Writing Historical Fiction With a Hubble Telescope Perspective
It is said that writing comes out of a present moment, but that all writing is historical. The moment I write these words, they are in the past. By the time I write a book, have it edited, printed, and distributed, the world has changed. My book is historical. All I can hope is that I’ve captured the essence of the present moment in which I was writing, so that my future reader can catch a glimpse into the past.
I find this concept that all writing is historical immensely freeing. It releases me from feeling compelled to touch into some contemporary zeitgeist. Also, there are infinite universes of past moments for me to choose from. When I look into the past, I’m like a scientist looking through the Hubble Telescope into the deep recesses of space-time. I choose a corner of the universe and zero in.
Scientists study the cosmos to try and understand where we came from, but they are also trying to understand the present moment in which we live. How did we come to be where we are now? How does this knowledge affect where we want to go next? To answer that, they explore a past that has traveled to us over time. But it is not as simple as looking through a telescope. In the cosmos, the past is clouded with light and noise from more recent times. To decipher what they are seeing, they need to take wobbles and vibrations into account. They need to parse the times that the past has traveled through.
A writer of historical fiction has similar challenges. Often, we want to answer the same questions. Like a cosmologist, a writer must explore their corner of the universe. But researching a historical moment is not simply a matter of looking through a research lens to see what is there. The past is clouded with noise, wobbles, and vibrations that bend the story. The past can never escape the place where we stand to view it. A historical novel reflects the time in which it is written, and a writer needs to parse the times that the past has traveled through to get to the present.
Writer Zadie Smith discussed writing a historical novel in a recent New Yorker article. “You can come at the past from an interrogative angle, or a sly remove, and some historical fiction will radically transform your perspective not just on the past but on the present.”
Writing Focus. Click. Wind gave me an opportunity to explore that duality, the interface between past and present. The book is a social and personal history that takes place within my lifespan, 1968. But as I researched it, I worked from a “sly remove,” remaining rooted in the present moment. Like focusing a Hubble Telescope, I looked through the dust and clouds into a particular past, yet I never lost sight of where I was standing in the 2020s. As a result, I think of the book not as a historical novel, but as a contemporary novel in a historical setting.
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As writer William Gerhardie has said, “The past puts a fine edge on our own days, and it tells us more of the present than the present can tell us.” That fine edge is where I want to live as a writer. That fine edge is where we can be “radically transformed.” That fine edge is a bridge for us to move forward into the future, taking account of the wobbles of space-time as we explore the past.
If you love to write and have a story you want to tell, the only thing that can stand between you and the success you’re seeking isn’t craft, or a good agent, or enough Facebook friends and Twitter followers, but fear. Fear that you aren’t good enough, or fear the market is too crowded, or fear no one wants to hear from you.Fortunately, you can’t write while being in the flow and be afraid simultaneously. The question is whether you will write fearlessly.