Saturday | Grass Valley Workshop - Delving into the Past

Research can be fascinating but can also lead to distraction and becoming overwhelmed by details. In this workshop, historical novelist Erika Mailman talks about how to sort the wheat from the chaff and create an outline that focuses on a strong story, augmented by the historical background. Learn how to create authentic ambiance for your novel and avoid some pitfalls. This workshop is also useful for those who aren’t necessarily writing historical fiction. Come prepared to wrestle an idea into submission and build a loose outline for a novel.

Trying to Make it All Real

By Erika Mailman

This post was published in the November 2019 issue of the Sierra Writers Newsletter. It originally appeared on the World of Mailman blog on 3/22/07, and has been slightly altered for this purpose.

Historical accuracy is a tough thing to keep your eyes open about. When I first began writing my historical novel Woman of Ill Fame, my intention was to make it absolutely true (while the characters were fictional)… so, for instance, I was going to situate the main character Nora’s brothel at the same address that I would be able to locate one on a map of the time, any saloon she frequented would be an actual one from 1849, etc., etc.

However, right away (first page!) I ran into a sticky mess: the name of the ship Nora comes to San Francisco on. I knew I wanted her to arrive on November 11—a little bit of number superstition on my part—so I went to the UC Berkeley library microfilm room to look at the Alta California newspaper. That’s the actual newspaper that the Gold Rushers read—pretty astonishing that somehow copies existed long enough to be photographed and stowed on microfilm. The Alta California ran lists of the ships coming into harbor on any given day. And to my dismay, none of the November 11 ships had evocative names. I even loosened my superstition enough to look a few days after and before the 11th… nothing good. I always thought ships were supposed to have very cool names!

So I decided to break my own self-imposed historical accuracy rule and just completely make up the name of the ship, The Lady’s Peril. And what a relief! This instantly freed me up to invent addresses and names of liveries and such. The historical background of the novel is still truthful: things like the Christmas Eve fire, the details surrounding contraception and prostitution…but I felt free to devise small details.

And then came… the final editing phase.

For a writer, few things are as scary as realizing the pages in front of you are your last chance to fix any errors. I was frantically googling and using my dictionary’s etymology dating to determine whether things like isinglass windows, the penile appellation John Thomas, and Panama hats were in existence in 1849. And then, too, I was trying to go through garment history to see whether women wore bell sleeves at that point, because I really liked the consonant sound of them –and boy, if you try to google anything about clothing online, you get hundreds of hits for Renaissance Festival costumes and it’s hard to navigate around that stuff to get to solid historical clothing history… (and a little voice inside of me said, why did you not do all this double-checking before submitting to agents?)

And then you come up on bigger issues.

Here’s my little frustrated note to myself at the time:

Major sticking point. Shit. All along, I’ve had Nora on the ship called The Lady’s Peril, but also had her crossing the isthmus of Panama, canoeing the Chagres River… I did not think it through to realize that if she got off the ship, the ship couldn’t continue… so it would be a different ship that brought her the rest of the way. I got confused between the ships that go round Cape Horn and the ships that make the Panama cutoff.

Shit. So, now I have to restructure all the references to her ship and to the other prostitute on board… or should I make her a Cape Horn person as well and cut all the stuff about the canoe trip?

Damn. Exactly NOT what I need when I’m trying to finish my edits a mere 14 hours before I have to go to the airport for a two-week trip to Paris I haven’t even packed for yet.

These are actually the fun things to contend with...and I think with hindsight’s wisdom that they are best tackled after you have a complete first draft, but before you start querying. Definitely don’t get lost in Google’s vortex while you’re still writing; just put an XXX to mark the spot like a good pirate and keep going.

Well, I got to Paris and I think/hope I caught all the glaring mistakes. Note to self: next time, write a novel set in the modern day!

I’m really looking forward to leading a workshop in historical fiction for the Sierra Writers Conference in February. Hope to see you there!

Additional References:

• Washington Post - 4/16/19 - I watched Notre Dame burn. But I know Paris will always endure

Check out Erika's Ten-week Online Novel Writing Class!

Mailstrom Class Endorsement

"My historical novel project was stuck. No progress had been made for some time. I took Erika's class to get it moving again...and it did! At the end of ten weeks, I had sixty new pages! I'm beyond thrilled." - Lisa Redfern