Historical Fiction

by Sheila Connolly

 

 

Recently I was exchanging emails with my agent and she said something like, "you like history—why don't you write an historical?"  I said no—fast.

Fellow Daughter (that sounds wrong, doesn't it?) Jeri Westerson writes mysteries set in the Middle Ages and does it well, and I applaud her.  But I can't do it.

Many, many years ago, when I was trapped in a dead-end job and had a memory typewriter (I did say "many years," didn't I?) sitting in front of me, I thought I'd try my hand at a medieval mystery, since I was once a medievalist.  I had the perfect opening:  someone is found dead in the cloister of a monastery under construction, his head crushed by a falling capital. Actually, in hindsight I realize I did one thing right:  I had the body right up front. But I gave up after three pages.  I had an interesting death and nothing more—no plot, no characters, and no idea where to go from there.

Obviously I came back to writing mysteries, a couple of decades later, but I chose to write contemporary ones.  Why?  Because as I told my agent, writing a historical is TOO MUCH WORK.

Once upon a time I was an academic: I have a Ph.D. in Art History.  If you've never been a member of the rarified world of academia, you probably don't realize that you can't make a statement, at least in writing, without having researched it thoroughly, and without adding at least two footnotes to back up your carefully phrased assertion.  Here's an example of academic-speak: "there are those who have suggested that the prevailing influence in the peripheral ornamentation of stone sculpture in the Southwest of France in the later twelfth century owes much to the infiltration of Moorish scrollwork appearing slightly earlier in manuscripts smuggled into the country by itinerant monks." You've gone to sleep, haven't you?  Obviously if you tried to write like this in a mystery, your reader would have turned her attention to her grocery list, which would be far more interesting.

 

A more normal person would write a simple statement like "French stone carvers copied a lot of Moorish motifs."

 

You might say that the same principle applies to writing mysteries. But still…  It's hard to let go of that training.  Suppose you say, "the colonial house sat proudly on a hill overlooking the old King's Highway." The reader gets a quick image of the setting, no problem: old house on hill.  Me, I'm saying—early colonial? Late colonial? Was it there before or after the King's Highway was built?  When were the King's highways built? And so on.  And one thing you're not supposed to do is insert "infodumps" into your book—you lose your reader's interest, fast.  They do not want to read two pages about the evolution of domestic architecture and its correlation with public infrastructure in the American colonies during the eighteenth century.

 

So I cheat, just a little, in my series.  My protagonist in each case probably knows very little about certain subjects, so she can ask stupid questions of someone who does know.  That way I sneak a little information in, without overdoing it.  It's a balancing act.

 

I love history, really.  In all my books I'm aware of how much the past informs the present, whether it's in Massachusetts, Philadelphia, or County Cork. But that may be as close as I'm going to get to writing historical fiction. I think I've found the perfect intersection:  a t-shirt I bought at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, which bears a quote from Henry David Thoreau, "Simplify, simplify."  Words to live by.

 

 

NICE NEIGHBORS

by Sheila Connolly

I've been playing catch-up this week, since I've just finished the draft of one book, due to my publisher at the end of the month, and I'm waiting for editorial comments on another book, due next week.  So while I wait, I've been clearing off my desk and finalizing some things that have been pending for a while.

One of which is my cemetery plot.  No, I don't have a terminal illness, nor does anyone in my family.  But I have an unusual history with cemeteries: they are my inheritance.  I can prove ownership of at least four plots, all of which have space in them.  In some cases there hasn't been a burial in the plot for decades.

Since the world has a way of surprising you, I thought it made sense to verify what my rights are, in the event something unexpected happens.  After all, your loved ones usually aren't in any condition to make major decisions at difficult times, and they may live far away, which complicates matters.  So if I can make one small part of the process simpler, I'll feel better.

The thing of it is, I'm not talking about any old cemetery; I'm talking about Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.  All right, most people won't know anything about it, or will confuse it with Washington Irving's story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (that's in a different state).  "My" Sleepy Hollow is famous for other reasons:  it's where all those authors are buried.

My family has a long history with the place.  The plot where I (or whatever is left of me) want to spend eternity was bought when my great-great-great-grandmother Sarah Durant Pratt died in 1893.  She didn't even live in Concord at that time, but that's where she met and married her husband.  She was probably a millworker, and he was a carpenter, later contractor.  They did have one son who lived in Concord in the 1890s (he had his own plot in the same cemetery).

So the family bought the plot for Sarah, and she and later her husband and a couple of her daughters were buried there.  It's a nice plot, right on one of the internal roads, on level ground--easy to get to. Lots of passers-by. But the biggest appeal is that it's right down the hill from Author's Ridge.

There was a cemetery on the site in the eighteenth century, but the better-known section was designed in 1855 by a pair of landscape architects.  Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke at the consecration.  It was one of the earlier "garden cemeteries" (Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA, founded in 1831, was the first, followed closely by Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia).  Such cemeteries were intended as something like recreational sites, where middle-class citizens could pack a picnic lunch and visit to commune with the dead and enjoy the glories of nature.  They were provided with benches and strolling paths, punctuated by burbling fountains.  Maybe now it seems a bit odd to think of cemeteries as places for pleasure, but I've enjoyed more than my fair share.

To return to Sleepy Hollow's Author's Ridge...think back to the heady days of the nineteenth century, when the historic town of Concord was a hotbed of Transcendentalism, led by Emerson (whose house is not far distant from the cemetery).  Picture the marvelous dinners that gathered Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and others around Emerson's table.  It shouldn't surprise you that they chose to continue their discourse even after death:  they're all buried together in the cemetery.  The Thoreau family, the Alcott family, the Emerson family, as well of Nathaniel Hawthorne, all cheek by jowl at the top of the hill--overlooking "my" plot, passed down to me through generations.

Louisa May Alcott

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I first visited the cemetery when I was a teenager, with my mother and grandmother.  My grandmother had presided over the last interment there, in 1935, representing the dwindling family (she had married Sarah's great-grandson).  I have always remembered the visit, most notably Emerson's pink quartz stone.




Fast forward to 2003.  I was housesitting for a college friend in a town near Concord, while my daughter finished high school so we could move to Massachusetts where my husband had a job waiting.  I was unexpectedly unemployed, so I wrote a book.  It was not a wonderful book, but it was good enough to land me my first agent.  In the spring of 2003, before heading back to Pennsylvania to pack up for the move, I stopped by the cemetery to talk to the authors.  I had planned to ask them to help me sell the book.  Instead, what came out of my mouth unexpectedly was, "help me make it good."

I guess it worked.  That book didn't sell, and I fired that first agent, but eight years later I have nine books on the shelves and more coming.  Thank you, Louisa, David, Nathaniel and Ralph.  (BTW, my grandmother was a BIG fan of Emerson.)

All of these writers and thinkers were already installed on top of the ridge when my family bought the cemetery plot.  Did it affect their selection?  I don't know.  But I would be honored to take my place among the Concord titans--which is why I'm paying the back fees this week.


P.S.  If you want one more literary note, Louisa May Alcott wrote a short mystery story in 1867:  "The Mysterious Key and What It Opened." It's widely available as a free download online.