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| "The Shadow" by Edmund Leighton |
Last week I described
the challenges of writing biographical fiction.
This week I want to focus on the more personal complications of the
genre. In normal historical fiction, as
I have described elsewhere, characters often take on a life of their own, even
pulling the novel in unexpected directions.
My experience with headstrong characters has been overwhelmingly good. A
good character has a better feel for the direction a book should go than I
do. Most of my books have benefited from
this fact and evolved differently from the original concept. In one case, a secondary character completely
took over the book and the initially conceived story was not written at all.
But with biographical fiction,
such course changes are unacceptable. The true biography of the central
character lays down the route that must be followed. The author is free to
decide which stations along the way will be described in greatest detail, maybe
the author can add an embellishment here and there, but in the end the road-map
must be respected. There can be no happy
end where there was none in history.
Another challenge of biographical
fiction is, of course, the fact that a historical figure does not “belong” to
the novelist alone. A historical figure is a public figure, and that means that
anyone else can choose to write about this person too. Unlike fictional characters, the novelist of
a biographical novel has to “share” their central characters with others – and
often compete with or assault existing interpretations. When I, for example,
describe Balian d’Ibelin, my interpretation will clash in many minds with the
hero of the same name created by Ridley Scott and played by Orlando Blum in the
Hollywood film “The Kingdom of Heaven.” It makes no difference whether my
research is better and my interpretation is more plausible. Scott’s Balian is
more familiar to my reader than my historical sources and it has already
occupied their consciousness. Altering readers’ perceptions of historical
figures is far more difficult than creating new characters.
Finally, there is the difficultly
of living with the ghosts of dead. A
good biographical novelist will spend a great deal of time with the characters
of his/her book and this means spending time with the dead. Depending on one’s sensibility, that can be
quite unnerving. I have spent many a sleepless night, plagued by images of
historical figures dissatisfied with my portrayal of them. They can be angry or simply disappointed, but
they are unrelentingly hard task-masters, who demand an even higher standard of
writing than their fictional colleagues.
Obviously, on the evidence of
some historical novels that liberally apply the names of historical figures to
characters with no resemblance to the personage carrying the same name in
serious historical sources, some authors do not take their responsibilities to the
dead very seriously. I wonder that they
are not haunted by furious ghosts. Perhaps they are and I just don’t know about
it – or the ghosts consider them so insubstantial they can’t be bothered.
Envoy of Jerusalem is the winner of the Pinnacle Award for Biographical Fiction 2016. It also won 1st prize in the 2017 Feathered Quill Book Awards for Spiritual/Religious Fiction. Is a First in Category winner in the Chaucer Awards 2016, and a finalist in the Foreword INDIES awards.
Envoy of Jerusalem is the winner of the Pinnacle Award for Biographical Fiction 2016. It also won 1st prize in the 2017 Feathered Quill Book Awards for Spiritual/Religious Fiction. Is a First in Category winner in the Chaucer Awards 2016, and a finalist in the Foreword INDIES awards.
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