Can Historical Fiction be True?

While preparing to print advance review copies of a historical novel I recently completed, I asked my followers for help fine tuning the title and cover design. On the cover was the tag line: "The True Tale of an Early American Haunting." 

A follower raised the bane of fiction writers who base their work on historical events. She wrote to me: "If it's a true story it is not a novel."

My response was less concise.

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Dear Follower:

 

You have served up a delicious morsel for discussion: What is “true” in Historical Fiction, or, can historical fiction ever be true? I think so, for the same reasons I don’t think so called true accounts of history are true. Here are six things to ponder.

 

1. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once? In historical fiction the reader is always wondering which parts are true, even as the reader assumes most of the telling is fiction. Why is that? Because it’s impossible to tell a completely true story if by “true” we mean all of the facts in the true chronological order...especially, if many of the micro facts occurred simultaneously and were somehow co-dependent on each other. Even to record all of the physical events and their related minutia would require too large of a book or too long of a movie...to think nothing of the internal and invisible thoughts, values, and motivations that caused the physical events.  It seems to me that to tell a absolutely true story would require an accurate narrative about all such things, in every conceivable crevice, all at once. Of course, this is ludicrous in a practical sense. So, what really is true?

 

2. Perspective. Since No. 1 is impractical, if not impossible, we, as writers, favor our perspective or bias which can result in a story that some would find totally fiction. The “facts” collected by different people, from different perspectives, even though they are all eye witnesses, always interpret or remember the “true facts” differently. We see this everyday in reports of current events and in scientific interpretations of so called “objective” and “natural” observations, and if we include recent understandings of quantum theory, reality gets a bad name real fast.

 

In researching the particular historical novel I recently completed I collected over 30 (more like 100) different narratives of the same historical event—some whole, most anecdotal. Some accounts were written by witnesses, others collected from second and third hand or generational sources. In every case they were all different. So what was “true?” It’s hard to say, although the core of the story (the main plot points) are similar.

 

In my “fictional” writing, I included as faithful as I could all the documented scraps of the history and wove them together with my imagination so they fit. In such a manner I told a true story...at least my imaginative mind thinks so. 

 

3. The Victors Write the History. We must remember that most of the time, with notable exceptions, it is the "victors" that write the history. Do the victors always tell the truth? No. There is bias is everything that is written. This is well known in so called "documentary" films. There is ALWAYS A POINT OF VIEW. 

 

4. Fiction Pretends to Tell the Truth. In all fiction the storyteller pretends to tell the truth by writing in the imperative mood. That goes for everything from the dialogue to the title, to the tag line. In other words the storyteller, with regard to the physical events described, is lying. But the reader recognizes that or should. If the reader understands Historical Fiction as true history, then the mistake is on the reader’s part, not the author whose intention is to be entertaining. 

 

5. “Non-Fiction" History is the Biased Retelling of Others. All historians writing about events to which they were NOT an eye-witness, are simply retelling what other historians have told. For instance, Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich while a comprehensive account of Nazi Germany, is the retelling form a hundred accounts of voluminous works written by others. Although the current historian is wanting to tell the truth, his truth is only as good as the previous historians have handled the facts. Consequently, a great deal of history is “presumption” or imagined by the historian. 

 

6. What is True is Deeper than the Physical Story. The more important aspect of truth in storytelling is the internal moral truth that the story conveys. In a classical sense the conveyance, or story form, is called a myth. While the outward physical story is fiction (about a donkey, a goose, and a frog talking to each other like human beings), the meaning of the story (the moral premise) is true.  This is the subject of my earlier book, The Moral Premise: Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success.  The movie, Armageddon, about Bruce Willis traveling to an asteroid to blow it up before it can destroy Earth, is fiction...unless you know someone who has done that. But the moral premise of that story, about the sacrifices a good father makes for the future sake of his children, is true. 

 

So, in these ways historical fiction can be as true as any documented history:

 

A. The story threads the available historical documentation together and relates them in a fundamentally cogent and reasonable way consistent with the time period. I’m sure many historical fiction writers believe that their telling is as true as any so called history text book written from a biased point of view...which they all are.

 

B. The story is about a true moral premise, e.g. that natural law exists and if it’s not followed, hell is to pay.