Why I Write Historical Fiction - A Guest Entry from Samantha Wilcoxson

 Samantha Wilcoxson writes emotive biographical fiction that enables readers to connect with history's unsung heroes. She also writes nonfiction for Pen & Sword History. Besides reading and writing, Samantha loves sharing trips to historic places with her family and spending time by the lake with a glass of wine. Her most recent work is But One Life, a novelization of the life of American patriot Nathan Hale, and a new biography of James Alexander Hamilton is coming soon.

 

We have so much to learn from the past. In a society obsessed with the future and supposed progress, it is tempting to dismiss those who have come before us and brought us to where we are. Perhaps we believe we have moved beyond their lessons and old-fashioned ways, but I find evidence almost every day that we can benefit from deeper study.

When I select a historical figure to write about, my objective is to tell their story in a way that enables modern readers to connect with them as a well-known friend and abolish the distance between the now and then. I hope to inspire readers to contemplate the values and character of the people in my stories with the desire to take on some of those positive attributes themselves. Of course, I encourage readers to appreciate the past and those who persevered through circumstances that we cannot imagine coping with ourselves.

Historical figures also made mistakes, sometimes unbelievably profound ones, and we can learn from those too. How can we expect to avoid the errors of the past if we do not know about them? Will some of what we read make us uncomfortable? I certainly hope so. When we think critically about decisions and actions of the past, we should also look at our own the same way.

People of the past share the universal human experience with us. We might think ourselves quite different from them, but we hold in common the most substantial parts of life, such as love, family, and friendship. They endured tragedy and heartbreak, just as we sometimes do. Their perseverance often resulted in our ability to avoid hardships that they were forced to cope with.

Catherine Donohue is a beautiful example of this. She was an ordinary young woman who loved her family and her church until her job at Radium Dial changed everything. Catherine’s medical struggle with radium poisoning was horrid enough, but she also insisted on taking up the legal battle with her employer to take responsibility for the sick and dying women they dismissed. A quiet, small-town girl became a heroic woman who can serve as an inspiration to us all, even as she lost her personal fight to survive. I alternated between wonder, sadness, and anger as I wrote her story in Luminous.

Women like Catherine are the reason I write historical fiction. I want people to remember her, connect with her, and feel inspired by her. Each of my novels features a person with a profound story to tell, one that I could not resist writing.

My most recent novel, But One Life, takes readers back to the American Revolution and the life of a young man only vaguely remembered today. Did he really say that he regretted he had but one life to give for his country before being hanged as a spy by the British? Maybe, but what life journey had created a young man willing to make such a sacrifice? I wanted to know – and wanted my readers to know – more about Nathan Hale and his short, tragic life.

I hope my readers agree that I write historical fiction to share the emotions and experiences of those who have gone before us. May their lives enrich our own just as our stories will hopefully one day encourage and inform those still to come.

 

 

Find out more about Samatha Wilcoxson's books at: https://amazon.com/author/samanthawilcoxson

Why I Write Historical Fiction -- A Guest Blogpost by Janet Oakley

 Janet Oakley, writing as JL Oakley, writes award-winning historical fiction that spans the mid-19th century to WW II. Her characters, who come from all walks of life, stand up for something in their own time and place: the Pacific NW and WWII in Norway.

When not writing, she enjoys delving into local history, looking for little surprises that tell a larger story of the area and the nation’s past, fodder far more novels or non-fiction pieces. She loves to garden, weave, and demonstrate 19th century folkways. She can churn some pretty mean butter.

Why do I write historical fiction? It would be easy to say out of curiosity, but I know the seeds of my passion began with my mom introducing me to her favorite historical novels, The Prince of Paupers and Captain from Castile—all played by heartthrob Tyrone Power in 1940s movies—and most importantly, family stories that reach back to the founding of my country. I was twelve when we took my 82 year-old Nana to Newburyport, MA to visit the 1670 tavern her direct ancestor had run in the seventeenth century. Seeing that ancient building, visiting the village green that celebrates the arrival of the ship that brought him in 1638, and seeing the grand home of his grandson built in 1702, left a deep impression on me. Here was the timeline of my family history that led down to the present, yet I wondered how my ancestors lived in those times.

My Nana’s own story of pioneering in the West in the late 19th century was a living embodiment to me. I hung on her stories that she sent to me in letters and told me in person. In elementary school, inspired by The Little House on the Prairie series, I began to write my own historical stories. While pursuing a degree in American History years later, I was honored to be an intern and later, a volunteer in the Smithsonian’s Anthropology Archives. One of my first assignments was to search early 19th century publications’ depictions of Native Americans. I was successful, finding the oldest one from the 1820s (an authentic portrayal), but as I was searching, I found scandals (Swill’s Dairy in 1850s D.C.), first account of Yellowstone in the 1830s, and terrible poetry and jokes, which I collected. My exposure to these early magazines and newspapers such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News, increased my curiosity and made me ask, “Why didn’t I know this?”

So why do I write historical fiction? I believe it’s to tell untold or lost stories. Though last year was the 90th anniversary of the Civilian Conservation Corps, FDR’s wonderful program that saved millions of young men and their families and built our state and national parks, few knew enough to celebrate the anniversary. Yet, the impact that program had on people during the Great Depression of the 1930s continued on into World II. Without young men learning to work together in squads to accomplish difficult tasks, America would have been six months or more behind getting our soldiers ready to fight. Tree Soldier, my novel about a young man struggling to redeem himself in the CCC in the Pacific NW, shows how the program operated and how it affected a local, mountain community. Timber Rose is about women climbing mountains in skirts in the same locale in 1907. More than half of the major mountain climbing clubs were made of women. They were part of the early environmental movement.  

One of my favorite untold stories are about Hawaiians in the Pacific NW, in particular on the San Juan Island, working as shepherds and laborers for the Hudson Bay’s Company during the 1850s and 1860s. Their contribution to the building of what would become Washington State should not be overlooked. Mist-chi-mas: A Novel of Captivity explores the dynamics of Hawaiians, called Kanakas, Coast Salish, English Royal Marines and the US Army when the island was under military occupation. The novel also explores society’s pressure on what a woman could and could not do. “Mist-chi-mas” means captive in Chinook Wawa.

In the last recent years, my focus on untold stories has been on Norway in WWII. When I first started to research my novel, The Jøssing Affair, many years ago, I was surprised how often American magazines such as Newsweek and Times reported on events happening in German-occupied Norway. Yet, all the WWII novels recently published seemed to be about the resistance and horrible events on the continent or the Homefront in the UK. Who knew that up 400,000 soldiers were deployed to  Norway, a country of three million (Berlin’s population in 1940)? That there were concentration camps in Norway and killing fields? How ordinary people resisted against Nazifying of their churches and schools? The destruction of Telavåg, “The Lidice of the North.”  I was fascinated by the leader of the Deaf Church’s role in the Resistance and the hearty fishermen on the West Coast who smuggled agents into the country and refugees out to Shetland. The psychopathic Henry Oliver Rinnan, a Norwegian who was Norway’s number two war criminal after Quisling. All untold stories. I am happy to learn that people visiting Bergen are now taking the time to go out to the wonderful museum in Telavåg because they read about it my novels.

This is why I write historical fiction. 

 

Find out more about Janet an her books on her website: https://www.jloakleyauthor.com/

Why I Write Historical Fiction - Guest Blogpost from Scott Amis

Joseph Scott Amis retired from a thirty-year professional and business career in 2004. He has since devoted his time to medieval and Crusades studies and writing historical fiction. Until recently, Scott was a writer and features editor at Real Crusades History. A native Texan, he lives in Dallas.

 

Good question.  In junior high and high school, my best subjects were English, history, languages, and art. This should have told me something, but I never once considered studying to become an artist, architect, writer, or historian, and I certainly didn’t want to be a dentist or a lawyer.

Off to college, and years spent muddling through stints in pre-med, anthropology, and fine arts. After nine years of “in and out”, I surfaced in the real world with a degree in architecture. This proved to be a late but wise career choice, and I married and settled in soon after. And finally, my mom was happy!

My wife and I are both readers, and, in the days before the internet and Amazon.com, our Saturdays were often spent at the public library. My interests inevitably ran to history and historical fiction; my wife’s, to biographies of famous people, both historical and pop-culture. As time went on, I found myself dreaming about writing a novel, but what to write? As a “dyed-in-the-wool” Southerner - both of my great-grandfathers fought for the South in the US Civil War - and as a “boomer” whose parents and their generation were directly involved in World War II, those legendary conflicts would seem to be my favorite choices.

But, by then, my reading was almost exclusively centered on medieval history and the Crusades, and the 2005 first release of Ridley Scott’s epic “Kingdom of Heaven”, though deeply flawed, seemed to light a spark. I was going to write a novel about the First Crusade!

Aware that this project would require meticulous research and development of a polished style, I began with a short story about an ongoing conflict between neighboring feudal polities in late eleventh century France. The story was successful for my purposes, and became the basis for a fictional account chronicling a young knight’s adventures in France, beginning with his coming of age in 1086 through 1095 and the eve of the First Crusade, and ultimately, ending with his death in the Kingdom of Jerusalem thirty years later.

Having read my share of Crusades novels and a fair sample of scholarly works, I opted for an atypical approach. Instead of beginning with armies of eager Crusaders setting out for the Holy Land, To Shine with Honor commences in 1086, nearly a decade before Pope Urban II delivered his immortal address to the noblemen, knights, and commoners assembled in a field outside of Clermont in November of 1095. Thus, I hoped to show the everyday lives and struggles of people of all social classes in the unsettled and dangerous world of late eleventh century France, and the circumstances which influenced some to become Crusaders.

By early 2010, I had a 900-page first manuscript, and, after numerous rounds of editing and revisions, the first volume of To Shine with Honor was published in summer of 2016 to unexpectedly positive reviews and surprising literary recognition. The second volume continues to be a work-in-progress. Find out more about To Shine with Honor at: (hotlink to amazon page).

Find out more about To Shine with Honor at: here.

Blog Host Helena P. Schrader is the author of 25 historical fiction and non-fiction books, eleven of which have one one or more awards. You can find out more about her, her books and her awards at: https://helenapschrader.com 

Her most recent release, Cold Peace, was runner-up for the Historical Fiction Company BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 Award, as well as winning awards from Maincrest Media and Readers' Favorites. Find out more at: https://www.helenapschrader.com/cold-peace.html