The History Police

Holy crap, have I ever been busy.

You know how, when you're writing a historical, and you're in the middle of all this fun creative stuff, and you gloss over the history bits for now and plan to look them up later? And you make notes to yourself in the manuscript ("Would fork be made of silver??? Look this up" and "Would he be walking north on Oxford Street?? FIND MAP" and "Would her maid accompany her or not?? NOT SURE")? And you tell yourself you'll fix it all in the next draft?

Well, that's me. In the next draft.

I like research as much as the next history nerd - it's pretty fun to lose yourself in looking these kinds of things up. The only people ruining it for me this time are the History Police.

The History Police live in various writers' online groups and message boards. They post about how Book X made them absolutely furious because the hero's epaulettes were described as light gold instead of dark, or he said the phrase "What is it" when everyone knows the phrase What Is It did not appear in the popular vernacular until 1905!

I'm sure they're very nice people, really. And, of course, every reader has a right to react to a book in her own way. Still, most writers are pretty scared of the History Police. They freak us right the hell out.

It's hard enough to write a book as it is, without hearing a voice over your shoulder wondering if you're missing something that the HP will find and pick on. "I don't care," you tell yourself. "I'm going to tell this story in my own way." But a second voice always creeps in. "Is that word right? That one? That word isn't in the dialogue, it's in the narrative, but it didn't exist in 1819. Should I look up the etymology of every word in the book? What if the History Police find it and post that I'm an idiot?"

I've decided two things about the History Police: 1) People really like to be right and 2) People really like things categorized into neat little compartments.

The third thing I've realized is that, with history, both of those objectives are completely impossible. We don't know if we're right about any of it - our idea of how people lived historically is always going to be based on the best guess, from the writings people leave behind. And no matter what "rule" you make about history (like what year a word was invented, for pete's sake), it's always possible you're wrong. Maybe someone was saying that word twenty years before it got written down for the first time. It's always possible.

Which is, in the end, why I write historical. If no one knows any of it for sure, it leaves huge leeway for the writer to begin imagining what it might have been like. The possibilities are endless. There are always gaps, mysteries, and, most importantly, questions. Questions are where stories are born.

I'll try and get my epaulettes right, really I will. If I don't, well, shame on me. But epaulettes are not the reason I'm writing the story in the first place, and they never will be.