I write thrillers. My plots are taken from the headlines, usually international conflicts that are left unresolved. Conflicts like the US and China battles over espionage especially in high tech. Conflicts like US and Iranian differences that have festered for decades. My Team Walker book due out in November follows that pattern but is set a little closer to home.
I also write Historical Adventure Fiction. My plots for these stories are drawn from my constant fascination with events, not in headlines, but in history, events that warrant a book of their own, but were relegated to some footnote or worse, covered up by the powerful when a plan or policy went completely to hell. Tempest North, (Available July 16) explores superpower conflicts between Spain, England, Russia and the United States, and Native Americans on the North Pacific Coast of the American continent at the moment European power began to crumble.
Among the 25 to 30 books that I read every year, are four or five of a genre called Historical Nonfiction. Among my favorite authors in this genre is David Grann. I loved his Lost City Of Z. Killers of the Flower Moon is a story that needed to be told. His latest book, The Wager, like my work, takes a little-known event and through meticulous research tells a story that few ever heard of. Authors of Historical Nonfiction often work from copious notes and literally piles of minutia about an event. They find journals of participants, and logbooks, and government reports, but when they sit down to write, they find that they have little real knowledge of the characters, how they felt, how they coped. To make the books real to the readers, they often include almost excruciating particulars. For example, in The Wager, before things come undone and the adventure begins, we learn about how a 1700s sailing ship is rigged, how it is supplied, how the crew is assembled, who hangs their hammocks where, the ages of the participants, the difficulties in navigation, and other descriptive facts. I suspect that part of the reason for this is that authors have little hard documentation on the characters other than they participated in the event. Grann turns journals into language.
Their work beats the hell out of most history books in supplying that detail. If you want to learn about these little-known events, Historical Nonfiction is a lot more fun than academic history. I love Grann’s books, but it can take me days to finish one.
Characters are not a sum of the details around them. They are flesh and blood, with emotions and souls, and like most of the rest of us, a mixture of devil and saint. The joy of writing Historical Fiction is that I don’t have to bury the reader in details, in fact too much minutia just slows down the story. I can use my imagination to figure out what each character might be thinking when faced with a crisis. As I write, the characters become real, and more interesting. Disagreement and arguments flesh in how the story develops and why. Often the only decision is a bad one. Tempest North is a story of terrible decision making in history that few people know about.
I write about moments and situations. In Two Civil Wars, I write about Lincoln’s meddling in the Mexican Civil War. In Enemy Patriots, I write about how America interred its Japanese American Citizens during WWII because they thought some were spies. Some were, but for which side? I want the reader to join the character in the adventure, to be part of surviving. I want them to feel it in their stomach, in their heart; in a way that might just open an understanding of why the event was covered up in the first place; how humans survived and why that is important to us even today. That works best if the reader has a great time being part of the story. Join the characters of Tempest North, in a little known, dangerous, and wildly beautiful place.