Over the past year, I've taken some time to muse, study, and read on the subject of characters in historical fiction. I've retained some of what passed through my brain, and I'm going to pass it on . . . it's a thing I do. This column is dedicated, then, to characterization, voice, period research, and realism.

Most of us have run across in a story or novel a character in one of the two that just didn't work. Why? The voice was wrong. They said something they would never say, or did something they would never do. They knew things that weren't invented yet, or used a figure of speech common to a different time period. One of my pet peeves is horror authors who try to write in elaborate, overblown Victorian speech patterns. In almost every case, someone who didn't live in those times will fall short of sounding correct, and will probably sound pompous, or flat silly. The reason is simple. You can't read Poe and Lovecraft and then, from vague memories of how they used words and language, transfer this to your own characters. It isn't that simple. Writing about characters you might meet today, or tomorrow, is one talent—writing about characters long dead is a different form altogether.

I've been writing a novel for Amazon.com's "shorts" program, serialized in many parts, titled "The Orffyreus Wheel." In this novel, half of the action takes place in modern times, and half in the time of Johann Bessler, which is Germany in the 1700s. I've read what is available in excerpts from Bessler's journals, and some accounts of his life, but to get a real feel for the language of the time, I've had to try other sources. This is where the research (and in particular the Internet) come in handy. If you put in the right search terms, you can find letters written by men and women of the time. You can find historical accounts of events written by men and women of that time, and you can find (if you are lucky) paintings, images, and as you move forward in time, photographs of those times. You can read the books and poetry of the time, and you can find references that put the politics and concerns into perspective for you.

When I wrote The Mote in Andrea's Eye, my recent hurricane thriller, I researched the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the 1940s. I didn't go into huge depth—I wanted enough to lend reality, but not enough that I sounded like a historian. I found out who would have been on the radio at the time. I found out populations, and what business was in the area at the time. I researched nearby Elizabeth City and other towns of the time. I already have a wealth of North Carolina historical info here because we have made a hobby of researching our house, our town, and the county we live in, which stretches all the way back to the British Colonial days.

A friend of mine recently mentioned that author Loren Estleman, who has written a series of novels that I love about the Detroit area, including a novel about the founding of Ford Motors, and another titled Whiskey River, which is the story of ferrying illegal alcohol across the frozen lakes from Canada and the gangs behind it, has developed the habit of reading period letters to get into the mood and voice. He finds as many letters from characters in different walks of life—written in the time period and geographical area of his novel—as possible. He reads and studies the phrases, the words, the expressions and the political and social "weight" behind each. It makes for a very authentic recreation, and it is part of what I believe is necessary when writing historical fiction.

When you write things in the modern world, you can get away with a lot. You can let the reader fill in the familiar and assume that they will understand the vernacular. You can give voices from TV and movies to your characters and people will instantly conjure the faces and the correlations. Not so in historical fiction.

One of the best series of the type that I can recall was Jack Finney's Time and Again, which is the story of a man with the ability to so immerse himself in the clothing, speech, news, and technology of another time that he could step from one year into another. The depictions of life in New York City in the late 1800s and early 1900s are spectacularly vivid. You not only see what they did, how they lived, and how they approached life differently than we do in modern times, but you get a narrator with modern times as his perspective. The detail in these novels (he followed it up with From Time to Time and a short story collection called About Time: 12 Stories) is painstakingly researched. Finney chose New York City, a town that is well documented in photographs, history, books, literature, and records. Imagine a time when only the head of The Statue of Liberty had arrived from France and the idea of her standing in the Bay was only an amusing thought for talk over dinner?

The bottom line of what I'm going for here is simple. Historical fiction is not to be taken lightly if you want to make an impression with it. Historical accuracy has to balance with a plot and characterization that is accurate in its place and time, and at the same time of interest to modern readers. The research is absolutely necessary, but can't be allowed to interfere with the story. The more familiar you become with the time, lore, legend, and fact of the time in which you plan to set your work, the more comfortable you will be when you actually begin putting the words in their proper order, and the less likely your reader will be to stumble over inconsistencies.

The Internet is a wealth of knowledge on the past. In recent genealogical searches of my own family, and that of a man I've been researching ever since his tombstone landed in my living room (another story that you can read over at www.storytellers.com if you get the time) I found letters from Colonial times. I found letters from Revolutionary soldiers, Civil War soldiers, wives, lovers, businessmen, Pinkerton Men—whatever you might want, it's out there. There are live scans of personal journals throughout history—there are articles drawn from other journals, and there are photos. The state of Kansas has a huge library of historical photos available online depicting the history of their state, and if you visit the pages of state historical societies, you can find a lot more. For instance, you can get the common surnames in an area, what religious practices were common, what they grew, ate, and listened to and who was in charge.

The more of this you do, the more comfortable you'll grow with your own characters, and the more vivid those characters and settings will become when you present your prose to the world.

History is an asset that America has in abundance, and that Americans are watching slip through their fingers. There are worlds of knowledge that are about to slip away from us as the next generation passes. Men and women alive fifteen, or even ten years ago could talk about life in the early 1900s because they lived that life. We are about to lose the twenties and thirties due to national apathy. Here in my own home town, the "Historic Society" is only worried about putting up pretty (and historically inaccurate) street lights and artsy brick endings on the sidewalks—the homes of the 1700s and 1800s crumble around them and it seems that they could care less.

I saw this attitude a bit in Europe—people walked in and around the ruins of the very icons of history—The Acropolis, The Coliseum—and all they cared about was selling things to the tourists. They didn't see that we were trampling the Greek Gods into the new asphalt . . . and it was a shame.

I'll leave you with a poem—one that was published first here at ChiZine long ago . . . and with the hope that you'll think about what I've said if you decide to write a period piece—that you'll give proper consideration to what people thought, wrote, did, and said in the time of your story . . . and take the time to dream those worlds back into existence, if only for a little while.

Medieval Mutant Masters

(Musings on Florence)

by David Niall Wilson

City built of temples,
Cathedrals and Baptismal Pools,
Saints and idols,
Saturated in the works
Of men with names larger,
Than their lives,
Who's visions reign,
Transcendent,
Their bones (long dispersed)
Crumbled into legends.
St. Mark's Cathedral,
A thousand candles burning
For a thousand prayers
As the bells toll in towers
Old as time herself.
Michelangelo's metamorphing
Creatures, half man, half stone,
Trapped in eternal struggle,
Metaphors of unintentional brilliance.
David, beautiful and stark,
Standing watch against the Goliath of time,
His sling and stone poised for battle,
His stature undiminished by the years.
Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo,
Mutant Ninja Geniuses from days
Beyond our memory.
So much passion, tied
To stone & canvas, wood & bone—
Souls, once vibrant with life,
Now bound to us by memory alone.
A thousand thousand lives of labor,
love & faith performed
Alchemical Transmutation,
Turning stone to gold.
Vendors sell tiny copies, trinkets,
Imperfect memories to cart away,
And feet still walk where prophets
Routed demons in the name of a King.
Modern priests of decadence infest
The streets, gawking at each new souvenir,
Carrying their trophies to the next temple,
Escorting their wallets to the next shrine.
The city abides, the spirits linger,
And David, carted off in Gucci splendor,
Broods over Jeopardy on mantels,
As Splinter leads the mutant masters
Of our children's dreams
In search of enlightenment.
18:35          9/23/94