Category Archives: Fiction Based on Fact

Writing Practice and Meeting up with your Muse

Writing Leap #72

Hi Writers,

As writers we are in a unique position to express how we are experiencing events in the current political climate through fiction. Fiction enables us to make our point indirectly through showing rather than telling. Showing is always more powerful and immediate. 

This new edit of my Thanksgiving post from last year sprung from my gut reaction to the current mood concerning women in our country.

The First Thanksgiving

He would eat standing up.  To sit next to an ash-skinned man at a crowded table, maybe have to touch arms, would kill him.

He was fourteen.

He was a ferocious warrior.

And he would stand.

As far away from those moon-colored faces showing all their teeth as he could.

Which wasn’t far.  He felt his father’s eyes flashing fire at him,  

But even if his father suspected his thoughts he would never see them on his son’s face.  The muscles around the young warrior’s eyes and mouth were as still as stone.

His weapon hung loosely at his side begging him to grab it.

Lots of gunfire this morning from this white settlement.  Surely an attempt for a full out attack on his whole tribe.  His blood raged.  He would devour them.  Chop them up like whale meat.  He was well aware of how easy that would be for him.

She brought him a platter of paleface overcooked venison and stupid-looking cranberries.  She was his age, he thought, but mush.  Not hard and magnificent like his mother and his sisters.  

“Seconds?” she asked.  Washed out blue eyes.  Worst of all she had yellow straw for hair.  A freak.

He just stared.

He pinched her breast through her starched apron.  Hard.

Her mouth flew open.

He didn’t have to look at his father to see the gesture of fury directed at him.  It said, “Leave. NOW.”

As he turned to go the young girl took the platter of venison and cranberries and dumped the whole mess on his head. And then she did something surely God would punish her for. She gave him a hard pinch on his behind. He let out a roar, looked at his father and willed himself to stand stark still.

The girl walked back to her mother, sure of step and mouth set. She sat down at her place at the Thanksgiving table and forced herself to breath evenly. In a quiet voice her mother said to her, “Good.”

Last year the young girl fainted. That was last year.

Happy Writing and Happy Thanksgiving all you writers out there,

A WRITING BLOG About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Categories

Writing Leap #32

WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION

Hi Writers,

Historical Fiction is a blend of historical facts and your imagination.  It takes place in a definite period of time and place in history.   Your characters are involved in a conflict or situation that is real for that time period.

The serious challenge for us writers is to eschew historical cliché.  We have to do our research and then plunge ourselves back there.  You don’t have to spell out the historical facts but they should be hovering underneath your fiction.  

So writers.  Do you have a time or moment or place in history that feels curiously familiar?  Or that you are curious about?  Take yourself back there and write.

Background on my fiction piece:   The First Thanksgiving

Juicy, fragrant turkey with the stuffing you’ve loved since a child.  Tart cranberry sauce and candied sweet potatoes.  Yuuum.  Creamy pumpkin pie with the flavors of autumn.  Cinnamon, nutmeg, a pinch of ginger and maybe allspice.  Thanksgiving.

But not anything like the food served at the harvest gathering in the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts in 1621.  Based on two slim accounts, 32 colonists and 90 Wampanaug feasted together on duck, geese, venison, maybe pumpkin and squash.  Nobody knows if the Wampanaug were even invited or just showed up.  With five deer.  But they were welcomed.  Chief Massasoit had signed a peace treaty with the Pilgrims.

Over the last 392 years since that gathering in Plymouth the romance of Thanksgiving has blossomed in our country’s fanciful mind.  It is a uniquely American way of saying grace.   Here’s my imagining of the first gathering.

The First Thanksgiving

He would eat standing up.  To sit next to an ash-skinned man at a crowded table, maybe have to touch arms, would kill him.

He was fourteen.

He was a ferocious warrior.

And he would stand.

As far away from those moon-colored faces showing all their teeth as he could.

Which wasn’t far.  He felt his father’s eyes flashing fire at him,  

But even if his father suspected his thoughts he would never see them on his son’s face.  The muscles around the young warrior’s eyes and mouth were as still as stone.

His weapon hung loosely at his side begging him to grab it.

Lots of gunfire this morning from this white settlement.  Surely an attempt for a full out attack on his whole tribe.  His blood raged.  He would devour them.  Chop them up like whale meat.  He was well aware of how easy that would be for him.

She brought him a platter of paleface overcooked venison and stupid-looking cranberries.  She was his age, he thought, but mush.  Not hard and magnificent like his mother and his sisters.  

“Seconds?” she asked.  Washed out blue eyes.  Worst of all she had yellow straw for hair.  A freak.

He just stared.

He pinched her breast through her starched apron.  Hard.

Her mouth flew open and her eyes rolled back and she collapsed to the ground.  In a dead faint.

He didn’t have to look at his father to see the gesture of fury directed at him.  It said, “Leave. NOW.”  

Happy Writing Everyone and Happy Thanksgiving!

LINKING THE ARTS

An Evocative Engraving

The Pilgrims Receiving Massasoit

 Charles Henry Granger, 19th century

Maybe my fuming young warrior is in this crowd?

A Word I Like:   Grace.  In the sense of generosity of spirit.  Like the young warrior’s father who surely must have harbored some fury against the pilgrims who stole their corn and worse, yet rose above it.

I Like this Book.

Thanksgiving by Sam Sifton, National Editor and former restaurant critic for The New York Times.  He is very funny.  His book is full of tips and comments both culinary and amusing.

Playing Around With a Story Line in Different Literary Genres

Hi there Writers and Readers,

Writing Leap #13  Fiction Based on Fact

There are many variations of fiction based on fact.  Creative Non-Fiction, Narrative Non-Fiction (sometimes called Docufiction), Memoir, The Personal Essay.  The writing is factual but reads like a story.

 Aaaah, but HOW factual?  This literary prose style can slip from super faithful to documented facts all the way to painting the facts with different colors and hues to serve your story–and on to outright reinvention of the facts to the point where they are unrecognizable!  Lots of intriguing choices for the fiction writer.  We can play with the facts.  Yaaaay.  

Attention journalists reporting a story.  Clearly this does not apply to us!

Story Line

When We Discover Something That Sparkles

So gather your facts and go make up a story around them.  Play very loose with the story line.  Just let it flutter your imagination.

Here’s mine.

Thirteen Centuries Ago in Reims, France

Dom Perignon, my good monk, you must calm yourself.  His Highness the King already loves your holy wine.  Is not the King riding all the way here to our magnificent cathedral to taste of it during an official royal mass?  The King would not be making the long bumpy journey from Paris to Reims for just an ordinary glass of red, my brother.

Dom Perignon covered his ears and pressed hard, as if to squeeze away this voice inside him.  If his superiors could hear this constant inner chatter Dom Perignon would be severely chastised.  He was a Benedictine and he must remain tranquil.  At all costs.  And he must pursue his wine experiments for God and by extension his King.  Not, God please forgive him, for his own aggrandizement.

The monk nodded to himself and descended a steep narrow staircase.  The wine cellar with its big vats and barrels, its acrid smell, and its lone small window was Dom Perignon’s personal chapel, although dear God, he would never utter this thought out loud.  Though partially blind It was here in the dim light where he could imagine and pursue his ideas for turning the pale red wine of the Champagne region into the prized deep red color of Burgundy.  Surely then the Abbey at Hautvilliers would be especially honored by the King.

Truth be told Dom Perignon was thoroughly exasperated with his efforts to perfect the wine.  The wine continued to ferment in the bottle to the point where horrid bubbles appeared.  As he descended down into the cellar he half expected to find that the bottles had exploded and made a mess all over the floor.

Must the wine be red?  Maybe the skins are the problem.  Get rid of them!  Would it be allowed to mix our grapes with others from the region?

Dom Perignon didn’t wait for permission.  He worked with two eager young monks on a creative recipe for a new holy wine.

Time passed and the new wine fermented happily in its bottles.  This time Dom Perignon couldn’t muffle his excitement.  His motives were pure and he just might have discovered a drink fit for angels, or at least for the King.

And he did.  He popped open the first bottle and heard the fizzle.  He poured some into a glass.  Oh, how it bubbled.  Oops too fast.  It was foaming.  How lovely and pale it looked.

Dom Perignon took a sip.  Aaaah.  Extraordinary bubbles.  Exquisite light taste.

“Come quickly my young brothers.  I’m tasting stars.”

And this, some say, is how Dom Perignon invented the exquisite drink we toast with called CHAMPAGNE.

***

Here’s a champagne toast to all you wonderful writers out there,

LINKING THE ARTS

Dom Perignon Tasting his Stars

A Lovely Word

Effervescent:  In the sense of lively and extremely happy

A Book I Love

One of my very favorite writers, Colette, played beautifully with the facts in her stories about her adored mother, Sido, a  late nineteenth-century woman in rural France.    

My Mother’s House and Sido by Colette.