Remember as you read this, it's written looking at the western and historicals as examples, however the rules, unless otherwise specified, apply to all genres....
The writer, even the fiction writer, is imbued with a trust. That trust should be to write accurately when dealing with factual characters. Not to say that you can't let your muse run wild in any other situation, with any fictional characters, but when you've worked hard to develop a relationship with a reader-and he's in your imposed trance-don't take advantage of him by filling him with inaccuracies that confuse and mislead. There's a line between fiction and fact that shouldn't be crossed. Orson Welles discovered that when he first broadcast a fictional alien invasion, and found himself faced with a panicked country and a few suicides.
Use discretion when your fiction might be mistaken for fact.
There is no tool more readily adopted to "writing from history," than the newspapers of the time. Obviously, if you're writing about the Roman Empire, you'll have a little trouble getting a copy of the local scandal sheet. However, if your writing about the late 18th or the 19th century, great papers are available either to purchase from sources mentioned elsewhere in this novel or from your local library.
Newspapers tell you what was being used as medicines, what a meal cost at the local boarding house or hotel; what boarding houses and hotels were in the town; what the schedules of stages, steamships, and railroads were, and where they were bound from or headed; what real estate was selling and renting for; what was happening with local politics, etc., etc., etc.
They give you the flavor of the time and place.
I never begin writing a piece set in the time frame from mid 1800's to late 1800's without picking up my set of Alfred Doten's journals (University of Nevada Press), covering his life in Virginia City, Nevada, from 1849 to 1903. Doten was a newspaper journalist, and kept a prolific diary. Like the newspapers of the time, you can learn a lot about the day to day life of one who lived it from reading journals.
Not only do newspapers and journals give you insight about time and place, but they give you plot material, maybe even whole plots. You can fictionalize from what you read as fact, but if you're not writing a biographical novel, change everything-the town, the participants, etc. That way you won't have to worry about distorting a piece of actual history.
To give you an example of writing from history and how closely I practice what I preach, here is a copy of a portion (there are, in fact, ten pages) of the author's Historical Notes and Acknowledgments which follow Rush to Destiny.
The author makes no claim to being a biographer, but has attempted to utilize history accurately in his writing, incorporating actual dispatches, letters, and newspaper accounts. Hopefully, this novelistic style offers accurate history, dates, and events in an entertaining form.
The author would like to express his admiration and appreciation to the following, whose wonderful nonfiction books were of immeasurable help:
Stephen Bonsal, Edward Fitzgerald Beale: A Pioneer in the Path of Empire.
Carl Briggs and Clyde Francis Trudell, Quarterdeck and Saddlehorn: The Story of Edward F. Beale.
Gerald Thompson, Edward F. Beale & the American West.
William A. DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents.
And others too numerous to mention.
Almost all of Rush to Destiny is founded in fact, either gleaned from the biographies noted above, from the Beale Papers in the Beale Branch of the Kern County Library (named after Edward Fitzgerald Beale and located on Truxtun Avenue, which was named after his son),...
And this goes on for 30 pages, with an attempt to explain the historical relevance of the novel...which I call a "biographical novel."
I subject you to this "out of context" material for a purpose. As you read it, you can begin to see the amount of actual historical data, or writing from history, I do (or did at least in this novel) when writing about a factual character or about a factual incident. Admittedly, Rush to Destiny is different from the norm. My westerns are not based (at least not the primary protagonist) upon a factual character, although many of them are laced with them, and with factual incidents.
I hope you'll pick up a copy of Rush to Destiny, and read it and the notes that follow. Only then can you appreciate the amount of influence history had on that novel. You can also appreciate how little plotting I had to do, for Beale's early life was the plot. You can also appreciate how little characterization I had to do, for his life was peppered with the greatest and most fascinating characters of the time.
In many ways, Rush to Destiny was the most simple novel I've written, and in many ways it was the most difficult.
We'll go on to the nuts and bolts of writing in even more detail in the following articles.
L. J. Martin is the author of 20 fiction works and 2 non-fiction works from major publishers. His political blog http://fromthepeapatch.com/ is followed by many thousands. His wife, Kat Martin, is internationally published in over a dozen languages and in over two dozen countries and has over ten million books in print.
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