Blogger: Michelle Ule
Location: Holding down the fort in Santa Rosa while everyone else attends the Mount Hermon Christian Writer’s Conference.
“I don’t know why you kids bother to read fiction,” said Mrs. Klocki, my eighth-grade history teacher. “You should read history! Not only are the stories more unbelievable, but they’re also true!”
As the daughter of an only-non-fiction reader, I knew she had a point.
My love for history started long before I found Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books on the shelf in my school library. I became enraptured by a series of small, square books, each maybe eight chapters long on notable Americans: Martha Washington, Kit Carson, Thomas Edison and the like. The first seven chapters were incidents from the title character’s childhood; the final chapter summed up what happened to them once they reached adulthood. The end pages included illustrations and the pertinent dates of their lives.
Just like kids today, I read every one our library had, not caring who the book was about. The hardback covers were an assortment of colors: green, orange, and blue, but the “brand” was the same in each: tell about a famous American’s childhood, using incidents that would reverberate into their future.
I remember at the time wondering why anyone would want to know about the characters’ adulthood; wouldn’t you rather read stories about children?
Amazon.com lists nearly 17,000 books under the search “children’s biography series.” Obviously, many of us have been interested in reading about the lives of famous people for a long time.
But how many stories of George Washington and his cherry tree–or not–do kids need to have? How do we find a fresh way to tell an old, familiar story?
For me as an elementary school student, I was attracted to fascinating stories, unusual events, and a hook that appealed to my age. Add illustrations and stories about kids “like me.”
Or not, depending on how outlandish the tales might be.
How do we write history in a way that makes it meaningful to people–young or old–while telling the truth? And does a series of books make reading history more palatable?
I think well-researched historical fiction is an asset to becoming familiar with the past. That is . . . for those who like and love history. Which I really don’t. It’s a rare historical novel that I read, but so many people love them, and they tend to dominate the shelves of Christian fiction.
Those biographies hold great power over a kid’s life. When I was 8, my uncle gave me the biography of an evangelist named Billy Sunday (the guy Frank Sinatra said couldn’t shut down Chicago). Later, I read the bio of missionary William Carey. I was hooked on biographies of great Christians, and even today, they profoundly affect my life. I’ve read scores of them. I’m in ministry today because of those books, and I owe a debt of gratitude to the authors.
I have written and published with WestBow, as yet a previously unwritten history of the kingdom of Mewar (Rajasthan). It is written as if I was telling a story and in a language appropriate for those for whom English is a Second language. I hope you will do me the honour to take a peep at my efforts- here’s the link:
http://www.westbowpress.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000172313
I definitely agree that well-written historical fiction is a good way to get a feel for the reality of history. It isn’t just kings and dates and battles; history is people whose love or hate those kings and whose lives are affected by the laws passed on those dates and by the outcome of the battles. The advantage of memorizing dates is hooks to hang those events on, like Mozart was a popular young musician in Austria when the American colonists were rebelling against England.
I found researching my 16th century English novel, Glastonbury Tor, to be a challenge because the reference books were more concerned with Henry VIII’s wives and courtly politics than with what monks ate for dinner or what kind of shoes people wore. I had to be careful when I read period fiction to be sure the author had done his or her homework, but then, that was the fun of writing historical fiction!