The Importance of Character, Setting, and Situation

A friend whose opinion I respect a great deal once told me that all a great historical novel is, is a great novel in a historical setting. I agree. Although that sounds deceptively simple and deserves a little unpacking.

Character, setting, and situation are the central components, the minimal “holy trinity” of all good novels. Of those three crucial ingredients, my personal feeling has always been that character is the most important, followed by the situation, the problem to be overcome, navigated, or sunk by, and the setting, where and when it all happens. So, when I find myself contemplating yet another historical novel, it is almost always the character who appears first.

Where they actually come from, which corner of my brain, I don’t quite know, and I tend to feel them more than see them. They may be angry, distressed, quiet, or shouting, but usually, they are in the middle of doing something when they first appear. Very occasionally, there will be two of them, but almost always it is only one.

Who Is the Character?

Usually, but not always, she is a woman. I don’t often have a lot of choice about her. She may be old, as in The Villa Triste, my novel about the Italian partisans in World War II, middle-aged, like Angela in The Lost Daughter which is about The Red Brigades, or, very rarely a child, like Isabelle in The Burning. Resolve in The Devil’s Glove is one of the very few teen-aged women who has wandered into my head, although like many others, she first appeared older, looking back on a younger self.

The situation and the setting are where it all becomes “historical.” I find that certain eras feel more accessible to my imagination than others. For instance, while I find the first quarter of the nineteenth century fascinating, and particularly admire and enjoy C.S. Harris’s St Cyr novels, I could no more write that era than fly. Any more than I could write the Victorian era. The roaring twenties and World War I aren’t me, either.

I found myself drawn to the complex situation Italians found themselves thrown into in 1942, and again in the 1970s, during the “years of lead.” I think what particularly interested me was the idea that perfectly ordinary people, people you pass any day on the street, might have been and done something extraordinary in a former life. Snared by circumstance, we might all become something we never, in our wildest dreams, imagine. And then, once it’s all over, if we survived, who are we?

Writing About the Salem Witch Trials

Historical novels, or at least novels that revolve around extraordinary historical events are particularly good frameworks for examining those questions. So, of course, Salem was a natural. Thinking about the witchcraft trials of 1692, I was particularly nagged by the question: who were all these people, especially these women?

Salem was largely a case of women pointing fingers at women. An awful lot of them. Over two hundred people, the vast majority of them female, from all walks of life ranging from the typically destitute to the very untypically wealthy, including shipbuilders’ and traders’ wives, and even the Governor’s sister, were accused.

True, twenty-five died as a result; nineteen hanged, one pressed to death, and five in jail. But what of the other approximately one hundred and seventy-five? And what of the accusers, most of whom were young, a few very young, women. What became of them, and who did they become? I was mulling all this when Resolve Hammond wandered into my head.

As tantalizing as Salem was, it also posed one of the unique problems with writing historical fiction: how to do it. I am not talking about finding out what people wore and ate and what they smelled like, important though that may be. I am talking about the bigger structural problem of telling a story set in and around major events in the past when we all already know the ending. Anne Boleyn never did have that son, Napoleon had a very bad day at Waterloo, Pompei was a lousy holiday home choice in August 79, and maybe Dallas wasn’t the best place for an open-topped motorcade.

So, where is the tension? What is fresh and new? Why should anyone turn the page?

Of course, part of the answer to those questions is character. A strong enough, compelling enough, likable enough central character, or characters – someone who reaches out and grabs us, connects with us on an elemental level, does an awful lot of work.

Writing a Compelling Character

Hilary Mantel pulled that trick off with Thomas Cromwell, and with Danton, and even the pretty unlovable Robespierre, and it’s not as if we don’t know the ending to Henry VIII’s marital saga or the French Revolution. But then again, she was a genius. Her novels truly are great. But they can still teach us mere mortals.

Mantel used another trick; not only did she take characters we thought we knew and show them to us in an entirely new way – strip them right down to their common human hearts – she used the power of knowing the ending. She could end Wolf Hall by merely saying we were going there precisely because everybody knows all about mousy little Jane Seymour. It’s similar to watching a TV horror movie and screaming ‘Don’t go down in the cellar!’

Deploying readers, using what they know without spelling it out to both suggest and build tension and empathy is part of the crucial bond of trust that is the other element of all great novels, and even good ones – authors and readers feeling that we’re all in this together. This is especially true, and useful, in writing historical fiction.

If the central characters are compelling and the events familiar, not only do we care, but we know – and that knowing only makes us care more. The couple at the end of the love story finally overcome all the odds, get married, and buy honeymoon tickets on the Titanic. The Jewish family decides, after all, that it’s probably safe to stay in Vienna in March 1938.

History On the Diagonal

One of our greatest historians, Mary Beth Norton, coined the phrase ‘history on the diagonal,’ which I find enormously helpful when thinking about the “hows” of historical fiction, particularly historical fiction set around momentous or notorious events – all those pasts we think we know all about.

She means that we should ask the questions that aren’t being asked. Look at what people are not talking about concerning any historical event or era. Where were all the women? All the people of color? What were they doing? What did they think? What happened to the children? The servants? The poor?  New perspectives and unexpected answers nest in those spaces.

The point of view of those who are not mentioned, or who appear only on the periphery, but were there nonetheless is a rich hunting ground for historical novelists. In Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell focused not on Shakespeare himself, but on his wife and dead son. Robert Harris used the point of view of the slave and scribe in his brilliant Cicero trilogy. Before she died, tragically taking all her unfinished and unwritten stories with her, Hilary Mantel was re-interpreting Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the distinctly peripheral Mary Bennet.

I wouldn’t dare compare myself to any of them, but I did decide to focus on Abigail Hobbs and Mercy Lewis, both of whom appear, flickering in the Salem story, then vanish, and on Judah White, who is barely a name on a list.

Getting the Facts Right

But, as my friend said, historical fiction is great fiction in historical settings. It is not treatises, or textbooks, or manuals of everyday life in Ancient Rome. Of course, research is essential to the building of a convincing fictional world. Getting the facts right about people’s lives, as far as is humanly possible, is equally essential.

Apart from being the right thing to do, it’s the foundation of trust between authors and readers. Someone being dead a few hundred years does not mean I have the right to change facts about them that I know to be true. So I do the research. Not only on what happened, and how old everyone was and who was who, but on the sounds and the smells and the food and if the fork was widely used and anyone had china plates or if they were all wooden.

It takes everything to build a world, from the timeline to the weather. Then I forget it. All of it. I push that iceberg so far under the surface that even the tip isn’t showing, so I am standing on it but no one could tell while I go to work writing the best novel I possibly can.

Northern New England, Summer, 1688.
Salem started here.

A suspicious death. A rumor of war. Whispers of witchcraft.

Perched on the brink of disaster, Resolve Hammond and her mother, Deliverance, struggle to survive in their isolated coastal village. They’re known as healers taught by the local tribes – and suspected of witchcraft by the local villagers.

Their precarious existence becomes even more chaotic when summoned to tend to a poisoned woman. As they uncover a web of dark secrets, rumors of war engulf the village, forcing the Hammonds to choose between loyalty to their native friends or the increasingly terrified settler community.

As Resolve is plagued by strange dreams, she questions everything she thought she knew – about her family, her closest friend, and even herself. If the truth comes to light, the repercussions will be felt far beyond the confines of this small settlement.

Based on meticulous research and inspired by the true story of the fear and suspicion that led to the Salem Witchcraft Trials, THE DEVIL’S GLOVE is a tale of betrayal, loyalty, and the power of secrets. Will Resolve be able to uncover the truth before the town tears itself apart, or will she become the next victim of the village’s dark and mysterious past?

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