where he talks about stuff, hears about stuff, and decides to re-deploy? Finish the job, so to speak - maybe there's a news story about a unit or a village being attacked, he's imagining what he could have done if he was there, so he asks to be sent back. Apparently not unheard of, 99,000 men had 3 re-deployments. I believe there's a demand for experienced men?

Anyway, he goes back, more skilled and experienced by now, and does his best - until the second prison-break, when he realizes that he can't really change anything, that it's just the same stuff, again and again. This time he goes home for good.

If you need a reason for him to stick around 'home' without actually leaving the Army, maybe take some courses that he thinks might be useful? Advanced training, languages, etc? That should take some time.
 

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You could mess with the tour of duty instead of the dates. But despite the many complaining about it on this thread, I doubt most people will care. Some pharmacist/medical care friends of mine were very irritated with the Knives Out plot point involving morphine due to massive technical inaccuracies, but it didn't keep them from enjoying the movie. Certainly didn't spoil the effect for anyone else.

I don't know how plausible it is, but could your protaganist insist on extending his tour to capture the remaining prisoners?
 

TrapperViper

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Thank you all. It's an interesting problem but a fun one to solve. I think I'll just keep it all as accurate as I can to historical events and then talk about Sarposa prison break in 2011 in an epilogue.
 

TrapperViper

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Thank you all. It's an interesting problem but a fun one to solve. I think I'll just keep it all as accurate as I can to historical events and then talk about Sarposa prison break in 2011 in an epilogue.
 

L.C. Blackwell

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In historical fiction, it's customary to write "between the spaces." So while I won't (usually) contradict a known fact, I do whatever I please with the gaps, so long as it falls into the range of plausibility. I have also shifted historical events that were not widely known, by anything from a few months to a year. (In the latter case, I might choose to add an author's note where I had deviated from strict fact, but this is a matter of preference.)

There's also room to slip more in than you might think. For instance, let's say you do decide to add another battle to the Civil War. Can you make that plausible? Yes, I think so. Just don't forget to add reasons it would never have been reported or known to historians--small engagement, detachment broken off shortly before or after a larger battle, and all the attention went to the main conflict; survivors kept the secret for some reason... You could invent a dozen scenarios. In fact, it's probable, given the way wars happen, that many a small and unofficial clash did go unreported. And don't forget the fun of conspiracy theories. An entire Confederate unit disappeared, and the government covered it up because....?

So in this case, I can't see the smallest reason not to invent your own prison, and prison break, and even military units. You may choose to base your novel on known events (and say so), but you're not writing a documentary. Don't be shy about it, either. You can write an introduction that begins, "The real-life inspiration for this novel occurred in (blah-blah real dates), when (blah-blah real events) took place. Blah-blah prison is an entirely fictional location, as are blah-blah-blah units of blah-blah branch of the armed forces." And so on.

Many readers enjoy knowing that the author is familiar with facts, but didn't hesitate to craft his own for a better story. (As an aside, however, I would think it preferable to invent military units and tours, rather than use real ones in fictional dates and events that are not plausible with known facts.)
 
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