如何为受家族史启发的历史小说做研究

Today’s guest post is excerpted from Fact & Fiction: How to Write a Novel Inspired by Family and History by Constance Hays Matsumoto.

Most everyone delights in finding treasure. Hunts excite us, take us to the unknown, and delight us with unexpected discoveries. That’s what research is all about: hunting for and uncovering treasure. No matter how deep you dig and how hard you look for hidden treasure, research is not your story. Research simply uncovers historical context and events.

Historical fiction requires a balancing act between reality and imagination. Does research inform inspiration, or does inspiration inform research? Both. They’re intertwined and enjoy a symbiotic relationship with story. Research unveils what happened in history and provides you with the knowledge to unleash your creative energy. Creativity inspires your ability to convey how it felt to live in and experience that historical period. It’s your imagination that creates an immersive story world and brings facts to life.

Why research and when?

Beyond the details of what may have happened in a particular period, research uncovers many important facts and circumstances that give credibility to the authentic world you’re building such as what people wore, where they lived, what they ate, where or if they went to school, what they did to earn a living, and what the social norms, etiquette, and politics of the day were. While researching, you’ll uncover surprising tidbits that make you scratch your head and question, “What?” And all of it will be available to spin—but only if and where it serves your story.

Let’s assume you’re full of pent-up energy and ready to get started on your book. Which do you tackle first: research or draft? Neither. First you clarify your story idea, which for me includes writing your logline and cover copy. Once these steps are finished, only then are you ready to start researching. You’ll want to begin your research phase clear on what your book is and is not, as well as what you want to achieve. I completed the bulk of researching a wide range of topics long before I started writing my first draft. Capturing and synthesizing research grounded me in the historically accurate time, place, events, politics, and social and cultural norms. It helped me feel comfortable imagining a time and place I’d never been.

Later, while writing, I dug deeper to fill in specific details. During my broad research, I learned about the Hiroshima Tram Girls—teenage girls schooled by the railway company as tram conductors during WWII, replacing the men who were at war. Later, I brought this unique piece of history to life through the experience of a supporting character. Not only was the story of the tram girls interesting, but it also served my story and defined an entire character arc.

Research is an investment in your story and your readers. Readers know when authors shortcut the research process. Don’t do that. You owe your readers the courtesy of serving up a place and time filled with enriching details that make sense, are verifiable, and serve the story. Imagine you’re reading a novel set in the early 1900s about seafaring, and the author references radar. Is that plausible? Maybe. You look up when radar was developed and learn it was decades later. Now, you’ve likely lost confidence in the author.

Do the work. By going back in time, you’re able to transport your readers there. And that’s what we look for in reading fiction: to be transported from where we are, learn something new, and relate with characters on a human level.

Before I began researching, my expectations were low, especially when recalling the required reading and boring history textbooks from high school. It was hard for me to read and memorize textbook entries for a test, because I didn’t care. Not about The Louisiana Purchase. Ancient civilizations. Washington at Valley Forge. I cared about who was having the party after a Friday night game. So, what flipped my switch? Passion to honor my family. I was jazzed and ready, my research fueled with zeal.

Paradoxically, my research took me back to my high school years. The first thing I did was reread Hiroshima by John Hersey, which I had first read as a junior. It shocked me then. And it moved me to tears again when I reread it in 2017. The Connie Hays in high school dreamed small. She would have scoffed at the idea of someday attending an Arms Control Association meeting or publishing an award-winning historical novel about Hiroshima. She would have been baffled by Connie today. People and perspectives evolve. Maybe yours will, too.

What to research

Your logline and cover copy will help you identify what you might need or want to know and any unique historical angle you may want to explore.

Let’s say your book is about a family member’s Vietnam War experience. Your angle will determine where you focus. Maybe it’s a general understanding of the worldwide politics behind the war, or the Vietnamese culture, or Agent Orange. All are important. Decide what’s most important for your authentic story and start there. Then balance historical facts with storytelling in a way that helps readers understand the historical context and immerses them in your story.

If you’re writing a historical novel inspired by family history, you may already possess some of the most valuable and inspiring gems in the treasure chest: primary sources and firsthand accounts from people who were there. Primary sources can include things such as early memoirs, original documents, diaries, photographs, artifacts, oral histories, newspaper articles, and interviews. Some of my primary sources included my mother-in-law’s autograph book (constructed from scrap wood and old rawhide shoelaces) and her 1944 spiral-bound high school yearbook from the maximum-security Tule Lake Segregation Center. Here, I learned about the activities at her high school and the students’ period slang—gal, swell, gee. From cherished conversations with her, I learned more about her actual experiences and how they impacted her.

Secondary sources helped me learn, interpret, and analyze historical facts. They include everything from textbooks to magazine articles to political analyses, and there’s a lot of secondary source material available. “A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in 17th century England.” This quote from Richard Saul Wurman’s book, Information Anxiety, astounded me when I read it years ago. And that was before the information and technology explosion of the internet and artificial intelligence.

Today, with a wide range of sources and seemingly endless information available to us, online is a good place to start researching. Most of us go to Google when we want to know something. Indeed, Google is a great place to lead you to other sources and get answers to quick questions, like what were the years of the Vietnam War? But writing a novel requires you to go way beyond Google.

What you want to know will take you where you need to get it, and there’s no perfect starting point. If writing about your family, then begin with your family history. I organized photographs, legal documents, and other primary source material by person and date. I created a timeline for each person, recording significant dates and events on a spreadsheet. Important dates in history and family experiences heavily influenced the structure. Having this well-organized information at my fingertips while writing was a godsend. If spreadsheets aren’t your thing, maybe plotting important dates on a whiteboard is. Capturing everything in one place is what’s important. Then you can move on to authoritative reference materials on your subject. They will reveal subtopics and issues such as daily life, art, music, etc.

If you intend to write your book with dual point of view characters set in distinctly different places and circumstances, consider dividing the research to maintain your focus. Because my novel was written with one point of view character in Hiroshima and the other in the US, I researched Hiroshima, militaristic Japan, and the atomic bombing and its aftermath first. I then wrote the early chapters for this character’s point of view before moving on to research and write about my US-based character.

As you conduct your research:

• Ask yourself if it’s topical and relevant.
• Cross-reference with other sources to verify important information and avoid bias.
• Differentiate the words of others from your impressions to avoid unintended plagiarism. Some writers avoid cut and paste altogether and summarize their research findings. I used quotation marks in my notes to indicate copied material. When the research inspired ideas and my own interpretation of something, I added my initials.

Online Research Tools I Found Most Helpful

• Digital Commons Network: An open source platform for scholarly articles and research
• Digital Public Library of America: An open access archival resource from across the US
• Google Scholar: A searchable database of academic and scholarly literature
• JSTOR (short for journal storage): A non-profit, partially open access digital library
• Archive.org: Non-U.S. centric sources
• University, public, and private libraries

Librarians are your friends! Ask for their help, and they will often refer you to some fabulous online sources. Many are free.

Books: Read other fiction books on your topic to identify how your details and your spin on history are different. I also read historical fiction books to learn other techniques and how the authors incorporated historical facts. I was so taken with Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, that I spent hours deconstructing it. Doerr is in a league of his own. If you haven’t read his book, I recommend you do. Also read about what happened in textbooks, autobiographies, and narrative nonfiction. It’s your writerly job to fill in the gaps. Before you return nonfiction books to the shelf, mine the bibliography and footnotes for additional source material.