From Perfection to Plausibility

You often hear writers say they have two personalities. Usually they are cave-dwelling introverts that tap away at a keyboard and growl at interruptions, but on book tours they trot out their public persona à la Beyoncé/Sasha Fierce and even put on pants.

I have those seemingly oppositional sides myself (ask my husband about the growling and lack of real pants), but I also have two others that battle it out in my brain: the anal retentive historian and the lover of a ripping good yarn.

During my short-lived academic career, it was the second part that got me in trouble. While I enjoyed debating theories, interpretations and ideas, I tended more to the narrative side of the spectrum. I loved the texture of the time. I got giddy thinking about everything from the weather to ways of life, and especially about individuals and their thoughts and actions in the past.

I got in trouble for my leaps into the unknown, the unverifiable, and the undocumented, though, my interpretations stretching more into the territory of an English Literature class than hardcore history would allow. So you would think making the leap from capital “H” History to historical fiction should be easy. Let that imagination loose! Tether stories to historical happenings but don’t get too hung up on ‘getting it right’!

Nope. In the five years I’ve worked sporadically on my first historical novel, I’ve hit blocks of punishing anxiety. I’ve hid in never-ending research in an impossible attempt at perfection (and possibly to protect myself from ever actually writing anything down). I’ve resisted imaginative leaps just as I resisted making anything up when I was writing my thesis. Except, I remind myself, you’re allowed to make stuff up in fiction. That’s the whole point.

Luckily, my research has also included reading other really good historical fiction about the Second World War era, when my book takes place. Elizabeth Wein, author of Code Name Verity, for example, blasted through one of my blocks with the idea of plausibility. As she writes in her author’s note, as long as events could have happened that way and her characters could have existed, that was good enough for her. And it was certainly good enough for me as I was completely absorbed in the world she rendered.

Elinor Florence’s book, Bird’s Eye View, was another wartime page turner with lots of historic flavour. And not once did I look for a footnote because I was reading it, not as a nitpicky historian, but as someone looking to be transported by a story.

I hope people will feel that way about my novel when it’s finally finished. And if they want the capital ‘H’ History? Well, I’ll be sure to switch hats and send them my alphabetized bibliography.

Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail is an award-winning writer, speaker, and historian, and occasional CBC radio columnist. She is the author of two nonfiction books, For the Love of Flying  and Polar Winds: A Century of Flying the North, and is currently at work on an anthology project tentatively called Unsettled (Brindle & Glass, 2016) and a WWII-era novel, Chasing Skies. She was writer-in-residence at Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon; Chatelaine’s  Maverick of the Year in 2011; and is currently serving as Edmonton’s Historian Laureate.