Thank you, Steve Himmer, for giving me this platform. I plan to write this month about fiction. I will also present a few pieces of my own fiction and other people’s fiction as examples of some of the problems I’m talking about.

In the introduction to my second book of fiction exercises, The 4 A.M. Breakthrough, I wrote that in,

1970 the Attorney General of Kansas tried to prevent airlines from serving alcohol while flying over his state, which did not allow the sale of any alcohol at the time. This sort of quixotic historical fact often makes fiction look strangely pale and unimaginative compared to the peculiarities and (sometimes) sheer unbelievability of reality. There is and should be no real difference between fiction and nonfiction. The distinction between the fictional and the fact-based world is overrated and the distance between the two is shorter than most critics imagine.

My recent novel The River Gods was inspired by Eduardo Galeano’s great trilogy of “novels,” Memory of Fire. In that book, Galeano studies the history of North and South America over five centuries, and he goes year by year (though he skips many years). The ambition of Galeano’s project daunted me as I was writing The River Gods, but when I moved significantly away from one common narrative method of Galeano’s I felt I’d broken free from some of his influence. Galeano used a great deal of quotation (both indirect paraphrase and direct quotation of primary and secondary historical material). He cited the sources of his stories at the end of each book. At one time, The River Gods also had a good deal of quoted material, from historians and from letters and journals of historical figures. I deleted all the quoted material in one fell swoop, and slowly I rewrote some of these pieces into my own words, sometimes keeping the historical figures who’d spoken the words, sometimes giving them to fictional characters. I also planted historians’ language in characters, giving them a historical retrospective sense. I liked that these characters knew their world with a nearly impossible omniscience.

Traditionally, historical fiction has employed research to flesh out the story, to add colorful detail, and to achieve verisimilitude. Research is what’s done early in the process of writing most historical fiction. My approach was to use the research to trigger the narratives, at any time in the process. I was interested in accuracy, but the historical fiction I wrote was more concerned with the mood and experience of the past. When writing about the distant past, one is essentially translating from another language, losing great chunks of idiosyncratic detail and idioms of the moment. But something can also be gained in this translation of the past: prose styles erupting out of close readings of primary and secondary texts, and a healthy rethinking of the relationship between the past and the present. When a writer rewrites history, by taking over other texts and elaborating on them, the result is history reread and revised. Much contemporary innovative historical fiction takes a simple idea—of reading the past—and complicates the process in surprising and imaginative ways.