Getting Into Your Historical Characters POV, As Published in Suspense Magazine

 By Ric Wasley

Using historical characters as a back-story for your suspense /mystery is a popular and proven successful literary device to add depth, clues and perspective to your story.

It’s also a great way to set up a compelling premise for the mystery and has been used with great success by numerous authors from Dan Brown to Alfred Hitchcock. Hitch was of course the one who gave the name, MacGuffin, to whatever was the object of the stories quest. For instance in the Maltese Falcon, Gutman, played by Sidney Greenstreet, explains to Bogey, Sam Spade, the ominous history of the “Black Bird” and what the cost of the pursuit has been in human lives. Think of how much less the suspense would have been had Dashiell Hammett not used that historical backstory and decided to make the MacGuffin say, a bag of cash from a local liquor store heist. It is the romance and danger surrounding the history of the Falcon that gives the story its tingling edge.   

But often you’ll run across historical characters and events who whether as backstory foils or main protagonists, seem lifeless and two dimensional. Worse yet sometimes they appear anachronistic. Almost as though a Hester Prynne type of character had decided to update that dreary old scarlet letter by taking a trip to the local Salem mall. 

Admittedly it is difficult for authors to put themselves in a different time and place when events, mores and behavior were far different. After all, every time and culture views the past through the prism of their own Zeitgeist and we today are no exception. And even though we have come to a more enlightened view on things like race, gender, sexual orientation and even children, projecting this enlightened view into a story robs it of its impact. For instance suppose that an author was writing a Dickensian tale and chose to have a caring social worker intercede in helping Oliver Twist get that extra bowl of gruel - or OSHA coming down on Simon Legree for deplorable working conditions. That would certainly make us feel better but would it make for powerful reading? Probably not.

So what is the answer? Obviously it is incumbent on authors to leave modern sensibilities here in the present and submerge themselves as much as possible into the period they’re writing about. Think of it as an imagination-powered time machine.

But while imagination is the touchstone of a writer's craft, too much of it can cloud the water when writing of another period. Because it’s not enough to get the framework of the history correct. A novel lives on its characters. Thus while the hard facts of names, dates and events must be correct, they don’t mean a thing if the characters you create are not truly products of their time and not ours.

So how do you get into that historical character’s head? The most direct way possible: by accessing the same things that real historical characters used to express their own personal thoughts and feelings; letters, diaries and journals.  

When I first started doing research for the historical flashbacks in my paranormal mystery, “Echoes Down a Dark Well”, and more recently a full-blown historical mystery called, “Candle in the Wind”, I began by using those musty old records that libraries euphemistically refer to as “the stacks”. And as every writer who’s ever used them knows, these are the books that look and smell like they haven’t been opened in a hundred years – and most of them haven’t. But often they hold the key to making your historical characters and setting ring with that elusive tone of authenticity. I found this out when writing, “Echoes Down a Dark Well”, a back-story that spans two thousand years. Finding first person records and accounts is difficult. Most of what you get for personal observation prior to the 16^th or 17^th Century is actually written by a third party chronicling events after the fact. 

There are of course some famous first person diaries and journals like for instance the diary of Samuel Peyps or Caesar’s Commentaries. This means that the author needs to fill in more of color to develop believable and complex characters from pre-Sixteenth Century settings.

One of the things I enjoy most about writing historical mysteries is uncovering some little known event or item mentioned in a journal or newspaper; then using that information and a knowledge of the period to imagine what it must have been like to experience that. Then once I’ve worked that out in my notes and research, setting my characters, with their own individual personalities, into that scene and letting the reader experience that event through them.

And if we do it right we will hopefully avoid the historical writer’s greatest hazard: anachronisms. It seems that those little buggers are lurking around the corners every time we engage our characters in action or dialog. And they are usually not as blatant as a protagonist who walks up to Henry Ford rolling off his first Model T and comments, “Dude. Nice ride”.

Were it so, they’d be easy for authors and editors to catch.  Alas, the types of anachronism that creeps into the story and leaves us feeling uneasy without knowing why are harder to spot. Why? Because they migrate unseen and unnoticed from our own mind and creep into the story without us being consciously aware of it. And the reason they are so hard to detect is because they bleed onto the page from our personal Zeitgeist and subtly color the world and thoughts of our major characters. This is especially true when it comes to characters thoughts and actions in dealing with the social mores of the period they are in.

Most writers and readers are well aware that the way in which we view and interact with the world is radically different than in almost every previous age. For instance: our views on things like the role of women in society, children, religion, race, ethnicity and slavery; just to name a few, are more different now than they have been at any time in human history.      

That means that to portray a historical period accurately the writer is going to have to go against the grain of everything we believe in now. For example, take slavery. Up until 150 years ago the attitude of almost every person of every race and ethnicity on every continent accepted it as a natural part of life. Remember, that man had been enslaving his fellow man since the first tribe conquered its rival and decided that it would be kind of nice to make the other guy do your heavy lifting. Rome built the first world empire on it.

So if you were trying to portray say; a protagonist living in the 18^th Century, you would have to divorce yourself from your modern viewpoint of how wrong it was, and put yourself in the perspective of someone who’d been raised to believe that it was the natural order of things. Thus, unless the character was a nascent abolitionist, their viewpoint would not include the thoughts of equality that we take for granted today.

Sounds basic right? But it’s harder than we think to leave our core beliefs in the 21^st Century and jump into a virtual time machine to where people behaved in ways that are anathema to us today.

That’s why I think the best way to avoid this pitfall is to create your characters from sources taken from the actual period.

Whenever I’m doing a historical book or story, I like to begin by immersing myself in journals, diaries, letters and first-hand accounts from the period. Even legends and sagas can be useful since even if they were created after the fact, they will produce a far more revealing viewpoint than our own. After all while we might not see much laudable in ancient swordsmen chopping their enemies into small pieces, the society which produced the saga, legend, song or even fairy tale, did.

For instance, Hansel & Gretel’s father didn’t abandon them in the woods because he lacked proper parenting skills; it was because he couldn’t feed them!  So that even a so called ‘fairy tale’ can give an insight on a period before there was any kind of social safety net making an action unconscionable today, a practical, if sad, part of life.    

And up until the 20^th Century, how many men who were considered good, decent and pillars of the community looked upon their wives and daughters in a way that we would consider patronizing, chauvinistic and just plain wrong today?  And yet they did. It happened. And for every John Adams who took seriously and welcomed his wife Abigail’s admonishment to “remember the ladies”, there were millions who did not.

But that’s why it’s so important to portray our characters as realistically as possible within the context of their time and culture. Because by doing so, we as authors have the privilege of letting the world glimpse another era and in doing so gain a better understanding and appreciation of how the viewpoint of our modern world evolved. Or to paraphrase an old commercial from the late 20^th Century, which even now seems almost like another era, “we’ve come a long way baby.” 

           

 And thanks to writers like us, we know just how far!

A member of Mystery Writers of America and the Cape Cod Writers Group, Ric Wasley is a writer and lecturer as well as the  author of the popular McCarthy mystery series set in Boston in 1968, and most recently Echoes Down A Dark Well from Tell-Tale Publishing.

Ric has a forty year professional career history in advertising, publishing, and marketing in Boston, New York, and San Francisco. He has degrees in history and psychology and has been trained in debating, public speaking, and stage acting. A large part of his forty year career was spent in numerous professional and business settings as a presenter and featured speaker at seminars and professional meetings. He also teaches a popular course on marketing for authors at prominent venues such as the venerable “Cape Cod Writers Conference.”

For more information, check out his website at www.ricwasley.com.