Researching the Little Things

 

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been working on a story that takes place at the Grand Canyon. At one point, my protagonist visits the Tusayan ruins at a site that was inhabited by Pueblo Indians centuries ago. This is a very short scene in the book, but even short scenes should be factually correct.

As you can see from the photo I took in 2014, the “rooms” are identified with signs indicating how they were used (e.g., storage, living quarters). Since the signs don’t explain how the archeologists determined those uses, it is only natural for my protagonist to ask how they knew. And if she hadn’t asked, my readers might have wondered why she didn’t.

That’s where my initial research fell short. I have visited archeological sites before and have a general idea of how those determinations are made, and anything too complicated would confuse my middle-grade audience. So a simple description is good enough, and one paragraph was all I needed. Even so, I wasn’t totally confident in my answer, and I believe that even the smallest details should be as accurate as possible.

To check my limited knowledge, I purchased a book that used the excavation of a different Pueblo village to illustrate how archaeologist interpret the past. The book is called Life in the Pueblo: Understanding the Past Through Archaeology, and it gave me the information I needed. In fact, it was interesting enough that I read the entire book even though what I wanted to know came about a third of the way through. (I didn’t notice until I had already purchased it, but the archaeologist who wrote it is named Kathryn Kamp.)

It may seem that I went to a lot of work to ensure the accuracy of a very minor point in my book, and I suppose I did. It was worth it, however, because readers deserve to be able to trust even the smallest details.

So I’ll always research the little things.

Story Ideas That Are Out-of-Sync with Travel

 

In 2014, I dragged Roland along on a trip to Utah and California to do research for my first middle-grade book, Desert Jewels. Since Roland had never seen the Grand Canyon, we took a side trip to visit it. I had no plans to set a story there, so we spent our time at the tourist sites.

Now I wish I could have seen into the future. I am currently working on the first draft of a book that begins in the Oklahoma dust bowl in 1934 but then moves to the Grand Canyon for the rest of the story. The many photos I took as a tourist have been helpful for the setting, but I‘m missing some I would have taken if I had known. In particular, my online research tells me that the school building my main character would have attended is still there (although not in use as a school), but we didn’t visit it.

The limited knowledge I have of the school as it was in 1934 comes from a history page on the school district’s website. Although the page was quite helpful, it didn’t answer all of my questions, such as how many classrooms there were. Given that it was the third location and the second building actually constructed for the purpose, it seems logical that the attendance had outgrown the previous building. The enrollment listed in the article also supports that, with 29 students in 1914 and 250 currently. This makes it likely that there were at least two classrooms.

The website didn’t include contact information for the school or the person who put the history page together, but I did find an email address for the school librarian. Unfortunately, she hasn’t responded to my inquiry, so my conclusion that there must have been more than one classroom is simply an educated guess. An onsite visit would probably have answered the question, but I didn’t know enough to check it out a decade ago.

I also tried searching online for photos of the old school and found one labeled that way. There are two problems, though. First, I have no way of confirming that the caption identifies the correct building. Second, the front-end view isn’t enough to determine how many rooms were inside.

That’s what happens when I can’t foresee what my future novels will be about. It can also work the other way around, however.

Over a year ago I wrote a story about a girl who traveled around the Horn in 1850 on her way to the California gold fields. That manuscript is currently circulating among agents and hasn’t found one yet, but the lack of success may be a good thing.

When I wrote Around the Horn, I relied on journals written by people who had taken that trip in the mid-1800s. They were clearly the best resources, although it would have been nice to have supplemented them by taking the same route myself. I assumed, however, that it was a trip I would never take.

Wrong. Or maybe not, since we never know what the future holds. But after I started circulating the manuscript, Roland and I booked a cruise around the Horn for early 2026. We didn’t plan it as a research trip, and we aren’t stopping in the same ports as my characters did, but I’ll get whatever information I can out of it. Obviously, many things will have changed in 175 years, but much of the landscape will probably be the same.

I don’t really expect that what I see on my own trip around the Horn will change anything in the manuscript, but you never know. That’s why I’ve decided not to make another round of submissions until after I return. In this case, unlike for the book about the Grand Canyon, I may actually have a chance to do the research I didn’t expect.

But it sure would be nice if story ideas always coordinated with my travel plans.

Be Your Own Photographer

 

The final reason I take photographs is to document my site research. Although you may not take photographs for that reason, I’m egotistical enough to believe that you might find my process interesting. For that reason, I’m reprinting a blog post from March 21, 2022. (The book on the Pullman strike has been completed and is circulating among agents and publishers. The one on the Topaz Relocation Center is Desert Jewels, published in 2017 using the pen name Kaye Page and available on Amazon.)

Be Your Own Photographer

I’m currently working on a story that takes place in the Pullman neighborhood of Chicago during the 1894 Pullman strike. I found a number of images online, but since I live in the Chicago area, I decided to take a field trip and check it out for myself.

The Pullman factory is no longer there, although some of the buildings remain. More importantly, though, the residential parts are much as they were then. I can look at old photographs, and I did, but they didn’t give me the sense of place I received from walking the same streets my protagonists did and taking in some of the same sights they saw every day. Unfortunately, the feeling will eventually fade, so I try to keep it alive as long as possible through my own photographs.

Here are some I took while walking around the neighborhood. The one at the beginning of this post shows the wide, tree-lined streets, which were a drawing point back then as they are now. The next one shows the type of skilled workers duplex that my protagonists live in. The rest show, in order, the Greenstone Church my protagonists attend, part of the old Pullman factory, and the Pullman Hotel.

Fortunately, Pullman is a historic neighborhood and much of it has been preserved and/or restored. The same isn’t true of the Topaz War Relocation Center.

Topaz was dismantled and the buildings sold off after the war, and the last two photos show what it looked like when I visited on a research trip in 2014. Even though the camp itself was gone, being there reinforced the photos taken during the war and emphasized the sense of isolation and desolation the 8,000 inhabitants must have felt.

So if you have the opportunity to go on location to research your story, be sure to take a camera along.

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.

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.

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.

Guidebooks to History

 

The characters in my current work-in-progress have to wait in New York City for several days before boarding a ship for Panama and the California gold fields, and they explore the city during that time. So how can I learn what NYC was like then? Download and read old tourist guidebooks.

It’s amazing what you can find on the internet. My story takes place in 1850, and an internet search came up with two guidebooks from around that time. Appleton’s New York City and Vicinity Guide was published in 1849, and The Stranger’s Hand-Book for the City of New York was published by C.S. Francis & Co. for use in 1853 and 1854. Both gave me a feel for the major tourist attractions that my characters might have seen and I picked the most likely ones, including the view from the top of the Trinity Church tower and the fountain at Central Park (then just called “the Park”).

Of course, I still had to be careful because things can change quickly. This is especially true if the guide is published after the story’s date. In the days before the Panama Canal, my protagonist and her family take a steamship to the Atlantic side of Panama, cross the Isthmus by canoe and mule, and pick up another steamship at Panama City on the Pacific. When talking about the ships leaving New York City for Panama, The Stranger’s Hand-Book states that “The transit of the Isthmus by the Panama Railroad is performed in from 18 to 24 hours.” The railroad was not finished until 1855, however, and the guide was probably quoting some optimistic member of the company building it. That’s fine with me since I can get a lot more drama from a crossing that occurs before the railroad is built. But my point here is that a writer should double-check facts even when using contemporary materials.

I also needed to be sure that the information in the 1849 guide was still current in 1850. At a time when fires were an everyday occurrence, one or more of the buildings referenced in Appleton’s guide could have burned down before my characters arrived in NYC. All the sights I used were referenced in both Appleton’s guide and The Stranger’s Guide-Book, so I can be fairly certain that nothing happened to them in-between.

So if you are trying to describe what a city was like in the past, see if you can find a guidebook from that time.

But don’t forget to check its facts.

Photos Tell the Story

 

Last week I wrote about using memoirs and other personal accounts to research a historical novel. This week I’ll cover the benefits of using old photos to supplement those resources.

Again I’m going to draw my examples mainly from the research I did for Desert Jewels because the War Relocation Authority hired professional photographers to take thousands of photographs during the removal and internment of the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. The photos were presumably intended to show the country that the Japanese Americans were being treated humanely, but some, especially by Dorothea Lange, ended up being censored because they showed a different story. Fortunately, they have since been released and are available for historical research.

In most instances, the Japanese Americans were originally sent to assembly centers, which were intended as temporary homes until more permanent camps were built. The photo at the top of the page shows four children, presumably siblings, after arriving at the Turlock Assembly Center. Notice the tags they had to wear for identification but which also made them feel like a number rather than a name.

Then there is this photograph, showing the horse stables that were turned into makeshift “apartments” at Tanforan Assembly Center and were occupied for months before the families living in them were transferred to the Central Utah War Relocation Center, commonly known as Topaz. As you can see from the photo, living conditions at Tanforan were not humane.

The third photo is a panoramic view of Topaz. Several families were crowded into each of those barracks. Worse, the desert was a desolate setting for the Japanese Americans, most of who were used to the lush vegetation of western California.

Or to use a research example from another book, here is how downtown Chicago looked a day or two after the Great Chicago Fire had burned itself out. (The photo shows the corner of State and Madison.)

Memoirs and other personal experience accounts are the most important research sources, but photos can supplement that research by providing a more a vivid picture (literally and figuratively) of what life would have been like.

And that makes them another valuable research tool.

__________

Dorothea Lange took the first two photographs and Francis Stewart took the third. All three are in the public domain because they were taken by War Relocation Authority photographers as part of the photographers’ official duties as employees of the United States government.

The last photo is in the public domain because of its age.

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.

Dealing with Reader Expectations when the Reader is Wrong

 

The courtroom scene from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is pure farce, and nobody would believe it. So why do television viewers believe crime shows that are almost as outlandish? And why do they expect me to perpetuate the fallacies in my own work?

I am currently writing a murder mystery with two parallel threads, one of which is a police procedural. I have done extensive research into those procedures and am trying to portray them accurately in the manuscript. However, I keep running up against critiquers who say, “but they don’t do it that way on TV (or in books).” And they give me the impression that my readers won’t believe me if I tell the truth. So what’s a writer to do?

In some cases, I’m dealing with the issue by being vague. Do the police really need a warrant or subpoena to see a murder victim’s financial records? I did an internet search and everything I came across discussed access to the suspect’s records, not the victim’s. Financial records aren’t crucial to the murder in my book, but I’m concerned that some readers may stop reading if they don’t see the procedures they have come to expect from TV. So when the detectives talk to the victim’s attorney, I wrote the passage this way:

Staci wrote down the information [about the value of the victim’s estate]. “Please give us her accountant’s contact information so we can review her finances.”

“I’ll email it to you,” Mr. Hunter said. “And when I talk to her daughter, I’ll ask if she’ll give permission for you to go through the records.”

Since those records belonged to a murder victim rather than a suspect, the police wouldn’t have any trouble getting them. Still, the process was always easier if the family cooperated.

Then, when Mr. Hunter talks to the victim’s daughter, he says this:

“The police will want to go through your mother’s financial records. Sometimes family members think of it as an intrusion, but the police will get the information with or without your consent. It looks better if you cooperate.”

Hopefully these passages will satisfy the reader while being vague enough to include the real facts.

Another way to deal with the issue is to explain the seeming inconsistency. For example, on TV shows the detectives always seem to be present at a lineup. I’m setting my story in Chicago, and the Chicago Police Department procedures absolutely prohibit that. So while the suspect is participating in a lineup, my detectives are at their own desks. Here is the way I explain that:

Although Staci would have liked to watch, it wasn’t possible. Under departmental policy, members of the investigative team weren’t allowed to attend a lineup. Even the detective who ran it couldn’t know who the suspect was. That way, nobody would say or do anything, intentionally or unintentionally, that would suggest who the witness should identify.

Of course, this approach creates several challenges. The explanation has to be short but, more importantly, it must blend into the story and advance the plot. If it interrupts the flow or reads like filler, it is better to leave the explanation out altogether.

Another challenge is describing matters my POV character doesn’t witness. I usually resolve this problem by having someone who was there tell Staci what happened. Or, as in the case of the lineup, she imagines what would have happened based on her knowledge of the procedures, after which somebody comes and tells her that the witness did identify the suspect.

From Dust to Dust will go through more drafts before it is completed, and these passages may change.

But I refuse to sacrifice accuracy for reader expectations.

__________

The image at the head of this post is one of John Tenniel’s original illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It is in the public domain because of its age.

Choosing a Protagonist from Another Culture

 

Last week I explained why I chose a Japanese-American protagonist for my first middle-grade historical novel. But that protagonist was half Caucasian and grew up in a white neighborhood with a culture not that different from mine, as contrasted to the protagonist in my second middle-grade book.

Here is the blurb for Creating Esther.

Twelve-year-old Ishkode loves here life on an Ojibwe reservation, but it is 1895 and the old ways are disappearing. Can a boarding school education help her fight back, or will it destroy everything she believes in?

Using a Native American protagonist was not an easy decision. I had no experience with the culture or reservation life, and I knew it would be a struggle to create an authentic character. But I wanted to tell the tragic story of how the boarding schools “civilized” the Indians, and no other perspective seemed to work.

I mentioned in the last post that Kirby Larson used a white protagonist in his book about the Japanese-American incarceration and did it very well. Fortunately, there were a number of people like his protagonist and her father who sensed the injustice and sympathized with the Japanese-Americans.

That wasn’t true for the Native-American boarding school experience. Memoirs written by white teachers capture a very different feeling than the ones written by Native Americans. Even those teachers who truly cared about the children had the mistaken belief that they were doing what was best for them by taking away their culture and making them “white.” So even though I could have put a white teacher’s daughter among the Native American students, it would have been unrealistic to give her the necessary understanding of and sympathy for her classmates’ plight.

Creating Esther was a very hard book to write because of my Native American protagonist, but I felt I had no choice. After extensive research, I did the best I could, and I believe I was successful. If not, I apologize.

But sometimes you have to take the risk.

__________

Creating Esther is available in paperback and Kindle versions from Amazon and in paperback from Barnes & Noble.

Writing from Researched Experience

 

I’m about as WASP as you can get, but the protagonist of my first middle-grade book, Desert Jewels, is not. Here’s the blurb.

Twelve-year-old Emi Katayama is half Japanese, but she is all American. Then Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, and she suddenly becomes the enemy.

So why did I write this book? The Japanese-American incarceration is a part of our history that often gets ignored, and I wanted to change that. All American children should learn the bad parts of their country’s history as well as the good ones. If our children understand the past, they are less likely to repeat it.

I could have used a white protagonist who lives outside the camp, as Kirby Larson did very effectively in the Dear America book The Fences Between Us, but I wanted to get closer than that. I did, however, give my protagonist a Swedish-American mother and placed Emi in a “white” neighborhood in Berkeley rather than in San Francisco’s Japantown. That allowed Emi to share some of my culture.

It also gave the book a different perspective than most. Even 1/16 Japanese blood was enough to send a child to the camps, and, while it was rare, there were a handful of Caucasian woman in each camp who had chosen to join their children or husbands there. None of the books I read dealt with this experience.

Still, Emi is half Japanese and I have no Japanese blood. I have also never experienced life in an internment camp. So what qualified me to write the story?

Research is key. Since I didn’t live through the experience, my research relied significantly on the voices of those Japanese Americans who had. Autobiographies, letters, newspapers, and “as told to” accounts are better than history books for learning what people actually experienced and how they reacted emotionally.

I was fortunate to have good materials available when writing Desert Jewels. Emi follows in the footsteps of Yoshiko Uchida, who lived in Berkeley, was initially incarcerated at Tanforan Assembly Center, and was then sent to Topaz (officially known as the Central Utah Relocation Center). Hers was one of several memoirs by people who traveled that same path. In addition, the camp newspapers from Tanforan and Topaz are available online. So I had a wealth of information to use when trying to create an authentic experience for the reader.

Next week I’ll talk about Creating Esther and my thought process in choosing a Native American protagonist to tell that story.

__________

Desert Jewels is available in paperback and Kindle versions from Amazon and in paperback from Barnes & Noble.