I’ll tell you something else from personal experience: once something has been put in print, a) it never goes away, and b) people will repeat it endlessly, rather than pause to check something or write something in a fresh way.
This is why I insist on writing my own flap copy (when possible) and on seeing press releases before they’re sent out. Had I but world enough and time, I’d comb my Wikipedia page weekly in order to weed out mistakes, but I don’t.5
As one example of misleading information—years ago, I wrote an essay for the local newspaper in Flagstaff, telling the story of my parents’ very dramatic courtship and marriage.6 This essay was picked up and either inserted into my Wikipedia page or quoted from in that venue. The result of this was a widespread misapprehension that I’m Mexican, or “Mexican-American.”7,8
I’m Hispanic, but not Mexican. None of my family members are Mexican. None of them have ever been Mexicans, save for a brief period of some thirty years between the War of Mexican Independence and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.9,10
But owing to the nature of local idiom in rural Arizona in the 1940s, anyone of Hispanic origin was referred to as a “Mexican.” Virtually none of them were Mexican—that was just what the local populace called them. And I quoted this idiom in the essay I wrote about my parents, because it was the term used, and it had a specific relevance to the underlying cultural conflict that was a large part of their story.
Because of this, though, I’m constantly being introduced (if I’m not quick enough to ask to see the introduction beforehand) as a “Mexican-American” and have such experiences as the Turkish hair-and-makeup stylist who came to work me over in Munich, and who—having conscientiously looked up my Wikipedia page in order to have some subjects of conversation—was charmed at the notion that I was “a Mexican girl!” and did her best to make me look like Jennifer Lopez (whose parents are Puerto Rican).11
None of these small things are a big deal—but they are, for better or worse, part of the historical record. And the point is—if errors are as common as they are in contemporary accounts of someone for whom there is no reason to suspect bias…how accurate do you think the records you’re reading from two hundred years ago are?
And as a brief example of the “limited space” problem: I always tell people the exact same story, as to how I happened to be online, how and why I began posting pieces of my work, how I was encouraged to look for a publisher, how I was advised to seek an agent, how I did so, and what happened when I found one. (The whole story, if you’re interested, is in the “Prologue” of The Outlandish Companion, Volume One.) I’ve told this story so many times that I invariably tell it with identical vocal inflections and hand gestures, no less. The journalistic version then normally emerges something like this: Diana Gabaldon wrote her first novel online. In no time, she was snapped up by a New York publisher, and the rest is history!
Um, yes. “History”—as in “written version of events”—is just what it is. It’s also wildly inaccurate and misleading and causes people to turn up periodically in inappropriate places online with the statement that they have just written a novel and are there any agents here who would like to sign them up?
Now, the interviewers who publish these lopsided versions of events are not trying to distort reality at all—quite the opposite. However, they usually have major constraints of space and time—they can’t faithfully repeat everything I said, verbatim, because it wouldn’t fit into the column inches allotted. They have to compress the story substantially, and how well they do that depends on a good many factors beyond my control—how much room they have, how well they listened, what parts of my remarks were interesting to them personally, what sort of notes they took, and how well they understood what I was talking about.
It isn’t just me, either. I’ve talked to a good many other people who have had events “covered” in the popular press, and on several occasions I have read journalistic accounts of events that I’ve personally experienced or know about (my dad was a state senator and held various other public offices. The resemblance of the account to any public event is seldom more than 50 percent or so).
Okay. Given that modern news reports will eventually become the “history” of the future—how much distortion do you figure there is in your average “historical” document? The fact that something was written a long time ago doesn’t make it any more trustworthy (rather the contrary, since there are fewer contemporaneous accounts by which to check it).
Historical documents are influenced by just as many distorting factors as are modern reports: lack of time, lack of space (if you had to scrape a sheep’s skin clean in order to have a writing surface, you probably wouldn’t be all that verbose), lack of understanding. And these are the unconscious distortions! Which leads us in turn to…
III. INTERPRETATION AND SELECTIVITY—OR: THE SECOND LEVEL OF LIES
Interpretation and perspective are drawn from—and imposed onto—the primary record. It’s necessary to achieve a certain level of historical perspective—or simple distance—because the complexities as viewed at ground level would quickly overwhelm any story.12 If history is the backdrop, rather than the focus, of a story, a higher ground of perspective will have to be chosen—a more inclusive, less tightly focused one. This is necessary, even if the change of perspective involves the sacrifice of detail and subtlety.
Even the writing of historical narrative, or historical nonfiction, requires this sort of perspective; the choice of what to include, what to leave out, what weight of importance to allocate to an incident, a person, a time period—all of these will alter the shape of the account and will result in a different impression of “the facts” (such as they are) being communicated to a reader.
How does a writer (or would-be historian) choose what to include and what to leave out? Human beings being what they are, I imagine the usual process is to spend more time on what the individual writer considers interesting or important, adding other information via footnote and appendixes for the sake of an appearance of completeness and objectivity.13
This being the case, anyone wanting to form a reasonable impression of a time period, person, or complex event would be well advised to read a variety of sources. Historians, of course, prefer primary sources—documents generated by persons who were alive at the time recorded and preferably witness to the events mentioned. These documents include letters, diaries, newspapers (to some extent), recorded oral histories, etc. Photographs (such as Mathew Brady’s well-known Civil War photos) are probably among the most valuable resources—but I tell you what, the camera can indeed lie, even without the benefit of Photoshop. (Some Civil War photos—not necessarily Brady’s—were recently analyzed and found to have been deliberately staged, with bodies having been moved postmortem and repositioned to give the impression of a massacre having occurred that actually hadn’t.)
So how is a responsible writer of historical fiction to make sure that he or she is being accurate in depiction of an earlier time? Well…you aren’t. Even if you were writing about something that happened yesterday, to you personally, your account would be shaped by the details you recall (whether right or wrong), by your emotions at the time, and by your ex post facto responses and analysis.
You try to avoid making obvious errors of fact, and to make an honest effort to keep faith with the dead. Beyond that, you just have to accept that history, for everyone, will always be seen through a glass, darkly.
Though since we mention honesty….
IV: INTRODUCTION OF DELIBERATE FICTIONS—OR: THE THIRD LEVEL OF LIES
In terms of historical fiction, there can be no such concept as “the truth”—at least not so far as facts are concerned (there is of course an artistic truth that is not only possible but highly desirable—but that’s not the question we’re dealing with here). The impression you (as the reader) come away with will depend not only on What Really Happened, and on the skill of the writer in depicting that, but on the myriad choices—s
electivity/accidental distortion/active suppression/deliberate misrepresentation—made by all those writers who lie (and I do mean lie) between Now and Then.
Because writers do tell deliberate lies, for an assortment of reasons, ranging from self-interest or self-protection, to the promotion of a political agenda,14 to a desire to aggrandize or destroy, or simply to make a better story.
This is why historical fiction matters, really. It’s the blending of what can be approximately known of events and circumstance with what can certainly be known of people—for the emotional truth that we share by reason of our common humanity is the same from age to age. By this means, we gain insight and perspective not only of the past but of our here and now.
Myth and Mountain Birthdays
Author’s Note: I wrote this in 1999, at the request of the Flagstaff newspaper, the Daily Sun, for one of their features on the history of the town.
My birthday was always the coldest day of the year. If not literally true, it was family legend, and everyone knows that myth is much stronger than meteorology, even in the north country, where the snow lies deep on the mountaintops, and houses are built to keep the heat in, not out.
This particular legend had its origin—reasonably enough—on the date of my birth, January 11, 1952. My family lived in Flagstaff, but the family doctor had been having a difference of opinion with the hospital board, and had moved his practice to the Williams Hospital. So, when my mother went into labor early in the morning, my twenty-one-year-old parents were obliged to drive thirty miles over a two-lane ice-slick road, through the teeth of a driving blizzard, in order to get to the doctor.
When I was finally born, just at dark, my father was so unnerved by the entire experience that he went out to a nearby restaurant and ordered ham and eggs for dinner—forgetting that it was Friday. (Way back when, Catholics didn’t eat meat on Fridays.) Driving the thirty miles home through snow and black ice, he ran off the road twice, got stuck in the drifts, and—as he later recounted—managed to free himself only because he couldn’t stand the thought of freezing to death and leaving my mother with a one-day-old child.
At the age of two days, I too made the perilous trip through the dark pines of the frozen landscape, to become a third-generation native of Flagstaff. There aren’t a lot of us, if only because Flagstaff isn’t that old.
Among the early founders of the town were my great-grandparents. Stanley Sykes was born in Yorkshire, England, but at the age of fifteen was diagnosed with consumption. The only chance, his doctor told him, was to leave England; go to Arizona, where the warm, dry air was good for the lungs (well, it was 1868, after all; the midwesterners hadn’t got here with their damn mulberries and Bermuda grass yet). Stanley heeded this advice, and with his elder brother Godfrey, set sail for the New World and the healing balm of the desert air.
Like many another outlander—my husband, for example—who thought Arizona was a desert, Stanley was startled to find that the northern third of the state sits atop the Colorado Plateau, and that the San Francisco Peaks are covered with the largest forest of ponderosa pine in the world. In search of desert, Godfrey went south…but Stanley stayed, seduced by the rush of wind through the pines and the clear dark skies of the mountain nights, thick with stars.
Great-grandmother Beatrice Belle Switzer came from Kentucky, along with her seven brothers and sisters, when the family farm was flooded out. It must have been a flood of biblical proportions, because once the Switzers started moving, they didn’t stop until they came to Flagstaff, which—at 7,000 feet—they evidently considered high enough ground to be safe.
The air in Flagstaff may not have been hot, but apparently it was dry enough, since Stanley lived to be 92, finally dying on a vacation to San Diego (the winter fog will get you every time). I was four when he died, and still have a vivid memory of him in his armchair, the smoke from his pipe drifting in the lamplight, as he taught me the delicate art of building houses out of cards—a skill that’s stood me in good stead since.
His son, Harold—my grandfather—became the mayor of Flagstaff—and thereby hangs another family tale.
It was a scandal, in fact—or so everyone said—when my mother, Jacqueline Sykes, the mayor’s daughter, descendant of one of the First Families of Flagstaff, fell in love with Antonio Gabaldon. Tony was smart, handsome, athletic, hardworking—and a Mexican American, born in Belen, New Mexico. In 1949, in a small Arizona town, this was miscegenation—or so everyone said.
My mother’s friends said so. Mrs. X, her English teacher, said so, telling her firmly that she couldn’t possibly marry a Mexican; her children would be idiots. The parish priest who refused to marry them said so; such a marriage would never last. The “interested parties” who took out a public petition against the match said so; it was a scandal. Her parents said so—and at last she was persuaded, and reluctantly broke the engagement.
My mother’s parents sent her south, to the University of Arizona in Tucson, to leave the scandal behind; to forget. But she didn’t forget, and six months later, on a dark December night, she called Tony and said, “I still want you. If you still want me—come and get me.”
He drove down from the snow-covered mountain to the desert and brought her back the same night—and they were married at 6:30 the next morning, by a priest from another parish.
It was a long and happy marriage—dissolved only by death—and thirteen months after the wedding, I arrived, the third generation born on the mountain.
We (and the fourth generation) live in Scottsdale, but I still keep the family house in Flagstaff, and escape there regularly to write; to me, the ideal weather for writing involves a gleaming portcullis of icicles to keep out all intruders, soft white drifts on the pines and the sidewalks, and the muffled grind of cars in the distance, crushing cinders into the slippery packed snow as they labor uphill. No salt on these roads; the San Francisco Peaks are in fact one mountain, the remains of an extinct volcano—or least we hope it is extinct; the U.S. Geological Survey is not so sure.
It’s 72 on this Christmas Day, and the dogs are swimming in the pool. My husband gives me warm slippers, though, knowing I’ll need them soon. My birthday, after all, is always the coldest day of the year.
(Oh…Mrs. X? You were wrong.)
WHAT IS THIS WORD…ORGANIZATION?
“How do you organize all your research?” people ask me. And “How do you keep track of everything that’s going on in one of your books?”
“What makes you think I do?” is my usual reply.
People often ask me what my writing space looks like and then immediately tell me what they think it must look like—obviously, they’ve spent some time trying to imagine it. The most frequent guess is (as one person recently put it) “a huge wall covered with charts and dozens of Post-it notes in different colors, with colored thumbtacks everywhere and a spiderweb of colored strings running from one point to another!”15,16
If I did that, I think I really would have trouble keeping track of things. I’d also probably be so busy trying to build and maintain such a monument to organization that I’d never write a word. Of all the ways there are to avoid writing, the impulse to “organize the material” is probably near the top of the list. (See “Mind Games,” Part 7.) Making lists is lots easier than writing.
Personally, I love lists. They’re very soothing. You usually write them slowly, so they’re tidy-looking even if you don’t have good handwriting. They also give you a sense of reassurance that you really do know what you’re doing, and they incite the pleasant delusion that Things Are Under Control. Unfortunately, once I’ve written a list, I find that I don’t want to do anything on it.17,18
I do in fact like to use color to keep track of things, but that—like everything else—is just a function of the way my brain works (i.e., messily) and hasn’t much to do with organization, as such. I’m happiest working on multiple projects—or parts of projects—at once.
I’ve recently come to the conclusion
that I have some benign form of ADD. I deduced this on the basis of a newspaper quiz purporting to pinpoint symptoms of this condition. Idly answering the questions while conducting a phone interview19, I noticed that the questions seemed to fall into two groups: some questions had to do with anger management/irritability/frustration issues, while others dealt with distraction—“Do you often feel like you’re watching a television set with all the channels going at once?” (Of course…doesn’t everyone?), or “Do you commonly feel as though things are rushing past your ears?” (Yes, it kind of tickles), and so on.
I answered all of the anger questions “no” and most of the distraction (if you want to call it that) questions “yes.”
This actually explained a lot. I normally do think on about eight levels at once, and there are only a few things that are sufficiently intense or absorbing as to give my concentration a single focus.20
The way people write—or write most effectively—has everything to do with the way their brains are wired up, and learning to write effectively means learning how you personally are wired up.
I discovered my own wiring arrangement more or less by accident (all the important things in my life have happened more or less by accident—with the exception of having children. That, I planned21). I was working as a university professor—writing grant proposals, textbooks, quizzes and exams, scholarly articles, popular science articles, etc.—and freelancing almost full time for the computer press, doing software reviews, articles, and opinion pieces for Byte, InfoWorld, and other such publications. I also had three children under the age of six, and it’s all Mozart’s fault that I decided that now was the ideal time to begin writing a novel.22
The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood Page 66