Hey! Remember me? I’m through the holidays officially now, and so I should be back at the blog more regularly. There’s a ton I could write about today, but instead, I’m just going to write a little note about an aspect of historical fiction that can be frustrating at times.
Facts.
I know I still end up getting details wrong now and then, but I make a real effort to avoid that as much as I can. If and when I come across something that’s not accurate, I do whatever I can to change it and get it right. For example, when I was writing Family of Killers, I spent hours researching what guns would have been commonly available at that time in Kansas, and how they would have operated. Not because the book was all about guns, but because I wanted to make sure to portray it as faithfully as I could.
The thing is, I often don’t know ahead of time what I’m getting wrong until suddenly something clicks in my head and it dawns on me. When that happens, it can have far reaching effects.
Right now I’m working on a new book that takes place on Boon Island in Maine. It’s a place with a fascinating history, and I’m excited about the project. For decades, the island had a number of buildings on it. Residences for the lighthouse keepers. In the scene I’ve been working on, the main character ends up in the ocean and gets out of it, chilled to the bone. So of course I have him go into one of the houses and take a shower. Makes sense, right?
Until you realize that there was no running water on Boon Island. Ever. No showers. No bathrooms. They had outhouses even at the best of times, because the island is nothing more than a granite nub jutting out from the ocean. There’s nowhere to get water from other than salt water or bringing it in by air or sea, or else using rain cisterns.
So I’ve got to stop everything else I was working on with the book and go back and retool that scene. It’s not a big deal, but it is a deal. And I suppose it would be easy for someone not writing an historical book set on Boon Island to wonder what the heck is my problem, getting something simple like that wrong. To which I say, the point of the book isn’t to be a treatise on indoor plumbing on Boon Island. It’s to tell a compelling story and have as little get in the way of that as I can. I spent hours researching what the inside of the lighthouse looks like, because that was clearly something I’d want to get right. It was a known unknown for me.
Plumbing? I just defaulted to “It’s the 90s in America. I know what plumbing was like in the 90s in America” and went with that. I love the research process, but I also want to actually write the book. So in my writing process, there’s often this push and pull between getting the details right and moving forward with the actual action. Coming from someone who primarily wrote fantasy before i took a detour into historical fiction, there are little landmines like that scattered everywhere in the past, and I often find myself walking along, blissfully unaware until one of them blows up on me.
(Still, I’d rather it blow up while I’m writing the book than after it’s already done . . .)