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Since we’re talking historical romance and realism today, let me tell you two formative moments of research I had that have influenced my thinking about this subject. A thread!
1. First of all, as background to this thread, reading diverse historicals and listening to the authors of same is the most important thing. A lot of what we think we’ve learned about history is flat wrong, or at best, missing pieces. So fix that.
2. Now, stories! The first Broadway musical I ever saw in New York was The Scarlet Pimpernel. The second was Hamilton. (Original Tony-winning cast for both, they were awesome.) These stories take place during the same historical era, so I started thinking...
3. ... how would these stories overlap? And I knew Angelica Schuyler-Church was in London during the Terror, which means she would have been invited to some of the same parties as the Pimpernel. I imagined her asking him to get somebody out of France for her.
4. Wait, Lafayette’s in France during the Revolution, right? Maybe Angelica works with the Pimpernel to get Lafayette to safety? Ha ha, what a wild premise. EXCEPT SHE TOTALLY REALLY DID THIS. http://historythings.com/life-revolutionary-marquis-de-lafayette-part-three/
5. Angelica Schuyler-Church actually hired spies to break Lafayette out of prison, and if he’d been able to understand directions better it would have been a famous success. This wildly implausible fic idea of mine was actual historical reality.
6. The second story: last year I wrote a 1950s-set noir romance manuscript with a bookseller heroine. On a whim, I decided she would buy an old letterpress and start using it to publish short runs of poetry and sff fiction fanzines. But I wondered: would a 1950s woman do this?
7. The answer, after a little research, is: yes, she would, AND SHE DID. Elinor Busby, in Seattle, won an early Hugo for editing a fanzine called Cry of the Nameless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Fanzine
8. So there I had two stories I tried to make up as wish-fulfillment, escapist, happy fiction. AND THEY WERE FUCKING REAL THE WHOLE TIME. So I decided to step away from “realism” where it meant: “statistically probable based on large demographic data.”
9. Instead I started thinking: could this be done? Like, physically, financially, chronologically? Then someone was probably doing it. We just don’t have the documentation, is all.
So far, this has steered me wrong zero percent of the time.
So far, this has steered me wrong zero percent of the time.
