History, Fantasy, and the Blurry Lines of Literature (Guest Blogger Jesse Bullington)

The best thing about writing historical fiction, for me, is the history. There is no substitute for hitting on some obscure fact or figure and realizing in this crackling flash that all the problems I was having with Chapter 17 are banished, and better still, the novel will be more fun for history buffs in the bargain. Considering the vast expanse of the historical record, passing up the real world for a completely fictional creation is a somewhat baffling choice to me.

The worst thing about writing historical fiction, for me, is the history (if you didn’t see that one coming you need to get out more). There is nothing more frustrating than realizing the fine plot threads I meticulously wove together into a tapestry of wit in Chapter 18 need to be completely unraveled because I skimped on researching the finer points of 14^th century fishing boat schematics or confused Pope Urban V with that chump Urban IV. Looking at the teetering stack of library books I have to get through to make Chapter 18 work again, I am somewhat baffled by my decision to work with real history instead of a wholly fictional, “second world” counterpart.

Not that I think creating a believable, nuanced world from scratch is easy. On the contrary, I have enough problems rendering a believable, nuanced facsimile of our own world with all of human history and learning at my disposal, so forget about my trying to invent a world any more than I already do. By which I mean that recreating a historical setting in a work of fiction does involve a great deal of invention, at least to render your world in such a way that is accurate and unobtrusive but still detailed enough for the casual reader who hasn’t spent far too much time reading up on Medieval fashion and politics.

The main reason I write fiction set in our historical past is that it appeals to me. Not a very illuminating answer, I know, but it’s the simplest one I’ve got. Writing fiction set in a fictional world wholly removed from ours, or a contemporary, parallel universe, or our species’ theoretical future, doesn’t get my brain humming the way inventing stories set in our past does, although I’ve read and loved many a work of second world fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, or whatever we’re labeling any given text at any given time. So no hating on so-called genre titles or non-genre speculative fiction titles, if there really is a difference between them—don’t ask me to define the fundamental distinctions between Margaret Atwood’s fictional futures and Ray Bradbury’s other than the usual differences you find between disparate authors; on my shelf she’s under A, he’s under B, and that’s about it.

In talking about historical fiction as opposed to other genres, and genre in general, I seem to have left out a rather important aspect of my own writing, which is that while at present I’m describing what I do as historical fiction not everyone would agree with me. The reason is that my work contains fantastical elements, and rather strong ones at that. Part of my motivation for incorporating the supernatural in my historical-set work is that many of the individuals living in said eras believed in monsters and witches, but that is far from the only reason I include patently impossible characters and creatures. A short answer would be similar to my reasoning for writing historical fiction in the first place, that I simply enjoy fantasy and horror and thus use both fairly heavily in my work, but even that doesn’t completely cover it.

Without getting bogged down with why we invent monsters and what they might symbolize to different cultures at different times, I would say that part of my desire to include fantastical elements stems from a desire to restore the magic that went out of the world when we realized witches were just midwives, madwomen, and charlatans, seamonsters simply whales and seals, dragons and griffins and countless other beasts nothing more than old dinosaur bones mixed with legend and the imagination of whoever stumbled over them. By telling stories set in a past that is as close to ours as I am capable of rendering, and by keeping the supernatural elements to the hinterlands instead of the civic centers, I’m trying to bend history but not break it, to recreate a world where the impossible was real, as opposed to creating a new world with its own realities.

Whether the reader thinks this means I’m a writer of fantasy or a writer of historical fiction doesn’t concern me so long as I get to keep blending the unbelievable with the everyday, the horrors of a hard life with the presumed horrors lurking just beyond the firelight, the real with the never-was. Just because we’ve lost our sense of wonder doesn’t mean we should inflict our mundane reality on our ancestors.