Guest Post by Theresa Brown –
We could discuss endlessly the categories and subgenres of historical fiction. And we can agree with Ariel Lawhon that “historical fiction is not a genre.” No matter how we choose to structure our novel, it is historical fiction because it is set in the past. It is a section of shelves in your local bookstore or your library. That is all. For the potential purchaser or borrower of a book, the possibilities indicated by the “Historical Fiction” sector are endless in terms of time, place, and structure. Confronted with this vague generic optionality, where is a writer of historical fiction to begin a new project?
Try an actual place. If you are short on time or funds for travel, look to what’s under your own feet. Go local and excavate from there. Who were the people who cleared this land, drained those wetlands, channeled that now-hidden stream? Who were the people who erected those monuments; or who buried their own ancestor’s artifacts and why? How did their culture regard the notion of place, of belonging somewhere? Was land ownership part of their social structure, or were they nomadic or communal?
If you choose place as the starting point of your writing, then you can tunnel through time to a moment from which your story unfurls, and so much more unfolds. In addition to narrowing the scope of time travel, a sense of place delivers the raw materials for world-building. If you go local, or if you travel and immerse yourself in a locality, so much of your work as a storyteller is well begun: open your kit of senses and have at it – the quality of the light, the sounds, smells, tastes of the air, the feel of what is under your feet or your boat.
The deeper you delve into the sensory experiences of place, the more convincingly the secrets of the past will whisper to you. Could one always taste that rust in the air? In a post-industrial place, could you smell a dark thickness, perhaps from coal plants? Is that quality the same as now, or has the air changed? Could you hear the clang of machines and the gangs that ran them? Is there more noise now or less? Have you peeled back layers of time to when you can smell the hot, unfurling tarmac of the interstate highway system, or when you could drink in the heady fumes of pre-EPA gas pumps? What sculpted the inhabitable land in your place – McCormick reapers or donkey-engine sawmills? Hydraulic mining monitors or railroads? Eighteen wheelers, stagecoaches, dock lands, or exponentially increasing herds of horses and cattle introduced by Europeans to North America?
Given the moment you have chosen in your location, is your world pre-industrial or pre-colonial? What really grew in your micro-climate? What did people really eat? Go to as undisturbed a nearby place as you can find. Is it truly undisturbed, or did Native peoples have their own protocols for land management? Scoop up a gob of soil in your fist: smell it, rub it between your thumb and fingers. Listen to the sound of the grains of dirt. Was it always this way?
Answer any of these prompts, and you will find yourself in a line of a novel draft, either on a narrative trajectory that propels you onward, or in the informative and necessary graveyard for what does not serve your story. Very likely, you will soon encounter a character or two someplace on their arc. You will understand what they are feeling at that point, and you can write forward or backward from there.
Then, too, embrace your local history museums. Even the least sophisticated of these can serve as curiosity shops or magic wardrobes that you can step through to imagine a life, a drama in the past. If you are at a maritime museum, for instance, you might experience the heft of a hawser or come to understand why sea shanties helped to turn capstans. Or in a farming or logging region, you might touch the heavy axes, two-man saws, and scythes that incredibly strong people wielded to carve out places to live and grow food.
Remember the Fiction Writing 101 precept that place, as much as emotion, is an engine of drama. Put two people with irreconcilable differences in a sedate living room, and you will have to work harder to sustain a reader’s interest than if you put them in a sea cave trapped by a rising tide, or trespassing in a grove of sacred trees, or jumping the turnstile on a packed subway platform, etc. Place generates the tenor of interaction, the circumstances of drama.
A bonus to exploring the history of your local place is finding the creative community of local history buffs in your area. This keeps you connected with your work while allowing you the benefits of in-person interactions, and possibly even relevant movement – walking history tour or nature hike, anyone?
Sometimes, when I write about local history, I delight in the fact that I can look up from any reference work, any archive, any screen, and be in the physical moment of my characters. Some days, you need only do this and take notes.
So, shop local and get started.
I co-authored the nonfiction social history: The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship (HarperCollins, 2015). My fiction and essays have been published in national magazines and regional literary journals. I have won numerous awards for my writing. Bay Lands is my first novel published by She Writes Press. Previously, I wrote and independently published two novels, The Old Inn at Punta de Sangre, and Summitville. I live and work on the San Francisco Peninsula where I explore local social, economic, and natural history.
