What a great question, Adrienne, and so apropos to In Your Arms.
The key is to make sure that you, as the author, have researched all sides of an issue so that you have at least some kind of understanding of the historical reality behind the issue that you’re dealing with. Once you understand it from a more scholarly point of view, then you need to bring the human element into play.
For example, the heroine of my novel In Your Arms, Lily Singer, is a Native American woman who was taken from her tribe as a small child and raised in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, PA.
The history behind the Carlisle School is controversial. The late 19th century idea of “educating the savages” was conceived of by missionaries who thought they had the best interest of the native people at heart. The Carlisle School and others that were founded after it were predicated on the belief that all people are born with the potential to be civilized, and that if children are removed from a more primitive environment and educated with enlightened ideas, they too can be successful.
The problem was that these good intentions were inherently racist and denigrated the Native American culture. It never would have dawned on the missionaries founding the schools that they were committing “paper genocide”. They thought they were being merciful and helpful. The result was that families were ripped apart and a generation of young people were raised without an identity, without a full sense of self. It’s a bleak and depressing topic.
It’s also at the center of Lily Singer’s struggle as a character. My aim with In Your Arms was to take those harsh realities of good intentions gone wrong and to make them real by showing the way they molded the life of one woman. Yes, I did my research and learned as much as I could about the facts, but rather than writing a discourse on the injustice of it all, I attempted to plant the pain of the reality that the children who were taken away felt in the heart of one character.Win $10 Amazon Gift Card PLUS free eCopy of Merry’s Latest Book.
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The Key:Don’t beat readers over the headwith the harsh reality.
I attempted to do the same thing in my novella, Sarah Sunshine, in which the heroine, Sarah, is taking her first steps of freedom after years as a very young prostitute. The key is not to beat the reader over the head with details of the harsh realities that some people faced in the past, but to find the emotional connection that someone existing in those circumstances would have with a modern reader.
None of us in the modern world was taken away from their tribe as a child and raised in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Too, too many of us, however, have experienced a deep separation from family or moved away from everything we knew as a child. The details of history are different, but we have all experienced those extreme feelings of alienation at some point.
We know the pain of not belonging in the world where we find ourselves but not knowing where we might fit in. I hope that hardly anyone knows what it feels like to be forced into prostitution at a young age, but we all know what it feels like to finally break free from something that was holding us back. Like Sarah, we know what that hope burning deep in our hearts as we take the first steps into a new life feels like.
If you can capture the emotion, the intangible things behind the cold facts that make up history, the accuracy of it becomes less of a flashpoint for people to take offense. We all know that dark things happened in the past, but you don’t necessarily have to go into gory detail to make your reader feel how horrible they were. In fact, focusing on how the darkness affects your characters can touch your readers far more than a blow-by-blow description of harsh reality.If you capture emotion …
accuracy becomes less of a
flashpoint.
You want to make your reader identify with your characters, and if they have never experienced the technicalities of what your characters are going through, there is still a wealth of emotion that they have experienced.
The experience of reading is all about being carried away into the lives of others. The best way to be carried away is to find something in the story that is close to us. We love romance because we all want to fall in love. The same is true with heartbreak, disappointment, and hope. Know your history, look for the common emotional threads between your historical subject and our modern reality, and focus on those emotional commonalities. You can still be starkly accurate, but no matter what the outward circumstances are, emotions are the most accurate details of all.
About Merry Farmer:
Merry Farmer is an award-winning author of Historical Romance and what she likes to call “Sci-Fi for Women.” She lives in suburban Philadelphia with her two cats and enough story ideas to keep her writing until she’s 132. Her second novel, The Faithful Heart, was a 2102 RONE Award finalist and her unpublished futuristic novel A Man’s World won first place in the Novel: Character category at the 2013 Philadelphia Writer’s Conference. She is out to prove that you can make a living as a self-published author and to help others to do the same.
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