Customs Change Over Time

 

I just re-read the first three books in the Cherry Ames series by Helen Wells. For those of you who don’t know, Cherry Ames was part of the craze for series about older teenage girls that started with Nancy Drew. Cherry was a nursing student and then a nurse rather than an amateur detective like Nancy, so most of the series takes place when she was a young adult. Although Cherry did solve some mysteries, they were secondary to her life as a nurse.

When I was a girl, my family occasionally stayed with my Uncle Lester and his family. My cousin Ann was four years older than I was and away in college during my high school years, so I slept in her room several times. One of the things I liked about it was Ann’s collection of Cherry Ames books, which I got to read while I was there.

Ann went to medical school and became a doctor, so many years later I asked her why she read books about a nurse instead of a doctor. If I’m remembering it correctly, Ann said she wanted stories with a medical setting and the Cherry Ames books were the best she could get.

By the time Ann started medical school, it was already the late 1960s and female doctors weren’t as unusual as they had been. Fiction hadn’t caught up with the times, however.

This isn’t a criticism of the Cherry Ames books. Nursing is a noble profession, and society needs nurses as well as doctors. Those first books in the series were consistent with the state of the medical profession when they were written and published in the 1940s. Although there are no female doctors or male nurses in them, there is also no suggestion that those roles are inappropriate and, for all I know, female doctors and male nurses may have appeared later in the series. Furthermore, I believe those books were written the way they should have been. Even though they were not historical fiction when they were written, they were set during World War II and have become historicals simply by occurring in an easily identifiable historical setting.

I strongly believe that historical fiction should reflect the time it is set in. Many of my novels include beliefs and actions that are not popular today. For example, Learning to Surrender has a protagonist who believes in slavery during much of the book until circumstances show her the evils that exist even for slaves with “good” masters.

This doesn’t mean that historicals can’t give a nod to today’s thinking, but it must flow with the story. A good example is Tenmile by Sandra Dallas, which takes place in 1880. The protagonist often helps her doctor father, and people tell her that she would be a good nurse. Nobody except the housekeeper encourages her to become a doctor, although the protagonist’s father seems to be wavering in his opinion when the story ends. The protagonist is still too young to become either a doctor or a nurse, but the reader has learned there is a medical school that takes women, and we are confident that will be the protagonist’s future. The prevailing opinion among the people in the story is consistent with the times, however.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with books that intentionally change history and admit it, and temporarily misleading information is often crucial to a plot during the course of a novel. But if you want readers to come away believing your historical setting is correct, you should make sure it is.

Always respect the reader.

World War I Food Quirks

 

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I’m a stickler for getting the period details right in my historical novels. That includes the foods my characters eat.

I’ve been working on two books that take place in the Midwest during World War I. The subjects are different, but the settings are similar, and so are the meals.

In 1917, the government created the U.S. Food Administration and commenced a heavy propaganda campaign encouraging citizens to grow their own vegetables and eat less wheat, meat, and sugar. While there was no shortage of those items in the United States, the government needed them to feed the soldiers overseas.

Although the restrictions were mostly voluntary, the propaganda campaign was successful and people tried to comply. To do that, Americans learned to be creative.

Some of the substitutions weren’t too bad. Wheat bread was frowned on, but cornbread recipes abounded, muffins could be made with oats or bran, and sugar was often replaced with honey. I cringe at the meatless options, however. Here is a recipe for Mock Sausage, originally published in The Twentieth Century Club War Time Cook Book (1918):

1 cup lima beans

½ tsp powdered sage

½ tsp dried thyme

½ tsp dried sweet marjoram

corn or vegetable oil

salt

pepper

flour

 

Soak lima beans overnight, boil until very soft, drain and mash, season with salt, pepper and a half teaspoon each of powdered sage, thyme, and sweet marjoram; make into rolls about the size of a finger; roll in flour and fry a golden brown in corn or other vegetable oil.

 

I was a fussy eater as a child, but my appreciation for new foods grew as I got older.

Still, I’m very glad I didn’t live during World War I.

__________

The picture at the top of this page shows a poster issued by the U.S. Food Administration during World War I. It is in the public domain because of its age.

Getting History Right

 

This week’s blog post is a reprint from June 20, 2016. It is another one I wrote while working on  Inferno.

Getting History Right

You’ve probably heard that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was started by a cow. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, to be exact.

The rumor was apparently begun by a reporter who wanted a colorful story to tell in his newspaper. It spread as quickly as the fire and had equally disastrous results—at least for the O’Leary family. Mrs. O’Leary never lived it down, even after the rumors were shown to be false. After all, people thought, every rumor has some truth to it.

And there was a germ of truth in this one. The fire did start in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn. But it started long after Mrs. O’Leary had finished her milking, taken away the lamp, and retired to bed in the nearby house.

One plausible theory is that a careless neighbor was smoking in the hay-filled barn. Another report speculated that men were gambling there and one of them knocked over a lamp. While the cause is still unknown, it is unlikely that Mrs. O’Leary’s cow did it.

I have started researching my next middle-grade historical novel, which takes place during the Great Chicago Fire. So how historically accurate do I need to be? Should I include the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow?

Personally, I believe that historical fiction should be as accurate as possible. That doesn’t require me to ignore the story, but I need to place it after the fact and treat it as the rumor it was. I’m not far enough along to know whether I’ll even use it, but it can be done without portraying the contents of the rumor as fact.

With her back against the church wall, Julia pulled her legs up and hugged them. To her left, a woman held a squirming toddler and watched an older child rock back and forth.

“One of those Irish immigrants started it,” the woman told Julia. “She was milking a cow and left the lantern too close to his hoofs.” The mother moaned. “One kick, and now my children are homeless and the entire city is gone.”

“Did you see the cow do it?” Julia asked.

“No, but everybody’s saying it, so it must be true.”

The rumor of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started within a day or two after the fire, and the existence of the rumor is factual even if the contents aren’t. The trick in writing historical fiction is to find a way to incorporate them without validating them.

Because false rumors have their role in history, too.

__________

The illustration at the head of this post was published in Harper’s Magazine in 1871. It is in the public domain because of its age.

Sifting Through the Rubble

 

This week’s blog post was originally published on August 15, 2016, when I was writing Inferno.

Sifting Through the Rubble

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 is one of the best-documented events in history. Chicago was a newspaper town, and within 48 hours most of the major papers were back up and running. They had plenty of eyewitness accounts to choose among, including those from their owners and reporters. Other educated persons quickly published their own eyewitness accounts. Then the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners held a public inquiry, heard sworn testimony from fifty-one witnesses, and published its report—all before the end of the year.

Even so, much of the evidence is inconclusive. We know where the fire started, but we don’t know how. We don’t even know exactly when. (The evidence puts it anywhere between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.) We know that the early response to the fire was a comedy of errors (combined with circumstances beyond anyone’s control), but we don’t always know who was responsible for the errors or the reasons for them. And only God knows whether the fire could have been controlled if everything had gone right.

In 1871, even the most reputable newspapers had a taste for sensationalism. Besides that, eyewitness testimony is only as reliable as the eyewitness is. Some people misinterpret what they see, some exaggerate, and some simply make things up for effect. So how much of the eyewitness accounts can I use in my middle-grade historical novel on the Great Chicago Fire?

Take this story:

One little girl, in particular, I saw, whose golden hair was loose down her back and caught afire. She ran screaming past me, and somebody threw a glass of liquor upon her, which flared up and covered her with a blue flame.

At first glance, the story looks pretty improbable. Not because the girl’s hair caught fire—that was common. But would somebody really be mean enough to throw alcohol on her? Still, maybe it wasn’t meanness and the person was so intoxicated that he thought his drink would put out the fire like water would. Besides, the eyewitness was Alexander Frear, a visitor who was a member of the New York State Assembly and a New York City commissioner. Surely we can believe someone like that.

Maybe yes, and maybe no. I can hear you saying, “Never believe a politician.” But for me, the biggest problem with Mr. Frear’s account is that it is filled with similarly dramatic events. One or two such instances might simply mean that Mr. Frear was observant and knew how to use vivid language to describe what he saw, but the entire account seems over the top.

So even if it’s true, I won’t be using the story of the girl catching fire from a liquor bath. And that’s okay, because I don’t need it. There are plenty of better documented yet still dramatic incidents scattered among the many eyewitness accounts.

It’s all a matter of sifting through the rubble.

Detecting History

 

This week’s blog post was originally published on August 6, 2018, when I was researching as as yet unpublished novel about the Siege of Vickburg during the Civil War.

Detecting History

Only detectives should write historical novels. I don’t mean the kind of detective with a magnifying glass or a knowledge of fingerprints. But writing historical novels requires a significant amount of research and deductive reasoning to get the history right.

In June, I dragged Roland along on a research trip. I am writing a book that takes place during the Civil War Siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and I wanted to do some research at the library in the Old Court House (pictured above) and visit the battlefield. While there, I gathered information on a real girl named Lucy McRae. She never comes onstage in my book and is only mentioned briefly, but she was trapped in a literal cave-in and I want my protagonist to hear about that incident. Also, Lucy comes from the same income class as my protagonist, so they would probably live in the same part of town and attend the same school. Knowing more about Lucy helps me make my own character more authentic.

My earlier research indicated that Lucy was 10 or 11 years old, but the movie at the battleground said she was 13. When writing for a middle grade audience, that is a big difference, and I needed to determine whether she was younger or older or the same age as my twelve-year-old protagonist. This is where the detective works comes in.

The research library had copies of the 1861 city directory and the 1850 census but none of the 1860 census. The 1861 city directory and the 1850 census showed a William McRae who was a merchant. At the time, he had four sons and no daughters. Was he Lucy’s father? He could be if she was 10 or 11 in 1863 since she would not have been born when the 1850 census was taken. And it was also possible that she could have been 13 if the census was taken early in the year and she was born right afterwards. But the 1850 census listed the youngest boy as less than a year old, making it less likely that Lucy would have been born shortly after.

And was this even the right William McRae? Several sources identified Lucy’s father as the sheriff, and both the city directory and the 1850 census listed this William McRae as a merchant. So did he become the sheriff by 1863?

After returning home, I went online and found a copy of the 1860 census. It showed a William McRae who was listed as sheriff and named the same wife and sons as in the 1850 census. The 1960 census also showed a daughter, Lucy, and gave her age as eight, which is consistent with her being ten or eleven at the time of the siege. Mystery solved.

But it took some detective work.

Chasing Details

 

On Saturday I gave a talk at the Hammond Historical Society, which I titled “Living in the Past: The Art of Researching Historical Fiction.” In preparing for the speech, I went through a number of past blog posts that related to the subject. Since I am still trying to catch up after Roland’s knee surgery and hosting people here after Christmas, I have decided to reprint several of them this month. Even if I wasn’t backed up, though, I think they are worth repeating.

These particular blog posts are loosely tied together by the detective work they involve when working to get the historical details right. This one was originally published on November 10, 1914.

Chasing Details

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I am working on a middle grade historical novel about the Japanese American incarceration during World War II. My research included numerous memoirs and other non-fiction accounts. While they agree on the broad picture, they do not always agree on the details. So what’s a writer to do?  

Here’s one example.

My protagonist lives in Berkeley, California when the war breaks out, and she and her mother are sent to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California. The sources agree that the Japanese Americans at Tanforan ate all their meals at a mess hall. But they don’t agree about who provided the dishes.

A minor point, you say? Yes, and the story certainly doesn’t hinge on its accuracy. Still, I’d like to get it right if I can. When I read a story and notice an inaccuracy, it makes me less likely to read anything else by that author. An error in my story will bother me, but it may also shrink the audience for my next book.

I purchased and read three memoirs and one near-memoir from people who were incarcerated at Tanforan. All of them mention their first meal there. In Citizen 13660, Miné Okubo says she picked up a plate, knife, and fork at the dishware counter in the mess hall and wiped her plate clean with her handkerchief. Toyo Suyemoto agrees and notes that she had to wipe off the particles of food clinging to the dishes (I Call to Remembrance: Toyo Suyemoto’s Years of Internment).

But Yoshiko Uchida and Haruko Obata both remember bringing plates and utensils to the mess hall. The Uchida family’s dishes were in their as yet undelivered luggage, so the three women took their place in line each “clutching a plate and silverware borrowed from friends who had already received their baggage” (Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family). Obata remembers, “At the dining room we had to bring our own plate, knife, fork, and spoon” (Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata’s Art of the Internment). [Emphasis added.]

I could leave those details out, but they provide atmosphere and show the conditions the residents lived in. Either they brought (and washed) their own dishes, or they ate from ones that had food remnants clinging to them. One way or the other, adding the details shows that the Japanese Americans weren’t living a life of luxury at a vacation spa. (Believe it or not, that’s what some Caucasians claimed.)

So what do I do? The best I can, which in this case means to evaluate the sources and make an educated guess.

The accounts from people who were there are evenly split. But since memories fade over time, the account closest to the events is often the most accurate. Okubo’s book was published in 1946—four years after the events—while Uchida’s wasn’t published until 1982, and the other two were published even later. On the other hand, Uchida kept diaries most of her life and, although I don’t know whether she kept one at this time, she may have pulled her description from a contemporaneous account. So it is still a stalemate.

Fortunately, there is other evidence. Two photographs taken by Dorothea Lange on June 16, 1942 show people waiting in line to enter the mess hall. Lange’s own caption for the photo at the top of this post reads, in part:

Supper time! Meal times are the big events within an assembly center. This is a line-up of evacuees waiting for the B shift at 5:45 P.M. They carry with them their own dishes and cutlery in bags to protect them from the dust.

If you look closely, you will see some of the white cloth bags she refers to.

Another piece of evidence is the official “Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry.” These instructions told the Japanese Americans what to pack, and the list included “sufficient knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, and cups for each member of the family.”

Looking at the evidence as a whole, my best guess is that Uchida and Obata were correct and the Japanese Americans arriving at Tanforan had to use their own dishes.

Am I sure that I have it right? No. And there are other arguments for and against that I don’t have space to go into here. But my job is to do the best I can.

Because even little details can be important at times, and sloppy research is as bad as none at all.

__________

The photograph at the head of this post shows a mess line at Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California. It was taken by Dorothea Lange on June 16, 1942 as part of her official duties as an employee of the United States government. Because it is a government document, the photo is in the public domain.

A Good Friday Declaration of War

 

In 1917, President Wilson declared war against Germany on Good Friday. That’s fine, I guess, except it caused me extra work to get history right.

I spent a lot of time on the first chapter of my current work in progress, and I was pretty happy with it as a first draft. Then I was going through some old hymnals, thumbed through the Easter hymns, and realized that two of the important historical events underlying my story had taken place the first week of April, when Easter sometimes falls. Sure enough, Easter fell on April 8 in 1917, meaning that the United States’ April 6 declaration of war against Germany fell on Good Friday.

So why was that a problem? The first chapter couldn’t have happened the way I wrote it. I started with the paperboy crying “Extra! Extra! U.S. declares war on Germany.” That would have been okay, except my protagonist and her friends heard the announcement as they left her Lutheran school that afternoon. No parochial school—and few, if any, public schools in those days—would have been open on Good Friday.

The fix has them leaving the Good Friday service at their church. Unfortunately, doing involves quite of bit of reorganization as well as both additions and subtractions. I can, however, use some of the cut material later in the story. So the work I had already done isn’t a complete waste.

I’m just glad I caught my mistake in time.

__________

The image at the head of this post is a 16^th century painting attributed to Frans Pourbus the Elder. It is in the public domain because of its age.

Researching the Old-Fashioned Way

 

I am preparing to write a middle-grade historical novel about a German-Lutheran girl living in America during World War I. Germany was the enemy, and people of German ancestry living in the U.S. were often treated as enemies even if they were loyal Americans.

One of the most shocking cases of persecution here in the U.S. was the lynching of Robert Prager on April 5, 1918. It took place in Collinsville, Illinois, which is less than twenty miles from St. Louis, Missouri. The nearby Belleville Public Library maintains old copies of The Collinsville Herald on microfilm, and St. Louis is the home of the Concordia Historical Institute, which holds the archives of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. Since many LCMS congregations were affected by the suspicions of their non-German neighbors, it made sense to travel to the St. Louis area to search through relevant documents.

That’s what I did last week. I had already done what Internet research I could and had read a number of non-fiction books about the impact of the war on German-Americans, but it wasn’t enough. So I checked into a hotel that would be my home for the next four nights and started at the Belleville, Illinois public library, which carried copies of the weekly Collinsville newspaper as well the daily Belleville News-Democrat. I had already read up on the Prager incident, and The Collinsville Herald gave me those same factual details but not much else. The Belleville News-Democrat carried less about the lynching but was a much better source for the mood and the atmosphere of the time. I was hoping for personal experience stories and didn’t get them, but my time at the Belleville library was still worth-while.

I spent the next two days at the Concordia Historical Institute in St. Louis. Most of my time there was spent going through LCMS publications from 1914 through 1919. Again, I didn’t find much in the way of personal experience stories, but the archives were a good source of background information to help me understand the reasoning behind some of the decisions that my protagonist’s father would have made as pastor of a local German-Lutheran congregation.

Although I would have been happier if I had come away with some personal experience stories (memoirs, diaries, letters) or even cites to some I could look up later, it give me a better idea of the flavor of the times. Between that and learning more background, it was a good trip.

If I discover that a historical novel has the important facts wrong, I put it down and walk away. I’m not the only reader who does that, either.

Research is essential to a good historical novel, and I won’t write one without it..

__________

The image at the top of this post is a political cartoon aimed at German-Americans during World War I. I don’t know the creator or the original source, but it is in the public domain because of its age.

History Dates Terminology

When writing historical fiction, the vocabulary is almost as important as the story. Labor Day has always been called that and has been celebrated on the first Monday of September ever since it became a national holiday in 1894. But stories that occur before then had better not talk about a national Labor Day holiday. That reference simply was not in the vocabulary at the time. (Not unless they were talking about trying to promote one, anyway.)

Memorial Day, on the other hand, started out as Decoration Day. It was called that because it was dedicated to decorating the graves of fallen servicemen. People gradually started calling it Memorial Day, especially after World War II, and the name became official in 1967. It was originally observed on May 30, regardless of the day of the week. Then, in 1968, in a quest for three-day weekends, Congress moved it to the last Monday in May. Anyone who includes Memorial Day in a historical novel needs to be award of this history.

So what made me think about historical terminology now? I am currently researching a book that takes place during World War I. But I can’t call it that because, at the time, nobody knew there would be a World War II. In fact, some people called it “the war to end all wars.” Obviously, they were wrong. During that war, and up until there was a second world war to make this one the first, people called it “the war in Europe” or “the Great War” or simply “the war.” In writing my story, I need to use the same terminology that my characters would have used.

Because the wrong vocabulary tells the world that you don’t care about historical accuracy.

__________

The picture at the top of this post shows an early Labor Day parade. I couldn’t find an exact year or location for the photo, but it is in the public domain because of its age.

Old Time Vocabulary

 

Slang and even formal vocabulary change over time. As a writer of historical fiction, my challenge is to stay true to the period without confusing my readers with words they define differently.

Some slang is practically timeless. “Okay” has been around since at least 1840, and “kids,” as in little children, was in use as long ago as the seventeenth century. Since my characters and my readers have the same understanding as to the meaning of these words, I don’t have to think twice about including them in a manuscript.

Other words aren’t as clear. I ask my middle-grade beta readers whether there are any words they didn’t know and couldn’t figure out from the context. When I got back the evaluation forms for a novel set in 1925, one fourth grader included “fast” on that list. At first, I was confused. Who doesn’t know what that word means? But when I searched the manuscript looking for it, I came across a scene where my protagonist asks her mother if she can get her hair bobbed and the mother responds that short hair makes women look fast. Now I understood the beta reader’s comment, and I found a way to rewrite the scene using language today’s children are more likely to know.

Then there are the slang words that need careful handling. Historically the word “gay” meant cheerful or merry, and all of my characters would have understood it that way. Defined that way, it was in frequent use during the periods covered by my novels, so avoiding it seems a little stilted. But because my readers would give it a different meaning, “gay” doesn’t occur in any of my middle-grade manuscripts.

Then there is the question of when a particular slang word entered the American vocabulary. Would my character have used a particular word at the time of the story? Fortunately, about two years ago I found a used copy of the 3^rd edition of the Dictionary of American Slang by Chapman and Kipfer. If I look up a word, that dictionary may tell me whether it was in use at the time. If it doesn’t have dates, or if the word is not included, then I’ll do an Internet search for “[word] origin.” And if I still can’t figure out when it became popular, I won’t use it.

Writing historical fiction is always a challenge.

But it’s rewarding to get it right.

__________

For more on this subject, you can read my January 25, 2021 and February 1, 2021 blog posts.

Time Changes Travel

 

 All historical fiction travels back in time, but matching the story to an exact time can be tricky. The overland routes to the California gold fields changed quickly as more and more people followed them. Furthermore, no two routes were exactly the same since pioneers and prospectors explored different cutoffs in their attempts to reach California as quickly as possible.

So how much can I rely on personal experience stories from several years before or after the one I am writing or that take slightly different routes? Then there is the additional problem of how the writer views the world. One of the most helpful memoirs I have is A Frontier Lady by Sarah Royce, but that tells the story from the perspective of a young mother. The diary of fourteen-year-old Sallie Hester is a closer fit, but she is still a female. My twelve-year-old male protagonist just isn’t going to think the same way as either Sallie or Sarah.

Having several journals and memoirs to rely on gives me a fuller perspective. Besides, some things don’t change. The sight of Chimney Rock had the same effect on travelers in 1865 as it did in 1844, and it’s easy to assign the same reaction to my protagonist.

Still, if I want to be as historically accurate as possible (and I do), I must be sensitive to the author's status as well as to the year and the route in each journal and memoir. Dealing with the inconsistencies. required me to make some judgments, but that’s a necessary part of the process.

Because time changes travel.

Standing Out

 

I’m working on a trilogy that covers the three main ways people traveled to the California gold fields during the middle of the 19^th century. The first two routes (around Cape Horn and across the Isthmus of Panama) haven’t been written about much, at least not for children. However, the third route is from Missouri to California over the plains and through the mountains. This overland route has been almost done to death when you include the stories of pioneers who took the route looking for farm land rather than gold and the similar stories of those heading to Oregon rather than California.

As I’ve said before, I have two main criteria when choosing the setting for a historical novel. The first is that there must be enough personal experience resources so that I can sense the atmosphere (emotional, moral, and physical) of the time and place as well as gathering the dry facts. All three routes to the gold fields meet that condition. But the second criteria is that it must not have been done so much that people are tired of it or think there is nothing to add.

The overland book appears to fail this second criteria because it has been done many times. But if I want a complete series about traveling to the gold fields, I have to include it. So what am I to do?

Notice I said people think there is nothing to add. Although there is nothing new under the sun, there is always a different way to tell it.

Fortunately, I have some ideas about how to do that.

First, most of the children’s books about the California and Oregon trails have protagonists who travel with their family. The children may be orphans before the trip is over, but it starts out as a family adventure. That isn’t the case with my protagonist. Joshua runs away from an abusive stepfather and stows away in a wagon. That isn’t a spoiler because it happens at the very beginning of the story. Then he spends the entire trip looking over his shoulder and worrying that his stepfather or the law will catch him.

Second, most of the stories out there take place in a wagon train. Mine will start that way, but before long two wagons split off, and Joshua goes with them. While it wasn’t unusual for one or two wagons to travel by themselves, few children’s books cover that situation.

At this point, all I have is a short outline. As the story develops, I’m sure I’ll find other ways to make it stand out.

__________

The drawing at the top of this post is in the public domain because of its age.

Prejudice vs. Reality

 

As I’ve mentioned in past posts, some of the people who joined the California gold rush took a route across the Isthmus of Panama. My current work-in-progress follows that path.

Once the gold seekers reached the eastern shore of Panama, the next leg of their trip was up the Chagres River. The vast majority seem to have hired canoes with native crews, as each of the men in my collection of journals did. So it makes sense for my protagonist’s family to do the same.

But here’s the problem. The journals give the impression that the natives were untrustworthy and lazy. At first glance, it appears to be a stereotype fueled by prejudice. But maybe it isn’t. The natives’ behavior is a common theme and the narratives include concrete details. In some cases, the natives weren’t anywhere to be found at the time contracted for departure. In other cases, they left during a rest stop and had to be rounded up before proceeding. Sometimes it even took an extra payment to get them to provide the services they had promised. The native crews did eventually get the men to their destination, but it was a frustrating experience for the travelers.

So here’s my dilemma. Good historical fiction portrays reality, and the reality appears to be that the natives had a different work ethic than the American and European gold seekers. If I describe the situation the way the journals do, I open myself to a charge of prejudice. If I don’t, I open myself to a charge of altering history. I can’t win.

Or maybe it isn’t as bad as it seems. My protagonist is a twelve-year-old workaholic, and I can play into that. My current solution to the dilemma is to have her father contract for a canoe with a native crew the night before with the agreement that they will leave first thing in the morning, but they don’t show up until the afternoon. When Lizzie complains to Pa, he says the natives have a different culture than the Americans, who are always impatient and uptight. Then he tells Lizzie that she can learn something from the natives because she needs to relax more.

That solution may change with subsequent drafts, but I won’t sacrifice historical reality to sanitize my story.

__________

The image at the top of this post shows an 1850 oil painting by Charles Christian Nahl titled The Isthmus of Panama on the Height of the Chagres River. It is in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

Journaling Across the Isthmus

 

As I’ve mentioned before, diaries, journals, and other personal experience accounts are my favorite research materials. I’ve found a number of journals documenting the trip across the Isthmus of Panama on the way to the California gold fields in the mid-1800s, but there’s a problem.

All eight accounts were written by men who traveled without their families.

There are enough references to assure me that women took the Isthmus route, too, but if they kept diaries or wrote letters about the experience, I haven’t been able to find them. That’s not really surprising since the vast majority of gold seekers took the overland trails across the prairies and mountains of North America, and the percentage of women and children traveling that route was much higher than it was for the other two main routes, including the one across the Isthmus. But women generally have a different perspective than men, so it would be nice to hear their side of the story.

It isn’t as much of a problem for me when writing the ocean part of the trip. Ships varied, and those that carried passengers usually had separate sleeping accommodations for women and families. So privacy probably wasn’t an issue.

It was for the trip across the Isthmus, however. It’s amazing how similar the experiences of the eight men were, sleeping crowded together in crude one-room buildings—or in even more primitive conditions when the “hotels” were crowded or unbearable. As far as I can tell, the women would have had to sleep right alongside them, to turn away when the men relieved themselves, and to find their own spot in the jungle—complete with snakes and fire ants—where they wouldn’t be disturbed when they took care of their own needs. I’d love to know their thoughts, but I can only infer them.

Unfortunately, my protagonist has to live with those conditions. I can imagine how she would feel, but I’d rather have confirmation from women who were there.

Still, I’ll figure it out.

__________

The image at the top of this post shows a painting called Crossing the Isthmus. A.D.O. Browere painted it around 1858, and it is in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

A Fiery Business

When 12-year-old Julia is sent to stay with her cousin Fannie in Chicago, neither girl likes the arrangement. Then the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 sweeps through the city and separates them. Can they survive on their own?

I am pleased to announce that I just released my third middle-grade historical novel, Inferno, which is available in paperback or on Kindle. If you or your friends have daughters or granddaughters in 3^rd through 6^th grade, please consider recommending it or buying it for them.

Anyone local to Northwest Indiana can purchase Inferno or any of my other books in person at the following events: 

• Saturday, April 23, 2022, from 12–3 p.m. at the Local Author Fair, Hammond Public Library, 564 State Street, Hammond, Indiana; and
• Saturday, May, 21, 2022, from 12 – 4 p.m. at the Creative Arts Summit, Lake County Public Library, 1919 W. 81^st Ave., Merrillville, Indiana.

If you are local, I’d love to see you at one of them.

For readers who can’t make either book signing, Inferno is available on Amazon at this link Inferno on Amazon. It will soon appear on the Barnes & Noble website, as well.

They Were There

 

I enjoy reading historical fiction, but only if it is an accurate portrayal of the times and events. So when I write my own historical novels, I am careful to get the details right. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to experience the events. Researching the facts helps some, but I want to know what people went through and how they felt about it.

That’s why I love personal accounts. Memoirs. Diaries and journals. Newspaper interviews. Letters.

My first middle-grade historical, Desert Jewels, is about a Japanese American girl living in California when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and it follows her through a temporary assembly center at Tanforan to a more permanent camp at Topaz, Utah. I picked that particular path because there was a wealth of personal experience information, including four memoirs—with Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family by Yoshiko Uchida providing particularly valuable information. My research also made use of newspaper archives from Tanforan and Topaz, where the articles were written by residents and columns showed their sense of humor and unique take on their experiences.

Diaries were an important resource for my as yet unpublished book about the Civil War siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Diaries were fashionable in the mid-1800s, and I had plenty to draw from, especially the diary of Mary Ann Webster Loughborough (published as My Cave Life in Vicksburg). I am currently working on another book that takes place a few years earlier and tells the story of a girl sailing around Cape Horn on her way to the California gold fields, and the journals kept by men following that path are extremely helpful.

Those are all events that cover months and, in the case of the Japanese American internment, years. But what about disasters that cover periods too short to generate memoirs or diaries? Historical society collections can be helpful there. When I was writing about the Great Chicago Fire, I studied the many memories collected by the Chicago Historical Society to understand what my characters would have done and what path they might have taken to flee the fire.

But it isn’t just fiction that can benefit from personal accounts. I just finished reading Liar Temptress Soldier Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott. Those women’s notes and memoirs gave the book a story-like quality that a purely factual account would have missed.

Letters can be helpful, too. When I wrote my first non-fiction book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, I included several chapters on what the founding fathers meant by the First Amendment. But I didn’t want to rely on other people’s opinions. Thomas Jefferson was in France when James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights, and the two men corresponded as often as the slow mail service would allow. Those letters gave me a better insight into their thoughts than I could have found elsewhere.

The point is simple. If you want to add authenticity to your writing, read what it was like for those who experienced it.

Then give your own characters those same thoughts and feelings.

Bringing History to Life

 

This week I am reprinting a post I published on the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog on February 5, 2014. I am using it as a lead-in to several blog posts about historical research.

Bringing History to Life

Have you ever been told to “write what you know”? Some writers think that means they should only write what they have directly experienced. But if everyone felt that way, we would have no historical fiction and no biographies of long-dead individuals.

So what does the phrase really mean? I think it has two components.

The first component is research. Assume I want to write a story about the RMS Titanic disaster in 1912. I wasn’t there, so how can I make it realistic?

I can start by getting into the heads of those who were there.

Autobiographies, letters, newspapers, and “as told to” accounts are better than history books for learning what people actually experienced. And for more recent events, interviews can provide additional information by showing the anguish in people's voices and the pauses to compose themselves before talking about losing their fathers or brothers 

The Titanic survivors are all dead by now, so I can’t talk to them. But several wrote books or articles about the experience, and many more were interviewed by newspapers in the days following the disaster. There are even some tapes where you can hear the emotion in the survivors’ voices. These are all resources that a writer can tap into to understand what the participants experienced 

The second component of writing what you know is as simple—or as gut-wrenching—as breaking the experience down and reaching into your own background for related incidents and emotions. How can you portray the feelings of a character waiting to board a life boat or sitting on the ocean and watching the ship go down? He or she would probably have terrified. But you’ve been afraid, too. Remember the feeling and magnify it. Have you watched a loved one die? Use that. We all experience the same things in different degrees, so take your own reactions and modify them to fit the situation.

I believe in writing what I know. But that doesn’t mean I have to have been there.

__________

The photo at the top of this page was taken by Francis Godolphin Osbourne Stuart as the RMS Titanic left Southampton, England on April 10, 1912. The image is in the public domain because of its age.

Telling History Through Story

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: I managed the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog for six years before IWC closed its doors at the end of 2018. The idea was that all IWC members would contribute posts, and some did. However, there were also many gaps where we would have missed our weekly publishing schedule unless I came up with something. The blog missed fewer than a half dozen posts during those six years because I filled in the slots. Some were fairly generic posts, such as quotes from writing masters or recommendations for craft books, but others were more substantive. Although all posts are still available in the blog archives, I have decided to resurrect some of my substantive posts and reprint them here from time to time. I’ll start with one that may explain why I write middle-grade historical novels. “Telling History Through Story” appeared on the IWC blog on July 2, 2014.

__________

Telling History Through Story

When I was a child, I hated history. Well, hated may be too strong a word. It’s probably more accurate to say that history bored me. But I loved reading, and I loved stories.

I also loved what I used to call the “blue true books.” They were biographies of famous Americans that concentrated on the childhood years, and they had a blue cloth cover at that time. As the picture shows, the cover has changed over the years, and the series now has an official name: “Childhood of Famous Americans.” I’m guessing that many of the incidents in them are pure fiction, at least for the earlier books that would have been harder to research.

But I learned something about history because it was told as an engaging story.

These days I enjoy history in most forms, but I still prefer it as story. My library contains an ever-increasing number of memoirs and autobiographies and first-person accounts of historical events. When those primary sources aren’t available, or when they need supplementing, I turn to well-written biographies and other secondary sources. And I still read the “blue true books” when I come across them at used book sales or museum book stores.

Even as an adult, I learn best when history is told as story. That’s a good lesson for authors who write history as either fiction or non-fiction. If you want to capture the attention of a reluctant audience, use story. Don’t just write about the 4^th of July—write about people who lived it.

One other caveat. Even when writing fiction, the story must be historically realistic. Not every detail needs to be accurate, but it must be true-to-life.

I recently heard about a novel set at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. It sounded interesting, so I went on Amazon and read the reviews. They said it was well told but historically inaccurate. The author had the Americans liberating the camp instead of the Soviets. So even though it might have been an engaging story, I didn’t buy it.

But as long as you keep the important details intact, you can broaden your audience by telling history through story.

Detecting History

Only detectives should write historical novels. I don’t mean the kind of detective with a magnifying glass or a knowledge of fingerprints. But writing historical novels requires a significant amount of research and deductive reasoning to get the history right.

In June, I dragged Roland along on a research trip. I am writing a book that takes place during the Civil War Siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and I wanted to do some research at the library in the Old Court House (pictured above) and visit the battlefield. While there, I gathered information on a real girl named Lucy McRae. She never comes onstage in my book and is only mentioned briefly, but she was trapped in a literal cave-in and I want my protagonist to hear about that incident. Also, Lucy comes from the same income class as my protagonist, so they would probably live in the same part of town and attend the same school. Knowing more about Lucy helps me make my own character more authentic.

My earlier research indicated that Lucy was 10 or 11 years old, but the movie at the battleground said she was 13. When writing for a middle grade audience, that is a big difference, and I needed to determine whether she was younger or older or the same age as my twelve-year-old protagonist. This is where the detective works comes in.

The research library had copies of the 1861 city directory and the 1850 census but none of the 1860 census. The 1861 city directory and the 1850 census showed a William McRae who was a merchant. At the time, he had four sons and no daughters. Was he Lucy’s father? He could be if she was 10 or 11 in 1863 since she would not have been born when the 1850 census was taken. And it was also possible that she could have been 13 if the census was taken early in the year and she was born right afterwards. But the 1850 census listed the youngest boy as less than a year old, making it less likely that Lucy would have been born shortly after.

And was this even the right William McRae? Several sources identified Lucy’s father as the sheriff, and both the city directory and the 1850 census listed this William McRae as a merchant. So did he become the sheriff by 1863?

After returning home, I went online and found a copy of the 1860 census. It showed a William McRae who was listed as sheriff and named the same wife and sons as in the 1850 census. The 1960 census also showed a daughter, Lucy, and gave her age as eight, which is consistent with her being ten or eleven at the time of the siege. Mystery solved.

But it took some detective work.

Getting the Details Right

Sometimes I feel sorry for authors who write contemporary stories. Unless they generalize current trends (which some do very well), they run the risk that their stories will become as outdated as the technology and fads embraced by the characters. Who knows if Facebook or Twitter—or even cell phones—will still be around in two years?

Since I have been writing historical fiction, I don’t have that problem. People know that the story takes place in the past, and that’s part of the reason they read it. My technology doesn’t have to be up-to-date. In fact, it had better not be if I want to story to ring true.

So historical fiction solves one problem, but it creates another.

For the past week or two, I have been wrestling with fictional closets.

The story takes place in 1871 and has two protagonists, who are 12-year-old cousins. Julia has come to stay with Fannie’s family in Chicago for six months, and the girls share a room and limited storage space. When I wrote the first draft, Julia was upset at the size of the bedroom closet.

Then Roland and I took a short vacation to Savannah, Georgia, and toured a couple of historic houses. And I discovered that none of them had closets.

Instead, they had trunk rooms. Everyday wear may have been kept in dresser drawers in the bedrooms, but most clothes were neatly folded inside trunks. The trunks were stored in a room that was often reached by a door from the hall but not directly from the bedrooms. If a trunk room was attached to a bedroom, it was likely to belong to the parents but not the children.

Change #1 to my manuscript removed the closet from the bedroom and replaced it with a trunk room in the hall. But now I had another problem. When the Great Chicago Fire breaks out, Fannie throws on the dresses that are handy in her bedroom. For reasons I won’t go into here, I want to keep that scene.

Change #2 added back a closet but made it a very tiny space with a few hooks. (The hangers and clothes rods we are used to were mostly unknown at the time.)

But that didn’t seem right, either. Then someone from my critique group suggested a wardrobe (as shown at the top of this page). Unfortunately, wardrobes weren’t a common feature of children’s bedrooms in 1871, even among the well-to-do living in urban areas. I considered that solution but rejected it before making the next round of changes.

Change #3. I eliminated the closet again but added several pegs along one wall in Fannie’s bedroom. That’s where I’m at right now.

When writing historical fiction, authors don’t have to keep up with today’s technology and fads and hope they won’t pass too quickly. But we do have to get the historical details right.

And that isn’t easy.