Stick, Twist, Fudge or Change?
Can you, should you, change the facts when you're writing fiction?
A few days ago over on Threads, spy novelist Rhiannon Beaubien was asking this:
Question for my writer friends … how much can you fudge a timeline when writing historical fiction? Like, if your book is set in 1953 and you want to include something that didn’t really happen until 1955, can you do it and add a disclaimer in the acknowledgments? What’s the limit for being a little creative with the timing of historical events?
It’s a classic question, which I’m expecting to crop up tomorrow at the Writing Coach’s Getting Published Day and next month when I’m teaching a Historical Fiction Masterclass at the Oxford University Summer School. I addressed it in Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction, but, of course, it applies fiction written in or about any time or place, and to creative non-fiction too. (What counts as historical fiction? Click here).
The thing is, if you’re writing fiction, by definition you are writing a story which never happened. My Battle of Waterloo didn’t happen any more than Thackeray’s or Heyer’s did, nor did my Wars of the Roses, or Scott’s or Penman’s. You are not writing history so you’re not bound by the historian’s rules to stick to provable and probable and label each as such. You can write whatever you like and if the reader’s unhappy with that they can go and buy a history book. Your book, your rules.
But novels, also by definition, use the materials of real life and historical truth, and those are part of the writer’s ‘fundamental contract’ with the reader, as John Gardner describes it in The Art of Fiction: that the writer will deal ‘honestly and responsibly’ with the reader, and in return the reader will ‘forget to disbelieve’ that the events of the story never happened, and be able to enter and stay in the ‘fictional dream’.
Suspending disbelief is a trust-fall: part of the writer’s job is to create (or at least not dissipate) the reader’s trust. The way we do that, says Gardner, is with the ‘reality and detail’ in the writing: how we evoke the world of the story needs to accord with the reader’s sense of the real world, even though the this story is not “true” in the literal sense.
How do we square the circle of ‘not true but true’?