linda collison's Sea of Words
charting a course from imagination to publication
I’m so happy to have the chance to revise and republish Star-Crossed as Barbados Bound; book one of the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventure Series! Last week I received the reversion of rights from Random House, and today I emailed the revised manuscript to Fireship Press. I’m going to include a preface, explaining the title change. Something like this:
Barbados Bound
Author’s preface
Barbados Bound was first published by Alfred A. Knopf as Star-Crossed. I wrote it as adult historical fiction, to explore what it might have been like to have been a young woman down on her luck, aboard an 18th century ship. Not as a passenger — but as part of the crew.
My curiosity had been piqued after my husband and I spent three weeks as voyage crewmembers aboard HM Bark Endeavour, a working replica of Captain Cook’s renowned ship of exploration. As crew, we were taught everything we needed to know about sailing the ship by our superior officers. Our duties included standing our rotating, four-hour watches, during which we climbed aloft to make or reduce sail, kept a look-out for other vessels, and took our turns at the helm. When not on watch we were assigned cleaning and maintenance duties, and at night strung our hammocks from the deckhead, just as British seamen did for centuries. Although Endeavour was equipped with a few modern conveniences Cook didn’t have, she was a time machine for my imagination. While standing watch, or at the helm, I found myself thinking that if I could perform these tasks alongside my mates (perhaps a quarter of whom were women like me) then surely there was truth to the stories about women dressing as men and working aboard ships during the age of sail.
During the three weeks I was an 18th century sailor, we sailed Endeavour across the northern Pacific Ocean, from Vancouver to Hawaii. When I disembarked in Kona, I carried with me the seeds for a story — though there was years of research to be done while writing it. The story I wanted to write was not about the Endeavour or Captain Cook, but it would take place on a vessel similar to the Endeavour.
Orion Rising was the working title for this story, written from the view point of a young woman who stows herself away in order to get to Barbados. It was published as Star-Crossed by Alfred A. Knopf in 2006, and marketed as a young adult novel. Although I didn’t write it for a teenaged market, I was honored when the New York Public Library chose it to be among the Books for the Teen Age – 2007.
Star-Crossed went out of print in 2011. Fireship Press has republished it as adult historical fiction — the first novel in the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventure Series.
I have taken this opportunity to correct a few minor historical inaccuracies – and to make a few other revisions, as authors are wont to do. I have also put back in some of the original wording that was changed for a young adult readership. Finally, I have retitled it because I always felt the title Star-Crossed (Knopf’s choice) was more indicative of a romance novel rather than a historical adventure story. Although the working title was Orion rising, I feel Barbados Bound better reflects the spirit of the story.
I am very grateful to Tom Grunder, the founder of Fireship Press, who wanted to publish Barbados Bound as the first book in a series about a woman who goes to sea in the age of sail, and who published Surgeon’s Mate; book two of the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventure Series in 2011. Tom didn’t live to see Barbados Bound under the Fireship label, but I am greatly indebted to him. I appreciate the support and editorial guidance he gave me while he was alive.
Using Fact and Fiction to Create Verisimilitude in Historical Fiction
Last week I was participating in a thread on Historical Novel Society’s Facebook page, where an author had started a topic asking if it was a historical or literary crime to manipulate the date of an actual event in their story.
I’ve been thinking this question all week, remembering the advice I’ve received over the decades about the craft of fiction writing and applying it to historical fiction. Realistic historical fiction (as opposed to historical fantasy) is a genre that is particularly difficult because the writer is challenged to recreate a setting that must conform to the accepted model for it. Yet literary historical fiction (which is what I read) should be more than history-lite. I want more than History-101 spiced up with imagined sex scenes.
Fiction is an art form in which we experience life from another point of view. It engages and transforms both the writer and the reader. Yet how to do it? What follows is a pastiche of advice. When I have followed this advice I’ve produced some of my best writing and when I’ve ignored it, some of my worst.
Before I begin ranting against obsessing on “historical accuracy” when writing historical fiction, let me say that before I wrote my first (published) historical novel (I have written many practice novels that have never seen the light of day) I researched the 18th century from a European perspective for four years and I continue to research the period. I spent time aboard four historical ships. I enrolled in college level history classes (and am currently enrolled in history classes, working toward a second degree.) The passion continues, research has become a hobby. But for me research is not the endgame.
As a writer what I want to achieve is not historical accuracy so much as the “V” word. Verisimilitude. Too much emphasis on accuracy can suffocate the story leaving the characters dead on the page. The point of an historical novel, or any novel in my opinion, is not to prove what a clever fellow the author is. That being said, the historical novelist must know what it is she is writing about, as if she had lived it herself. This is where the art of writing comes in and if it were easy everyone would write and publish a novel.
How to create verismilitude? Hard to say, yet we know it when we read it. Here’s an example that we all can relate to. The stories of old people.
My grandfather was a great storyteller; partly because he knew how to tell a short but interesting story and partly because he led an interesting life in interesting times. Born in 1900, at a time when automobiles were still rare, penicillin had not been invented and televisions and computers were the stuff of science fiction, John W. Leonard (not pictured, that be Rembrandt’s Old Man) was a youngster when the Wright Brothers made the first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, he recalled meeting the aviator Charles Lindbergh after he made the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean and he watched with millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took those first giant steps for mankind on the moon in 1969. “Bill” Leonard, whom we grandkids called Bebop, lived to hear about his granddaughter jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. He lived through the Great Depression, two World Wars, was married to one woman for more than fifty years and raised six kids. Bebop could play the piano by ear, he loved a good song, a good joke, a good road trip, and he knew how to tell a story and keep your interest. I always believed my grandfather’s stories because I knew he had lived them. His stories rang true, they were from the heart, they were from experience. My grandfather, like your grandfather, created verisimilitude.
Yet I’m sure more than once Bebop got a date wrong, had the sequence of events out of order, or confabulated something along the way. Does that make his stories less real? They were his truth and captured his essence and the life he lived far more than the most assiduous biographer could ever do.
Historical fiction writers probably all wonder how accurate we should be. This is an angst that never really goes away but my resolution is to be accurate without deforming the story arc and overburdening the characters themselves with chronology. In character-driven fiction story comes from character and setting. As the writer I must know that setting intimately, I must live it. When I write it I might confabulate some details and ignore others, just like Bebop did when he told us his stories. That is my goal.
One example of my own angst over facts from my own historical fiction is HMS Richmond, a “real” frigate that took part in the “real” battle of Havana in 1762. What I have concentrated on is capturing what it was like to have been aboard a frigate of the British Navy during this time period. My Richmond has a life after the battle of Havana that is probably different than the “real” Richmond had. Parallel lives, if you will. But I strive to make my story believable, not by piling on information to “prove” I have done my research or inserting too much back story. Whatever isn’t necessary to the evolution of my characters or creating the mood or setting must go. If I know my setting, if I have been living in the 18th century this familiarity will seep through the page. It’s the “telling detail” not reams of description or fact-dropping that lend authenticity to the paragraph.
If you find you are more enthused about writing the facts than the character’s response to living in that long ago world, then perhaps the book you really need to write is nonfiction. When I read I don’t want to be taken out of the story for a history lesson, I want to be transported back to the time and feel immersed in it. I want to vicariously live that history. Writing historical fiction is difficult because it involves time travel and astral projection, or at the very least, channeling past lives. I am only partly jesting when I say that. An author must do whatever she can to get to the heart of the story and find the truth in the historical setting.
In writing a realistic historical novel I am not defending a thesis. On the other hand, writing memorable fiction is more than just making up stuff that might have happened. Fiction tells the truth the facts cannot.
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Finding an agent is like looking for Mr. Right in a singles bar – you are constantly buying new shoes with high heels that kill your feet but make your legs look luscious (fuck-me shoes, we used to call them) and you spend hours and hours practicing your pitch line, trying to sound confidently sexy but a little off-hand, never desperate, and getting your hopes up, up, up only to be told yet again and not in so many words that well, you’re kind of cute but there’s no chemistry here (meaning, you’re too old, too fat, too dated and most importantly you can’t make me enough money because frankly my dear, we’re all gold diggers.)
I once had an agent but we broke up, amicably, like mature adults (unlike my first ex-husband who held a gun to my head when I tried to leave him, but that is another story altogether.) I am considering joining “E-Lit Luv” an on-line dating site to find another pimp, I mean agent. You see, this whole thing feels kind of greasy and sordid but here I am, blushing and batting my eyelashes, looking rather too obvious in my fuck-me heels, trying once again to find Ms. or Mr. Right.
Seriously, I have just signed onto Agent Query Connect. a real on-line dating site for authors and agents. Already I’m hyperventilating, I’ve got cotton mouth, those little white flecks of dried spit collect at the corners of my mouth. My armpits are drenched and I am sitting in my pajamas in the privacy of a hotel room!. Yet in my imagination I am back at the erstwhile Maui Writers Conference giving my pitch to Wendy Lipkind Black herself after my manuscript won the grand prize that year, way back in 1996. Actually that year there were too grand prizes awarded, the contest was declared a tie.
Alas, that interview came to naught, although Wendy would have been a dream of an agent. She sent me a book one of her clients had written to show me what it was she was looking for. I believe if I had landed Wendy Lipkind she would have been my agent for the rest of her life.
It took nearly 40 years to get lucky at love but when it comes to my lit-lover, the agent-of-my-dreams, I’m still looking! And yes, I’ve got something in the works, I am pregnant, so to speak, another kid on the way. Knocked-up and single — yet ever hopeful. All I need is the right pair of shoes!
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