3 Goals for Writing Great Historical Fiction
In a lot of ways, writing historical fiction is a double-edged sword. You have the framework and structure of real lives, based on historical facts. But because it’s fiction, the possibilities of what you can actually do with your story are endless.
(When Research Leads the Story.)
You can go with alternate history: Billy the Kid wasn’t killed by Pat Garrett and he lived out his life in Butte working as a rancher… until his past came calling.
Or as a framework for a Shakespearean tale: Billy the Kid and Paulita Maxwell were in love, but they were from warring families that would do anything to keep them apart.
Or as a slice of life portrait: One tumultuous week in the life of Billy the Kid.
And the more famous the protagonist, the more scrutinized the novel will be. There is no shortage of books, movies, and television that feature Billy the Kid. So the next question you have to ask is why do you want to tell this story, especially one that is already so well-covered (to varying degrees of accuracy)?
For my novel, Billy the Kid: The War for Lincoln County, I had three main goals in mind.
First, entertain.
Simple yet the most important. The novel is meaningless unless readers get to the end and think, “Well that was definitely worth $20.”
Second, enlighten.
I hope to impart some context and understanding about not just Billy the Kid, and not even just New Mexico, but where America was in the 1870s. At the time, New Mexico was still a territory and wouldn’t achieve statehood for another 40 years. But for all intents and purposes, it acted as a state. The President appointed the Governors. Local business leaders had huge sway in Washington, D.C. White people were migrating west, onto land already inhabited by people who had arrived there millennia ago. The U.S. military was the de facto tip of the spear, running not only the local Reservations but also used to keep peace in the area, if needed. And by “needed,” I mean if anything was going to interrupt the (white) local business interests or ability of whites to further migrate to the region.
And in the middle of all this is a youngster, recently orphaned, who is just looking for a place in this world, a group of people he can call family. But for context, how was he catapulted into national infamy?
I became fascinated by this young man who seemed to have a larger than life hold on American folklore in the old west. But how did he become this caricature? I came across this little-told anecdote from early in his life. His mother had recently passed away, his stepfather abandoned Billy and his brother to go mining for silver in Arizona, and Billy and his brother were separated, sent to live with different families. Billy was mischievous but within the bounds of any normal 14- or 15-year-old. He was dealing with a tremendous amount of grief. And that’s how he fell in with Sombrero Jack Schafer. Sombrero Jack was a 27-year-old ne’er-do-well who asked Billy to hold on to some stolen blankets and guns. Billy did, was caught, and arrested by the local Sheriff. Billy was 15 and terrified of going to real prison. He spotted the chimney and in the middle of the night, he worked his way up onto the roof and fled town.
What he didn’t know was the local Sheriff was trying to scare him and was going to release him the next day. And I had never seen this depicted before. This split decision he made changed the course of not only his life but American history.
And I wanted to tell his story and give context and understanding to how he became the outlaw we think of today, while never losing sight of the fact he was just a teenager.
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Third, deliver accuracy.
In historical fiction, there are a thousand different ways to tell the same story. My purpose here was—as someone who has read countless biographies of Billy the Kid, watched any documentary I could get my hands on, and seen every fictional depiction of the gunslinger on film—to tell as close to the truth of him as a real person that I could.
There are so many wonderful movies and books about Billy but I never felt they captured the Kid how I envisioned him to be. He was always portrayed as this larger-than-life, cocksure ball of charisma that laughed in the face of danger (and in films, often played by grown ass men). But does that sound like any teenager you know in real life? Never scared, always cracking a joke in the deadliest of times? It made for a great film character but didn’t ring true to me.
So how do you capture the essence of someone who has been dead for 143 years and of whom there is no video or audio and only one verified photograph? Research, research, research. I read everything I could about him. I even found a great book that had the letters we know he, and other major players in the territory, wrote (Billy the Kid’s Writings, Words & Wit, by Gale Cooper). It gave me great insight into not just how he spoke but how he thought, what he felt.
Still, there are moments and people and things we cannot know for sure. I used the tentpoles of events we know happened, then invented a few smaller characters to fill in the gaps. This allowed me to have Billy express certain ideals and beliefs about life that would have been hard to convey in other circumstances, with other characters.
Again, there are a thousand different ways to write historical fiction. But once you figure out your true goals for your piece, what you’re trying to say both about your protagonist and the world at large, then you can build around that.
And the good news is, as long as it’s entertaining, it’s a success.
Check out Ryan C. Coleman’s Billy the Kid: The War for Lincoln County here:
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