How to Write Fiction About Real Tragic Events

When I started writing my historical novel The Paris Understudy, set in Paris during World War II, and through many drafts afterward, I was sure of one thing: I wouldn’t write about the Vél d’Hiv roundup, the infamous round-up in July 1942 of French Jews by the French police acting on orders of the Nazis. The police held over 13,000 Jews in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor bicycle racing track in Paris, before deporting them to the Drancy internment camp. From there, they were sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Terribly few survived the war. 

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The role of the French police in those events was such a source of shame that for decades, politicians refused to acknowledge it, saying instead that the Vichy government of Occupied France hadn’t been a legitimate government, and so the roundup hadn’t been done by French law enforcement. Only 50 years later did the French President apologize for the role of the French police in rounding up their own compatriots.

I didn’t write about the Vél d’Hiv roundup not because it wasn’t relevant to my novel (it was: My novel is set mostly in Paris, starts before the war and ends after it) but because the weight of history was too daunting. So many people died because of their religion, some of which didn’t even practice. As a French-American citizen, born French and later naturalized American, those were my fellow citizens, almost all of whom had perished in Auschwitz. I didn’t want to use this immensely tragic event just to create a gratuitous, fictional plot twist. 

For years, I was convinced I could sidestep this horrifying event in French history: I ended the wartime part of my novel before the roundup, and when the next part started, surprise! The Libération of Paris in August 1944 was upon my characters.

And then, something happened. I revised the novel and revised it again and revised it some more, and when I had made the writing as good as it could be and I was re-reading the book for what felt like the 100th time, I reached the point where the book skipped over the latter part of the war, to drop the reader at the moment when the Free French enter Paris, about three years after my previous chapter and two years after the roundup. Only at that moment, when I had refined the storyline, strengthened the character arcs, and polished the manuscript, did I decide to include the roundup, but only because it’d spearhead a profound change in one of my characters. I’d put enough work into the rest of the book that I could do justice to such a monstrous event. I was finally ready to add these scenes. In hindsight, I realize the book wouldn’t have been complete without them, but for a long time I just wasn’t ready to write them.

From the experience, I learned the following three things.

1. If you can find another way to add a plot twist to your novel, do it. 

The real people who died in that event deserve it. Don’t trivialize such a tragedy. When The Emperor’s Children came out, Claire Messud (an author I profoundly admire) was criticized for the way she incorporated 9/11 in her novel. Here it is in a nutshell: A married man is having an affair, tells his wife he’s flying out of town, meets with his mistress elsewhere in the city instead. The next day, 9/11 happens. He doesn’t know what else to do but to walk home to his wife. The same effect could easily have been accomplished by having the man get hit by a car in Manhattan and rushed to the hospital where his wife is called to his bedside, surprised that he never left New York.

2. If you truly believe the tragic historical event is a central part of your novel, show in detail the devastating impact it has on your protagonist. 

In Messud’s novel, 9/11 occurs at the very end, and we don’t see its lingering effects, if any, on her protagonists, or the way they reevaluated their life after it. (If your protagonists don’t change after 9/11, set your novel at some other time, in some other town. Maybe you can make a chemical plant explode in your book, or a train derail. Just don’t use 9/11.) 

In Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner incorporates the terrible Madrid terrorist attack at the Atocha train station, which left almost 200 people dead in 2004, in a thoughtful way that focuses on the psychological impact of the events on the main character. It’s worth noting that the Atocha terrorist attack happens around the two-thirds point of the novel rather than the very end.

3. Make the rest of your novel as good as possible first and write the scenes around the tragic event last. 

People may disagree with me on that, but I think it’s basic respect for the people who died or were maimed, and their friends and relatives who were traumatized. When you finally put your pen to the page, think of the reverence that surrounds a visit to Gettysburg or Arlington National Cemetery. You can’t be sure whether the reader will approve of your efforts, but you can fight to make your writing worthy of the departed. 

Check out Aurélie Thiele’s The Paris Understudy here:

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