I think that historical fiction is one of the most perfect forms because when it’s well executed, it gives us a sense of history, it gives us a sense of story, and it gives us a sense of place. And all of those things combine together to be both educative, they can bring a period of history to life and help young people understand it. But it can also keep them engaged and reading and excited about the story.
And because historical fiction writers, after all, can invent characters that never existed, they can invent events that never existed, they have a natural way to tell a story that might be stopped if only, if all they could deal with is what we know exactly to be true. Great historical fiction recreates periods, sometimes better then even a narrative non-fiction writer can recreate that period.
So it is at its best, a beautiful form that completely allows a reader— it’s like a time machine, it allows you to go back in a period of time and be there. I still remember reading Esther Forbes “Johnny Tremaine” when I must have been in about seventh or eighth grade. And I felt like I was fighting in the American Revolution. And I think that’s exactly what historical fiction allows for you.
To be good, it has to be based on a lot of research, but that research cannot overwhelm the story. In the end, great historical fiction writers are telling the story about characters at another point in time. And I think it is a natural for classrooms because we’re always trying to talk, teach about history, geography, the world. You know, it opens up all of that.
So again I think it’s for teachers to take and sample a bit of it, to show a bit of it, to have you know, have students put themselves back in a period of time or create a character from another period of time and see what it would be like. You know, a lot of the game playing that kids have been doing as, as kids, are really based on historical fiction concepts.
You know if you’re a Japanese samurai, you’ve wandered back into a period of time, of feudal Japan. So I think it is not, these concepts are not as foreign to, to young readers at this point in time as they might have been in other points of time. So I think it’s just you know, I, when I find a great historical novel, it’s, I love to savor it, it does so much. And I think that this is where a teacher’s passion for books can really translate to getting a child excited about a book.
In historical fiction, you don’t want things that are inaccurate, okay? You don’t want things to mislead a reader, but story is always the thing that’s going to carry, you know? “His-story,” you know, it is the story of events always has to carry it. And that means that the writer will invent things that in fact we have no historical documentation for whatsoever. The thing that we have to be careful is historical anacronisms, you know a character from Korea in the 1600s acting and talking like a modern young woman.
Those are the sorts of things that you need to kind of parse out if you’re evaluating historical fiction. But there will be characters there, there will be real people portrayed who say things that we have no record of them saying. All of that is at the heart of historical fiction, which after all, was invented by Sir Walter Scott in the early 1800s. And he comes, yeah, this is the first work of historical fiction. And he really comes up with this idea that it is fictional characters you know, real characters, history, period of time, that you bring to life. So always the story has to work because if it doesn’t, you lose the reader.