Discovering Our Way into Historical Fiction

by Constance Hood
Writing historical fiction is a through-the-looking-glass experience. The mirror of life warps and bends. Your world separates into multiple dimensions, some layers reflecting you and other layers revealing shadows of people and places from the past.
Islands of Deception: Lying with the Enemy is based on a true story. Two Dutch teens, a brother and a sister, make decisions that will affect their entire lives. They don’t have a lot of time. They must flee a Holland where Jews are being persecuted, or they must stay to face the consequences. At the end of his life, my father mailed me a letter, some 12 closely spaced pages. He was a spy, a career path that he followed for nearly 50 years.
It took only a few months to assemble a first draft of what happened. I had a series of events, no settings, a limited understanding of what happened, and no real interactions between the people. So as writers, how do we conjure up stories that matter? Our work is to take that initial draft of significant events and make it into scenes where the reader plays a role. Readers are not bystanders looking at staged events. They want to come with us.

Walking Our Settings

It’s essential to know where we’re going. Because the events are actually from family, I had spent many school vacations in Amsterdam.
The house is now the Argentine Embassy for Holland, but they invited me in to walk through the building, ground floor to attic, the courtyard in the center. My aunt was with me on these walks. The ground floor offices with marble paneling and floors were originally a ballroom, the upstairs corridors for family life, and finally the attic with its elaborate pulley system intact. How else would you get a piano off the canal boat and into the house?
In the first chapter of the book Hans has procured two immigration visas to the U.S.–green cards to live in a country that wasn’t accepting Jewish refugees any longer. His walk through Amsterdam reveals a young man who is already homesick. Your walks are your backdrop and your insight into feelings and senses.
Ellis Island in New York revealed the faces and fears of immigrants. I was able to pull the ship manifests, Dad’s visa, and to understand the process of landing in the U.S. alone. This character was only a couple of years older than I’d been when I left home to attend college a hundred miles away. He entered a new culture, a new language, and there was no dorm mother to help out.
As a writer, I sketched out my scenes, but for each character I looked up photos of people in the place. My favorite? A video of New York City, shot in August 1939. It was the motherlode– absolute pandemonium of Manhattan surrounding a young man who had grown up on a quiet canal.

Daily Lives in Museums

Museums are a treasure trove of daily life. How does your heroine get dressed, or undressed? What does the maid do? What do they do with the chamber pots each morning?
Historical society curators love to meet with writers and their stories are gold. Dad’s notes stated simply that he ran for his life. We had to catch our bad guy, not just leave it at “ONI (Navy) got him.” We’re on an island, so the escape must be over water; patrol torpedo boat makes sense, but where on earth are there PT boats?
Three months later I stood in Battleship Cove, Fall River, Massachusetts. The last two PT boats are fully restored, sitting in that museum.
An afternoon of crawling around a boat gave me an understanding of how it worked. I had my hands on the throttles for the three engines, the mechanism for the two torpedoes, the cannon lever, and triggers of 50-caliber machine guns. All this stuff was attached to a basic plywood shell, about the size of your pleasure cruiser. Oh yeah, no guardrail, not even a cable to grab onto. The deck is covered with things that go boom; it’s not a place to hang out.
Still didn’t know how to capture the bad guy. Enter Don Shannon, curator of the PT boats. Interesting curator’s office (paint, fixatives, ropes, hardware) not like the bookish curators in art museums.
“Come on outside.” Don took me upstairs and pointed. “That’s a Daihatsu barge. The Japanese used them to get supplies and personnel back and forth to the submarines.”
“So, the guy is going to meet a sub, and he first has to locate this barge?”
“That would work.”
“So, we need to get him before he gets to the barge?”
“Nah, let him get on the barge.”
I looked at him sideways.
“Then we’ll blow it up.”

Photos and Documents–Primary Sources

Artifacts like photos, visas, and love letters all bring credibility to your characters. We turn to photos and documents, our own and those of others.
The camera became a supporting character in this book. Hans Bernsteen went to war with a camera, not a gun. He uses it to record the truth and remember the details. Before photoshop the camera told the story. WWII newsreels are primary source documents. If you tell a story that occurs since photography was invented, use it. Even stories from long ago are documented in churches and municipal halls, marriages, births and deaths. Writers come to me with story ideas that have come from their looks at Ancestry.com. Read into the pages.

Interviews

You are essentially a journalist if you are writing about a time and place.
However, as a journalist exploring the past, you need to find people to interview. Things happen in interviews that don’t happen from just looking at things. You’re hunting for a character’s desires and secrets. People may not remember what they ate for lunch, but they will remember significant events from long ago.
People are generous. Everyone has a story, and the final interview was absolute gold. We had a chance to spend an afternoon with someone who had been a member of the German army. After about an hour, his son picked up the bottle.
“Here, have some more wine.”
“Oh, I’m fine, I don’t need any more,” I said.
Chris poured. “Yes, actually you do. Anti-Semitism is coming up next.”
So, we went for it. The old soldier talked; I recorded.
So why do we do this?
Often there’s an author’s message that accompanies our fictions. In this case the plight of persecution and the decision to take action or not is a major theme, one that has grown more relevant when it should have faded into obscurity.
Our message needs to come across credible. Fiction readers want to believe what they read, to become a part of the story. Your history is the container, the Pandora’s box. Listen to your dreams; sometimes we call that a vivid imagination. Who knows what is inside your own boxes? Go find out.

Constance Hood has earned professional credits as an artist and a writer in both theater and classical music. Her day job was as a LAUSD literacy expert, educating students from “Which way do you hold the book?” through Advanced Placement Writing skills. Islands of Deception: Lying with the Enemy is her second historical novel.