Fast and loose?

My latest creative project, which for last several weeks has seen me involved in drastic, medically necessary line editing, is a series of stories half in historical in nature and half not. I've mentioned this in a couple blogs since last summer. What binds the stories is the

setting--Nantucket Island, Massachusetts--but I've found some similar themes evolving across the stories, whether they are contemporary or historical. I guess this isn't surprising since all the stories arise out of the same imagination.

The earliest story, chronologically, takes place in 1795. (Interestingly, this was the last story to be drafted.) The catalyst for the story was reading about an actual, and rather significant, event from that year: the robbing of the new Nantucket Bank by a group of off-islanders during the Nantucket's June sheep-shearing festival. No robbery is good for those victimized, but this crime proved particularly divisive, as accusations began flying wildly (cunningly?), especially from the mouth of the bank's president, one Joseph Chase. Islanders very quickly took sides in laying blame. On one side were the Quakers, who tended to be Jeffersonian Democrats; on the other side were the Congregationalists, who tended to be Federalists. Each side thought they had an explanation for the crime and were sticking to their guns, despite evidence to the contrary. This is especially true in the case of the Quakers. (Chase was part of their ranks.) At one point, William Coffin, a Congregationalist and Federalist--and someone suspected of being involved with the robbery--had to carry out his own investigation on the mainland, because the mostly Quaker, Democratic bank directors refused to look into, or didn't want to believe, clues and rumors that pointed to culprits from there. After months of searching off-island, Chase actually brought back to Nantucket two men from New York who admitted to the crime. But the bank directors, too busy trying to pin the crime on Coffin and his Federalist allies, never took the suspects seriously, and the two men were later permitted to escape. It proved a disastrously acrimonious episde for the island, and in the years following Nantucketers tended to look back on the pre-1795 years as a period of prelapsarian grace.

The Nantucket Bank robbery is a fascinating story--with even more complications that I've suggested above--so I couldn't resist approaching the event fictionally. It's probably worthy of a novel, but for now I've merely written a long short story. While I've stayed true to several facts about the case, I've also changed many facts, left others out, and am ignorant of still more. My characters, while based on real participants, are given new names and identities, and revised personal backgrounds. Also, in trying to shape the robbery into a coherent story, I've conflated the timeline and eliminated certain events and people that were significant to the historical account. Whether it works as a story is my main concern, not whether it works as history. Right now I can't tell because I'm still very close to it. My main worry for now, actually, is that because it's based on a real case I encountered in a history book (Nathaniel Philbrick's wonderful Away Off-Shore), I'm trying for too much historical perspective. But I have a feeling that historians, and perhaps Philbrick himself, would say that I'm playing way too fast and far too loose with the facts.

However, I wonder aloud--and am wondering in this post--if by giving my characters invented names and (mostly) invented identities, I have opened up exactly that "fast and loose" space for myself. I guess that's why I did it. (I say "I guess" because it was an intuitive choice. I didn't labor over it; I just did it.) Unlike my Van Gogh novel, I am not using real names. (Altough I am using a real event and a real island.) In my novel, I can fairly be charged, if in just a few spots, of creating an "alternative history." In completely abandoning real names and identities does the fiction become more or less alternative? Can a writer be criticized for not sticking to the "known facts" about a character if that character is fictional? What if the fictional character is in some vital ways drawn from a real person? Does this create a meaningful distinction or a distinction without a difference? Oh, the entangled mental waters one wades into when one starts blending history and fiction. But, then again, that's the fun of it, right?

When we look at our research

I posted Monday about a thought that came to me during a recent visit by novelist Elise Blackwell to UCA. (That's her on the right.) Blackwell said something else worth noting, so I'll raise the point today. Blackwell suggested that a writer should first do all her research for a novel but then put the research away when she starts to write. I understood her point immediately and have even made it myself in this blog: Writing a historical novel is all about telling a story, not showing off how much you know. Or having to feel burdened by how much you know. Understanding this point is crucial to understanding how good fiction works. But, even so, I felt moved to ask: You didn't research anything after you started writing Hunger? Weren't there new questions that came to mind as you wrote? Blackwell admitted that, yes, of course, certain questions of fact did come up and when that happened she would briefly revisit her original research or simply Google for an answer. But she stuck to her first point that a writer needs to put the research away. I then threw out something I'd heard years ago from writer Tracy Chevalier when she "visited" UCA (via a live feed from a studio in London). Chevalier suggested that a writer should write her story first--to make sure she really remains centered on the story--and then do whatever research seems necessary for the sake of that story.

Blackwell found that a tough one to swallow, and I admit that I do too. After all, aren't our stories often discovered or significantly shaped by the research? There's no way of getting around that they are. I simply can't imagine having started my Van Gogh novel without doing substantial reading into Van Gogh's biography, which directly affected what scenes I decided needing showing. And as for putting away the research you've already completed, I found myself only in half-sympathy. Yes, there is quite a lot of reading and notetaking that I carried out before I started composing Yellow that I never actually looked at while I wrote. Perhaps even the majority of my reading and notetaking. On the other hand, as I wrote I found myself having to research certain areas more substantially than mere fact checking (although I did plenty of that too). Most of all, I found myself delving deeper and deeper into Van Gogh's Collected Letters. These became my bible, my most important resource: for opinions on all sorts of matters but most importantly contemporary painters, for descriptive details about places and people, and for a sense of his emotional and intellectual life at different periods. Before I started composing Yellow, I read three different collections of selected letters, but while I was writing I had the nagging feeling that I might be missing something. So I ordered, at some expense, the hardbound three volume Collected Letters and plowed into it as I kept writing. I tried to read ahead. That is, I tried to be done with the letters from a certain period in his life before I wrote--or rewrote--the relevant scenes in Yellow. Carrying out this reading drastically improved and broadened my novel. Did it fundamentally alter the plot? No, actually, it probably didn't. But it made every scene more convincing, more vivid, more real. At least to me. If I'd just sat content with the already considerable research I'd carried out by the time I started writing, my book would be much lesser for it. Maybe this means I just didn't do enough in the first place. And maybe Elise Blackwell--an admirably thorough person and writer--did.