A Love Song for Historical Fiction for Teens
Don’t believe naysayers: Teens do like historical fiction. It can sell. It will touch hearts in lasting ways. But… you must do it well, folks.
This is a love letter to authors embarking on the fascinating, soul-stirring, and—yes—arduous journey of researching/writing historical novels. I’ll start with the inspirational and the aspirational, the call of let’s-stand-with-our-head-in-the-clouds, while ending on this make-or-break caveat: with-our-feet-firmly-rooted-on-the-ground.
History is a human drama. The story of how we got to who and where we are today. An often perplexing and aggravating, even terrifying saga, rife with cruelty, pettiness, and lust for power, but also one of astoundingly poetic, brave, compassionate, audacious ordinary people who managed to find all that within themselves and perhaps inspire it in others.
Pretty good material for writers, y’all.
Story is how we make sense of ourselves—all the way back to Homer—retelling events, looking for parable, for examples of how people survived, what personality traits, what words, what moments brought out the best (or the worst) in them as guidance for choices we have to make ourselves.
Teens are starving for story that humanizes all those dry dates, statistics, battles, election results they’re required to memorize and regurgitate for tests. Story puts a beating heart, a protagonist they care and worry about, to walk them through—anxious about what’s around the corner—the challenges and dangers, the hurts and hopes, the failures and triumphs, of a historical era. Their ability to imagine is still abloom. They easily jump to “make-believing” this: What would I do if that person said that to me or threatened someone I love? And asking that question is the beginning of empathy, what makes the world better. One reader at a time. “Ripples of hope” as RFK, the OG, said.
And here’s the best part about historical fiction if it is well-researched, woven tightly with fact, with an era’s societal constraints, slang, political and cultural personalities, food, creative arts, even smells. It’s a magic trick. While immersed in a compelling, suspenseful, richly detailed narrative, readers learn without realizing it. Like osmosis, simply breathing in all those revealing specifics.
And that, my friends, those specifics, is where the hard work comes in! I happen to love research’s treasure hunt. But it does demand writers on those archeological quests to dig deep, way below surface stereotype and preconceptions, to get to the real human bones and gems below. If you’re doing it right, your heart and back will ache, your hands will get dirty with some disturbing discoveries. But to paint a meaningful picture, you need to look at it all.
To make story truly relevant for teens, find themes and conundrums that resonate with today. Historical fiction is the perfect prism to look through and at current arguments, removing the heat of immediacy, stripping away defensiveness, allowing easier revelations because, golly, we’re talking about the past not me. Witness Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, depicting the 1692 Salem witch trials, also being a profound metaphor for the mob mentality and paranoia of the 1950s Red Scare the playwright was living in.
My newest, Truth, Lies, and the Questions in Between, is set in 1973, the year of Watergate, the ERA, Roe, and Vietnam vets returning to an America still reeling from anti-war protests. It’s the third of three Cold War dramas (the first Suspect Red on 1950s McCarthyism; the second Walls about the infamous Berlin Wall).
Check out L. M. Elliott’s Truth, Lies, and the Questions in Between here:
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All three explore the dangerous impact of political polarization, inflammatory rhetoric, and disinformation—especially on young people, right as they form their world views, sense of hope and agency, who they want to befriend and become. All three ask whether teens can learn to trust and care about one another—despite what they’ve been fed to believe—before it’s too late in some personal crisis they face. Showing-rather-than telling in a powerful, relatable way, (I hope!), the importance of listening to others and uncomfortable truths, to not swallow conspiracy theories or catchy demeaning slogans even if friends or family or personal heroes remain entrenched in them. To think for oneself. That takes courage. And teens are desperately in need of examples of people (or characters) willing to ask tough questions and stand up for what they believe is just. People who risk ostracization or worse and survive, maybe even pull others along with them.
When taking on those kinds of heady topics, though, an author better find a way to do so in a plausible, authentic way.
In Truth Lies, I zoom in on 1973, because that’s the year Senate hearings produced one shocking revelation after another about Nixon’s campaign tactics, thirst for retribution, the DNC headquarters break-in, and ensuing cover up. Gifting me stunning witness testimony in a court-room style drama to use as the novel’s spine.
It’s also the year ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, expected to be quick, was suddenly derailed—by women. Suburban homemakers marshaled by conservative author Phyllis Schlafly, who scared the beejeebees out of them, claiming the ERA would demolish their chosen life-role as stay-at-home moms and wives.
How the heck to legitimately combine these two enormous political storms without seeming contrived? A theme: the irony of truth finally working in Watergate while hyperbole and fear-mongering undid the ERA. Still, what character could be a plausible linchpin?
Research! It’ll save you. In 1970s newspapers, I discovered 1973 was only the second year young women were allowed to be Capitol Hill pages—only a handful, which meant these young women, whether they planned to be or not, were a symbol for women’s liberation! So, my protagonist became a moderate, 18-year-old Republican Senate page, who legitimately witnesses close-up those Watergate hearings, her own arc of growth and self-examination reflecting the nation’s, as she questions everything she’d previously believed about the president, her parents, her boyfriend, her definition of womanhood. Asking what’s truth vs. lies vs. “politics as normal” vs. gaslighting.
Her questions are fueled by testimony that spark worry her father, a Midwest campaign fundraiser for Nixon, might have gotten caught up in the scandal, following his political hero. Patty is also a symbol—given the startling sexism of the 1970s despite the feminist movement—of learning to shake free of cultural messaging and expectations that a “likable” woman is demure, accommodating, even submissive to the opinions of her father and family and the dreams and desires of her boyfriend.
Historical fiction not relevant to our teens and issues they face? Pshaw.
