Remembering Thirty Years Later
When I was young, I remember watching a period TV drama with my parents about the fortunes of a well-off family prior to World War 1. It actually ended with the war breaking out. I can remember today how disappointed I was at this. I can remember also the many discussions I had with my mother who claimed how impossible it was for the show to go on, because World War 1 changed society so radically. All I could put in against that was: “But I want to know what happened to these people.”
I was recently reminded of this when I started reading crime-writer, Elizabeth George’s book: Write Away: One novelist’s approach to fiction and the writing life. The very first chapter is titled: Story is Character. From the start she makes clear:
Is this why historical fiction is often more popular than the dry academic tomes which gather dust on the shelves of our libraries? Stories need people to bring them alive and to create identification. Which, to go back to my TV drama, is why I can remember very few of the events of the series but the characters—their names, personalities, loves and lives remain engraved in my memory some thirty years on.
So how do we create such memorable characters? George gives us three tips:
- Remember that real people have flaws as well as positives traits. Perfect people are either boring or priggish. Nobody likes them. Usually they are also hypocrites. We’re just not like that. If we want to create any element of identification with our readers, then we have to make them real by giving them flaws.
- We all have moments of self-doubt and weakness. Doubt is essential to our being. It’s part of what we are and what we become. True, we all react differently when doubt rears its (sometimes ugly) head. But we still cannot escape from it. If we are to create real-life characters, doubt will have to be a part of their make-up.
- Real people grow and change through circumstances, so should the characters in your novel/story. Such change usually comes about as characters face up to conflict. They may sail through, they may succumb. Usually, we land somewhere between the two. But the fact is, when we emerge from conflict, we do so as different people. And that’s what we need to aim for with our characters.
Well, I wonder how many of my characters will be remembered thirty years on. And how many of yours.
I would like to draw attention to the following passage in this post:
“Is this why historical fiction is often more popular than the dry academic tomes which gather dust on the shelves of our libraries? Stories need people to bring them alive and to create identification.”
This is an unfair comparison – apples and oranges. I am an academic historian who writes historical fiction, and I have heard – indeed, have made – this same disparaging remark myself. But it’s rather like accusing a giraffe of being too tall. Academic history, popular history, and historical fiction all pitch to different audiences; each audience reads its genre with an eye to particular content and standards. Trust me, a good work of academic history, knee-deep in footnotes, may be quite exciting if you’re a historian, specializing in that field.
Academic history is a study, not a story… and yet every historian who is being honest will admit that there is, indeed, a story. It’s right there in the very word history, after all. But it’s usually a story with many, many holes in it.
I really am surprised more historians don’t write historical fiction. For me, historical fiction is a wonderful opportunity to imagine the lost or tattered story, to fill in the holes in the research. More often than not, those holes are filled with people’s lives – the things that usually do not enter into “studies.”
And yet historical archives are full to the brim with private correspondence, never meant to be read by strangers – often very moving prose that lays bear real life with an immediacy and an impact few novels can ever match. Historians are awash in good ideas for stories. They also are awash in good ideas for believable characters.
I have heard professional colleagues disparage historical fiction because it is fiction. I understand their concern: in the field, we try to train our students to separate evidence-based arguments from constructed memory, or “stories.” But memory and story-telling remain important, as every well-trained historian knows. The brutal but brilliant movie “Enemy at the Gates” (starring Jude Law) reminds us that even a society without any heroes may have to find them and invent them. People crave a character they can follow. The great forces that move the world only make sense, to most of us, when they can be identified with a person.
I am reminded of the social commentary novels so popular in late 19th and early 20th century America, which sought to reveal the abuses and excesses of industrial society to middle class audiences by placing these developments in the context of stories about farmers, meat-packers, and so forth. “The Wizard of Oz” was one of these – an especially imaginative example of the genre. We have forgotten the context entirely, and yet even after all these years the old world knows about Dorothy and the Wicked Witch.
Hi William, thanks for your comment. Sorry for this late reply. I’ve been on holidays and only saw your comment this morning.
Please let me reassure you that it was not my intention to denigrate historians or historical research in any way. I realise how important these are, both in a general sense and also for writers of historical fiction in particular. Good historical fiction requires solid research. I also agree with all you said in your comment. All I wanted to do was to point out that historical fiction is more popular than historical fiction. This was not meant as a judgment upon academic works. I realise now my choice of words “… dry academic tomes…” could give a false impression and was unfortunate. But this was not my intention.