Using Real History in Your Stories by Pegg Thomas

Writing historical and historical romance means using real history in your stories. Sometimes, that history isn’t pleasant. There are many instances of difficult situations—true history—that need to be told, even though they don’t always show humanity at its best.

Such was the case while I was writing Her Redcoat for the Backcountry Brides Romance Collection. This is a collection of stories set in Colonial America on the frontier—the backcountry as it was called then. I wanted to set my story in what is now Northern Michigan. Most people don’t equate Michigan with Colonial America, but the northern reaches of the state were first visited by the French in 1623. By the 1700s, there were several towns along the waterways between the Great Lakes.

Not too far from where I live is Fort Michilimackinac (mish’-ee-lee-mack’-in-naw). I set my story there because of a well-known uprising of the Ojibwe and Sauk tribes against the British at the fort. The British had recently ousted the French following the French and Indian War. The local tribes had been friendly with the French for over a century. They did not like the British who were stingy with their gifts and arrogant in their demeanor. 

How was I to craft a romance amid so much tension? By playing off the tension, of course! My hero is a British soldier, but one who doesn’t want to be there. My heroine is a local Métis (May-tees’), a woman of mixed French and native cultures. He was prejudiced against the “heathens,” and she was prejudiced against the English. 

So what was going to bring them together? There had to be a connection. He was educated, highly educated for the time, and she owned a book she couldn’t read. Bam! 

Now for the biggest challenge of all … they have to survive an uprising that killed almost every soldier save the officers who were kept alive and traded for ransom. How did I do that? You’ll have to read the book!

To celebrate the release of The Backcountry Brides Collection, including my story, Her Redcoat, I’m giving away one of my signature shawls. Today the area around Fort Michilimackinac is known for its beautiful lilacs. One subscriber to my newsletter will win Northern Lilacs, my handspun, handknit wool shawl on May 31, 2018. Subscribe today to be entered!

Pegg Thomas lives on a hobby farm in Northern Michigan with Michael, her husband of *mumble* years. A life-long history geek, she writes “History with a Touch of Humor.” When not working or writing, Pegg can be found in her barn, her garden, her kitchen, or sitting at her spinning wheel creating yarn to turn into her signature wool shawls.

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Southern Literary Fiction in Three Easy Steps (Yeah, right…) by Eva Marie Everson

In a recent blogpost, Chip MacGregor predicted that Christian fiction as we now know it will cease to exist. Namely, he stated, because the readers who demanded 100,000 copies of the latest Amish romance had “aged out.”

Chip (who knows this industry, folks), stated further that the few Christian houses still publishing fiction will now look for “high-quality literary or women’s stories for a broader people of faith … rather than clearly religious stories aimed only at the faithful.”

I’ll admit, I’m doing a happy dance over here.

Authors of Southern fiction have known for a while that our work is either about poking fun at our people (think Mary Kay Andrews (Hissy Fit)) or we dig into the darkest elements of who we are (Pat Conroy (South of Broad).

Southerners are a complex bunch of people. We can praise God from one side of our mouth while quoting superstitions from the other. We are white verandahs and dark shadows in the cluster of live oaks dripping with moss.

But how do we differentiate between “fiction” and “literary fiction”? And what makes literary fiction “southern”?

Fiction is literature with madeup stories and characters. Literary fiction is symbolic or thematic fiction and should comment on something significant (such as the human condition). Literary fiction isn’t meant simply to entertain—such as genre fiction, which is meant to help you escape your reality. Rather, literary fiction sparks discussion—arguments even—around the dinner table, the water cooler, and on social media because it comments on the realities of life.

Literary fiction usually has complex/complicated characters (which is why Southern Fiction can so easily fit right in). Complex/complicated characters are multi-layered and, when brought together between the bindings of one book, form an onion-like story filled with sub-plots told without any sense of rushing.

Who better to fit the proverbial example than Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind? Southern literary fiction at its finest. Not because it is set in the South, but because its complex characters embody the Southern experience.

Writing literary fiction is as simple as one-two-three. (Okay, we all know there is nothing simple about it.) But if I had to give you three steps to writing in the literary style, they would be:

 

1.  Create characters who are complex. This means spending time working out the details of characters who are by nature one thing, but who have been shaped to something else by experience. Then, allow your characters to tell you a story that is bigger than you could have possibly imagined. Listen long. Listen hard. This won’t come in one sitting.

 

2.  Concentrate as much on your tone and voice as you do the theme of the story. Take your time with word choice and don’t let anything sway you from those that come from your gut. That doesn’t mean you’ll use three adjectives to describe one noun and three adverbs to describe one verb, but more that the nouns and verbs pop on their own. (Not to say you can’t use adjectives and adverbs … just be careful.)

 

3.  Take all the time you need. None of this will come overnight nor will it be written in a day. Or a week. And maybe not in a year. But when you are done—deliciously exhausted from the process—you’ll have something you’re proud of. You’ll say, “This is it. This is it.”

 

Eva Marie Everson is the bestselling, multi-award winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her latest work of fiction, The One True Love of Alice-Ann, is set in the south during World War II. Eva Marie is the president of Word Weavers International and the director of Florida Christian Writers Conference. She is a wife, mother, and grandmother.