Tale Share: Why Historians should Write Fiction

When a novel is set in the past, we often have to build a world to support the story that we tell. If we set it in our actual past, then we have to take elements of history and fit to the plot itself. This brings forth the field of historical fiction. But how do we define historical fiction anyway? The following is an essay by Ian Mortimer, a famous historian, who writes historical fiction under the pseudonym of James Forrester, and it tries to address the question from the point of view of the authors who write these stories. This article written at the IHR conference is an insightful look at how historians view the genre, and how we could possibly define it. The following are some snippets that I found really relevant to the conversation.

"A historian writing history never has to create character: he allows it to emerge from the evidence. He never needs to guard against the inconsistency of his character’s traits. Nor does he need to invent ways in which one character influences another. Historians reveal human interactions through examining the evidence for a man’s words and deeds in relation to that other individual. Creating fictitious characters who interact with one another goes beyond just imagining the past: it requires you to imagine it and then to change it, gradually and believably, in the reader’s imagination."

"Academic historians have normally lost the ability to write dramatically or with empathy. It has been trained out of them. The traditional obligation to be ‘objective’ impedes them from writing a stirring account of a battle, or a romantic account of a love affair."

"Scholars have learned too well the craft of distilling evidence to its very essence, the clear liquid of a synthetic truth, and in an educational establishment that is all that is required. It is easy to forget that it is not the essence that most people are interested in but the wider world that created the evidence in the first place."

"All the difficulties above really add up to identifying lacunae – a lack of knowledge of aspects of everyday life, the lack of literary form in academic historical writing, and the failure to recognise alternative points of view. Much more profound is the realisation that history is not primarily about the past. It is about human nature. What makes it historical is that it examines human nature through the prism of a different age."

"This is what good historical novelists do. Often without realising it, they will choose a historical period to bring out some aspect of human nature. In my case, I had chosen to set my fiction in the sixteenth century because I wanted to write about loyalty and betrayal. Loyalty to one’s spouse, to the state and to one’s faith have huge resonance in a sixteenth century context, much more so than in today’s easy going world."

"History allows us to see human nature in a deeper way. It is all very well describing the world today, with its wars, commercial greed, philanthropy, courage, fear, etcetera; but when you start to contrast the past with now you become aware that humanity has far greater depth than appears from a knowledge of the here and now."

"(Historical fiction) teaches you how little you really know about the minutiae of the past, and destroys professional complacency. It humbles even the most experienced researcher. It demands that you think deeply about human character, and how it is formed, and how people integrate. But most of all it shows you that there is a different sort of truth beyond the measurements of facts and dates: truths about human nature which are timeless, or, at least, very slow-moving. And it leaves you thinking that these truths, although they are unprovable, are probably the most important historical conclusions of all, for they reflect what we are, and what we can be, both as individuals and as a society."