How to Write Recent Historical Fiction
In college, one of the first classes I took was a seminar with a revered medieval history professor named Dr. Robert Brentano, who was famous for doing eccentric things like assigning Virginia Woolf or Chinua Achebe in a class on 14th Century England because he liked the way their minds worked, and wanted all of us in a frame of mind like those more modern thinkers as we cast our eyes on medieval monasteries and peasant revolts.
(7 Tips for Writing a Near-Future Dystopian Novel.)
He also used a metaphor I’ve never forgotten: He asked that Achebe and Woolf—or Socrates and Derrida, for that matter—become “wallpaper in our minds” when we sit down to write a paper.
Wallpaper in my mind.
I’ve carried this powerful idea with me through countless college papers, graduate school essays, editorials for my literary journal, book reviews, plus a nonfiction book, and nine novels (four of which have been published), and its meaning has essentially remained unchanged for me. When I start any piece of writing, I need to push all influence to the back of my mind (like wallpaper) so that my imagination—my capacity for original thought—can take the stage.
As a writer of historical fiction, this means that all the research I do on specific people, time periods, and events, is the wallpaper. My characters are the people moving around against the backdrop of that wallpaper—waking up, talking, cooking, fighting, and doing everything else people do.
By now, at 48 years old (30 years after receiving the advice from Professor Brentano), I have quite the rambling old mansion of rooms in my mind that have been fabulously wallpapered by years of reading, thinking, and travel. I feel blessed to have this many rooms, so beautifully wallpapered—and I look forward to making more.
Wallpaper is also how I like to think of current events when I write historical fiction. I’ve had the not-unusual but often disorienting experience of finding myself writing about time periods in which the historic events resonate so strongly with current events that sometimes it’s tempting to think of my historical novel as practically contemporary.
When I wrote about the censorship of James Joyce’s Ulysses in The Paris Bookseller, for instance, a new phase of censorship was beginning in the United States. In January and February of 2022, Art Spiegelman’s Maus was banned in Tennessee; literature-lovers world wide celebrated the 100th anniversary of the publication of Joyce’s banned masterpiece; and my own The Paris Bookseller about Sylvia Beach, the American bookstore owner who defied censorship to publish Ulysses, came out in hardback.
More eerily, as I was writing about brave women in Chicago providing safe, illegal abortions in the early 1970s for All You Have to Do Is Call, Dobbs overturned Roe in the summer of 2022. Suddenly, my historical novel about a dark period in the fight for reproductive justice felt all too contemporary.
Once I got over my initial horror at the Dobbs decision, I felt all the more passionate about my novel. I hoped—and still hope—it might bring hope to people struggling today because it shows how women of the 1970s helped each other in their hours of need, when the law was unjust. All over our country today, just like in 1970, people in clinics and call centers strive to help others receive the reproductive health care they need, when the law is unjust.
Crucially, though, the events of 2022 did not change the way I wrote about the 1970s. As much as these two periods have in common, there are also essential differences in attitudes toward abortion, and feminism, and reproductive rights overall, that I had to respect as I wrote about my characters of 50 years ago.
Instead, current events became part of the wallpaper in my mind, coloring certain themes brighter. For instance, as I revised my novel after Dobbs, I leaned in harder to the second-wave feminist demand for abortion as an essential right for bodily autonomy, hoping that that our much-augmented 21st century concepts of bodily autonomy would be suggested by that demand; I hope that modern readers will see in the feminist fight for women a contemporary fight for ALL people whose bodies are denied rights under the law.
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I also highlighted the laws of the 1970s that were jettisoned by the conservative forces nascent in this country then, which still have us in a choke-hold today. In 1971, Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Childcare Development Act, which would have created a national daycare system among other aids to families. The Equal Rights Amendment, which would have granted equal rights to all people regardless of sex, was nearly ratified in the 1970s but now languishes waiting to be revived. Had these measures become law 50 years ago, reproductive justice, childcare, and the rights of people of all genders would be radically different today. I wanted readers to be aware of that history—those missed opportunities for growth in our country—so that they would understand where we are today.
Sometimes I quite literally imagine history and current events as wallpaper—big flamboyant and sometimes iridescent patterns on walls in a house. Funny enough, in the last decade, wallpaper has become quite popular in interior decorating, from powder rooms to dining rooms and even children’s nurseries. We see bold wallpaper everywhere these days. If you’re having trouble imagining how to implement this wallpaper idea into your writing, just open up Pinterest and look up wallpaper, and study how it works in a room. It synthesizes and brings disparate elements together. Sometimes it’s muted background, and sometimes it’s bold and loud. You’re the decorator. You get to choose. What kind of wallpaper is in your WIP?