history

The Top 7 Details You Need to Think About When Writing Historical Fiction

November 27, 2016 By Guest

Please welcome back Warren Adler, the acclaimed author of The War of the Roses, a masterpiece of macabre divorce adapted into the BAFTA and Golden Globe-nominated hit film starring Danny DeVito, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. Adler has also optioned and sold film rights for a number of his works, including Random Hearts and Private Lies. Adler’s works have been translated into more than 25 languages, including his staged version of The War of the Roses, which has opened to spectacular reviews worldwide. Adler has taught creative writing seminars at New York University and has lectured on creative writing, film and television adaptation, and electronic publishing. He currently has a number of film/TV adaptations in various stages of development with Grey Eagle Films including The Children of the Roses. His novels are now available as audiobooks through Audible. His latest historical fiction release, Mother Nile, has been received with spectacular reviews from critics and readers alike.

The Top 7 Details You Need to Think About When Writing Historical Fiction

I’ve always considered myself a history buff and have written quite a few historical fiction novels requiring exhaustive amounts of research. Creating believable historical fiction means getting facts straight and making sure that your research and imaginative input inspires the most plausible, complex plots and characters you can possibly bring to life. Here I lay out the top 7 components you need to think about when writing historical fiction.

Research, Research, Research

Writing historical fiction can be intimidating and you might feel either overwhelmed by the amount of research that is required or constrained by the time period, in turn making your writing flat and boring. If you haven’t done enough research for your novel then it will be evident to readers – the environment you create just won’t have that pull. Doing enough research doesn’t just mean reading up on dates and public figures but delving completely into the historical period you’re writing about. My most popular historical fiction novel, Target Churchill, centers on a fictionalized Soviet conspiracy to assassinate Churchill in order to prevent him from delivering his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Mo., in 1946. I co-authored the novel with the Pulitzer-Prize nominated Churchill Biographer James C. Humes and spent months reading Winston Churchill’s memoirs, accounts of the events leading up to the Iron Curtain speech; composing his speech in the British embassy in Washington; facts about Soviet spies who had penetrated the embassy during the war; the relationship between Churchill and his lone bodyguard. Walter H. Thompson; details of the Soviet advance into Berlin; events surrounding Truman’s invitation to Churchill to speak at Westminster College in Missouri; the marvelous, true events about the famous poker game on the Presidential train en route to Missouri; and the Churchill family history at the time. It was all grist for the novelist’s mill. My research led to new characters and sub-plots. It was all so rich and intriguing that I could have spent a lifetime on the topic. That research was immensely critical in being able to paint a believable character replete with identifiable insecurities, quirks, strength and weaknesses. [Read more…]

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Using Family Stories to Write Historical Fiction

October 23, 2016 By Guest

Helen Maryles Shankman's mother's family taken after the war in the Foehrenwald DP camp in Germany. Photo property of the author, all rights reserved. — Helen Maryles Shankman’s mother’s family taken after the war in the Foehrenwald DP camp in Germany. Photo property of the author, all rights reserved.

Our guest today is Helen Maryles Shankman whose stories have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She was a finalist in Narrative Magazine’s Story Contest and earned an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers competition. Her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Gargoyle, Cream City Review, 2 Bridges Review, Grift, Jewishfiction.net, and other publications. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Color of Light and the linked story collection They Were Like Family to Me. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.

I wanted to pay tribute to my parents’ war experiences—and the experiences of the people who risked their lives to save them. As a writer, I was concerned that people might be tiring of World War II. My challenge was to make people feel the Holocaust—for the first time—all over again.

Find Helen on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Pinterest, and on her Amazon author page.

Using Family Stories to Write Historical Fiction

“So I jumped out of a tree, and I killed him with my knife.”

Anyone saying those words would have gotten my attention. The fact that they were being uttered by my mom’s friend, tiny, round, elderly Mr. Tenenbaum, sitting at my parents’ Passover Seder table, was what made them so extraordinary.

“What’s he talking about, Mom?” I asked her in the kitchen.

“Oh, just one of his stories. He was a partizan during the war,” she answered matter-of-factly.

For many years, whenever anyone asked me about myself, I would begin with, “My parents are Holocaust survivors.” My identity might have been forged by Dick and Jane, by “Bewitched” and “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” by the Viet Nam war on the news every night and the glorious Technicolor Sixties and Seventies, but it was also forged by my parents’ war traumas.

World War II took a terrible, invisible toll on my mother and father. For years, police, politicians, and neighbors persecuted them for their race and religion. Soldiers rounded up their friends and family and killed them. Half of their childhoods, they lived in various holes in the ground, praying that a passing hunter wouldn’t find their tracks and turn them in. The only constants were violence and upheaval. Long after the war was over, what took a terrible toll on them would take a terrible toll on us.

As a dreamy little girl, I wasn’t interested in my parents’ histories. I lost myself in books set in different times, in other places—1920s New York, Victorian England—running away inside my own mind. Mom and Dad’s childhood memories were so ruinously laced with evil that I wanted to shake them off, to forget them completely. World War II had been a long time ago. It was too grim, too gray, like old newspaper photographs.

But I couldn’t run away from my parents’ stories. As I grew up, I began to understand that they weren’t just memories that could be dismissed and forgotten; they were the origin stories for our own scarred and imperfect lives.

By then I was married, with children, and living in New York. I’d lived enough of my own American dream so that I could begin to look at my parents’ experiences with a storyteller’s eye.

[Read more…]

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Editing’s Eternal Verities

July 25, 2016 By Dave King

A lot of what I do involves helping writers give readers what they expect, and what readers expect has changed over the years. Many modern novels include sex scenes or language that would have gotten them banned sixty or seventy years ago. Movies and television have made readers less patient with leisurely story development than they used to be. Even little things like tolerance for –ly adverbs has evolved over time.

But it’s worth looking at the principles of storytelling seem to hold steady, even while others shift with the culture. These editorial constants are a way to understand what a story really is and how writers habitually go wrong in telling them. If your storytelling is out of step with your times, then updating your skills is not a serious problem. But when you’re out of step with the ages, then your facing something more fundamental, and harder to fix.

For instance, writers have apparently always been partially blind to how well their writing comes across to their readers. This leads them to include either too much detail or too little. In Mark Twain’s epic 1895 takedown of James Fennimore Cooper, Twain lists a series of literary “rules” that Cooper violates. For instance, an author shall:

Say what he [or she] is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
Use the right word, not its second cousin.
Eschew surplusage.
Not omit necessary details.

Twain shows how to apply these principles in a second essay (published posthumously in 1946), in which he actually line-edits a paragraph of Cooper, improving it substantially by simply removing nearly a third of the words. Many of his edits yank out elaborations of points that are already obvious and unnecessary descriptions of emotion, something I still do a lot of today. His cuts are in italics. [Read more…]