When a Character Steps Off the Page

In the last blog, I said I was going to try to describe the phenomenon that occurs when I’ve done a lot of the research, and one character or other slips right off the pages and I know it’s time to start writing the story. Since that went up on the website, a number of you have written anticipatory questions about it, which is great! I thank those of you who’ve taken the trouble as it helps me to focus my explanation.

When I’m creating characters from scratch who will help me tell a story within a certain historical context, I’ll do research until I’m comfortable with a level of familiarity with the times and places I want to write about. This usually takes about a year – which I confess is joyous, as if I’ve designed my own history course, reading only where I want to go. I develop a list of historical events that are important to the story I want to tell, and a thread develops between them of what kind of person justifiably would be involved in those events. The events start dividing into different threads, needing different people, sometimes going separately off on their own, sometimes – more often than not – tangling with others. Because the research has continued, I’ve accepted more detail for each of these people, and one fine day, he/she is there, ready for her/his story to begin, coming right off those pages of research and, with hope and doubt and excitement and trepidation, onto an engulfing and intimidating empty white page.

That’s how it is with broadly defined historical fiction. I’ll be sharing with you two books later this year that I’m working on now which were developed just that way.

But what if the history is already intensely focused, with the story and the characters clearly defined? Or, in terms more specific to the book we’re talking about, if the history is so specific, if the story is already so infamous (but perhaps forgotten), so shocking and so clearly defining the culture of its times, what’s a novelist to do? And what’s the point of using fiction to do it?

Such was the quandary I faced when I ran across the history that became Black and White and Read All Over.

I’ll explain everything in the next blog.