Breathing Life into the Past

Okay, so I lied! Our reviewer extraordinaire, Michelle Sutton, had some unexpected zig-zags pop up in her week, so instead of a book review, today I'm going to delve into the different forms of the historical novel. Hopefully we'll be able to bring you Michelle's review tomorrow.

In mulling over topics for today’s post, I started thinking about the different historical novels I’ve written over the years. And it occurred to me that there are three different ways to write a historical. (There could always be more, but none occur to me at the moment.) The first novel I wrote (still unpublished), entitled Falkenberg, was a medieval epic tragedy, i.e., the main characters were all dead at the end, a la Hamlet. In fact, I was deep into Shakespeare’s tragedies at the time, and they served as the model for my plot structure.

Although Falkenberg is set in thirteenth-century Europe, the action takes place in the fictional kingdom of Sehnthal, which I located below the Jura Mountains and between France, what is now Germany, and Switzerland. The characters are completely made up by moi, as is their world. There is little reference to any real kingdoms, people, and world events of the time. I researched the period very carefully, and the details of my characters lives are solidly grounded in the actual thirteenth-century European social, political, and religious culture. But everyone and everything that happens in the story is purely a product of my fertile imagination.

This story was immense amounts of fun to write. I created detailed genealogies for my characters as well as complete histories for these ancestors, wrote sonnets and epic songs for my troubadours, and created an entire, complex world full of kings and princes, knights and ladies, romance, passion, intrigue, adventure, and peril. I felt like God. LOL! This kind of novel is probably the easiest to write and is, I'd guess, the most popular form of the historical novel.

The first two books of my American Patriot Series, Daughter of Liberty and Native Son, however, are quite different. This time the actual people and events of the American Revolution became the basis, the core, of my story. I then created fictional characters and set them down in the middle of the historical people, places, and events of the time. My fictional characters live and travel through a variety of settings that are as accurate to the real places of the Revolution as I can make them. They interact with the real political and military movers and shakers as well as with the more humble folk who actually lived at the time and were involved in one way or another in the events that created our nation. My characters don’t just watch these things happening—they actively participate in them as they occur so that readers, in effect, become eyewitnesses to the Revolution. Needless to say, this series is requiring considerably more intensive research and much more careful plotting than Falkenberg did.

Last summer, my cousin, author Bob Hostetler, and I met for the first time and discovered that we both were toying with the idea of writing a fictional account of our ancestors’ story. Amish Mennonites who came to this country in 1738 seeking freedom to live according to their religious convictions, they settled on the borderlands between the white settlements and Indian territory. They were pacifists, and in an ironic twist of fate their home was attacked by a band of Indians during the French and Indian War. Because they refused to take up guns to kill, three members of the family were killed and scalped, and the three survivors were carried off into Indian captivity, returning years later.

After talking, Bob and I decided to join forces on this massive project, which we’ve entitled Northkill for the name of both the creek along which the massacre took place and the Amish congregation our ancestors were a part of. We are very fortunate to have a considerable amount of research material to work with. In 1911, the 1,200 page Descendents of Jacob Hochstetler (DJH), well known in genealogical circles, was first published. It included not only an extensive genealogy of our family, but also a brief history of the Amish and Mennonites and a more detailed account of our ancestors’ story, compiled from research materials available at the time as well as stories that had been passed down by family members.

However, there are pitfalls to anecdotal material like this. Stories handed down through the years and through multiple voices tend to mutate quite a bit from the original facts. Thankfully, our family also has an organization, the Jacob Hochstetler Family Association, which includes members who continue to research the story of our ancestors. They have published a number of corrections to the DJH as well as intriguing additional details gleaned from sources such as the Pennsylvania Archives, which are helping us to keep Northkill as close to the real people and events as possible.

A fictionalized account of a true story is the most difficult form of the historical novel to write, I’m discovering. Because this story is very well known among the Amish and Mennonites and is important to so many people, especially to the members of our extensive Hochstetler family, Bob and I are committed to doing the best job possible in bringing our ancestors to life and giving a true account of their experiences. For one thing, we don’t want to incur the wrath of our relatives if we make a hash of this!

While many details of the story are known, such as the site of our ancestors’ farm on the Northkill Creek where the massacre took place; an approximation of what their house, barn, and other outbuildings looked like; how the attack played out; where the survivors were taken by the Indians and roughly when they were returned, other details are not so easy to discover. The humble details of daily life are rarely recorded, and so we are left with many questions as we try to capture their story. What were their marriage, birth, and death customs? What were their worship services like? How different was the German dialect they spoke from what is spoken today.

For one thing, we can’t be certain how the Amish of that time and place dressed. I’ve had to do a lot of guesswork there. The idea that Amish dress has remained virtually the same since the sixteenth century was very quickly dispelled through my initial research. Despite their plain lifestyle, costume, customs, and even dialect have undergone a gradual, but noticeable shift over the centuries, as is to be expected. The trouble is, nobody thought to take notes as changes took place!

Just one of the problems we encountered up front was the fact that the name of our ancestor’s wife had never been recorded, as women’s names frequently were not. Their infant daughter, who, with her mother, was also one of the victims of the massacre also remained unnamed. So we had to do some digging and speculating to come up with the most likely name for each of them. And once we found those names, it was as if we had breathed life into this mother and her baby and had again given them a voice after all these years. That has been the most gratifying part of this project—to finally see them emerge from the shadows of the past to tell their own stories.

To be honest, that’s really why I love writing historicals. What other work gives you the opportunity to recapture long-forgotten people and places of the past and breathe life into them so they can share their stories with readers of today and into the future. That is a delight I will never grow tired of.

Be sure to post a comment today to be entered into tomorrow's drawing for a copy of Deeanne Gist's A Bride Most Begrudging. And tomorrow, if all goes well, we'll have that review of Sharlene Maclaren's forthcoming novel, Loving Liza Jane. If not, then I'll have another topic for us to talk about!