The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction by James Alexander Thom

Author:James Alexander Thom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook
Publisher: F+W Media, Inc.
Published: 2010-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

SHIFTING IMAGES

One of the real and constant challenges you'll face in taming your research data is that data isn't dead and inert. It is usually changing and evolving, as I've said, which also means it grows. Much of your accumulated research will subtly contradict other materials you've dug up, and anything heavily studied by historians will gradually change with the evolving “perceived wisdom.”

No matter how diligently your colleagues research, or how clearly they write, other able historians are busy somewhere revising the facts and the images. And historians don't like to be out of step with their respected peers.

That's just one more reason why your research material piles up to a nearly unmanageable mass: because there are so many versions of everything.

And you, as a historical novelist, will be judged by the look of the story you put together. Your description of something or someone might have developed from your reading of original documents or your examination of pictures — long since refuted facts that may have “gone out of style” according to later research.

My father, an army doctor, liked to say with a wry smile: “I learned just two truths in medical school. Both of them have been disproved.”

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