Among the challenges writers of historical fiction face is how to negotiate the relationship among fact, truth, and story.
I wrote a feature article for volume 96 of Historical Novel Society’s Magazine, based on my interview with the acclaimed author, Amy Bloom. At the time of the interview, I was in the middle of revising my novel, Cities of Women (exciting news about my novel to follow soon!!) and Bloom explored with me a number of issues all writers struggle with.
Whether writing historical fiction or a speculative novel, every writer must decide which facts uncovered in research will serve the story and which facts will bog it done, no matter how interesting those morsels of knowledge may be in themselves.
Setting the story in a particular time period isn’t as important to her, Bloom said, as it is to the story she wants to tell about a subject. In other words, choosing a particular decade or century in which to tell a story comes from the imperative to elucidate something about love or beauty or relationships or death that is best told by situating the story in a particular context.
I chose a dual timeline for Cities of Women because I wanted to illuminate connections between then and now, with “then” being the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—a time of corruption, plague, but also spectacular art made by women—and “now” being the twenty-first century—a time afflicted by similar conflicts, yet also witnessing waves of creativity, often produced by women and other marginalized people whose voices and visions deserve to be heard and seen.