James Alexander Thom - The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction: Researching and Writing Historical Fiction

O nce upon a time, just a few months ago (a time we then thought of as now), the mother of a teenage girl lamented to me that her daughter simply was not interested in history. Not through school, History Channel programs, movies, old photo albums, or even the most earnest family conversations could the girl be roused to the least level of enthusiasm for anything concerning history.

In exasperation, the mother sat her down and asked her to explain her antipathy toward something as important and fascinating as history. The girl rolled her eyes, sighed, shrugged, and finally exclaimed: Because I'm not in it!

What a telling statement! Of course! Not only is history taught in dull ways, full of dates and meaningless names and places she's expected to remember and might be tested on, it's utterly irrelevant to her because she hadn't been born yet! She said a mouthful in that explanation.

Or, maybe she meant she wasn't recorded in MySpace or Face-book. Maybe her schoolmates hadn't texted each other calling her a geek or a slut. Maybe that's when history begins for young persons of today: when they are mentioned online.

But she was wrong to believe she's not in history. She didn't understand that she is a part of the historical story; she just hasn't yet caught up with the place in the story where she's been born. Her ancestors, or her American forebears who founded the country she now lives in, are the earlier chapters of that same story in which she'll appear soon enough. She is the result of that earlier history, the outcome of those people and what they did. They are part of her.

She and they are all part of the same story. The story of the world, of America, of any community or institution or family, flows like a river, and we are all in it some of us dead, some old, some young, some as yet unborn. Some of us are upstream; our ancestors are farther downstream; our young or yet unborn descendants still farther upstream. The River of History has countless tributaries and constantly comprises everything that flows into it.

The schoolgirl is in the River of History. She just doesn't feel immersed yet.

Some of us are fortunate enough to feel ourselves immersed in the flow of history from a very young age. Personally, I have always felt that I'm in it, clear up to here.

I'm old enough that I can remember direct ancestors and old relatives who were veterans of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. I remember their faces and their voices and their smells of tobacco, whiskey, farmyard, liniment, and the plain smell of old working men in the days before people used deodorant. I remember as a small child going to their funerals, their honor guards standing by, frail and white-bearded in their blue Union army uniforms. Such memories connect a child with the river of history, because a family shares the stream of another river: its blood.

A namesake of mine was killed in the Civil War at Petersburg. A great grandfather survived the hellish prison camp at Andersonville. His grandson, my father, served in the army in both world wars. Less than ten years after my father returned from the Pacific, I crossed it, going to Korea on a Marine troopship. Bloodlines are another kind of current in the River of Time, and they carry other streams of connection, such as soldiering, or family trades, or religious and political traditions, or fraternal orders and so on. In some families more than in others kinship bonds and behavioral traits are so strong that they're seldom out of mind. Not to mention family feuds. Many families in modern America are still divided by the Civil War.

In some families, storytelling, either proud or rueful of the fore-bears, plays a big role, while there's very little of that in other families. As a child, I knew of our family progression and of the history we'd been through, so I had always been aware of the flow of the river of history through time and of my place in the flow, upstream from some of us, downstream from others. Unlike that woman's teenage daughter, I never felt that I wasn't a part of history. And when I look at the old photographs of my ancestors, or visit the grave of a Revolutionary War veteran who was our first Thom to come over from Scotland, or read my mother's maiden name in Moby-Dick, I know they are all in me.

The fortunes of some people, like stockbrokers on Wall Street, lie in something called futures. The fortunes of others royalty, for example lie in the past, by inheritance.

The fortunes (modest though they may be) of historians and historical novelists also lie in the past. The past is where we get the raw materials we use to make the stories by which we earn our bread. The raw material is already there, inexhaustible. We pick bygone time up by the handfuls and, like clay, see if it feels right and then form it into stories about the past.