In East India, author Colin Falconer faced head on the challenge of writing historical fiction:  determining the perfect balance of fact and fiction. He shares his experience here:

WHY HISTORY IS A PAIN IN THE BUTT

Colin Falconer

The facts are a constant thorn in the side of every author of historical fiction. HF readers hate it if you get your facts wrong so you sweat blood on research. God help you if you make a mistake. I once had a reader take me to task over tomatoes, so you overlook research at your peril. Especially about salad.

But you have to also remember that you’re not a historian, you’re a novelist. My sister’s constant complaint – and she always has her nose in a book, God bless her cotton socks – is that some writers bombard her with too many facts. ‘I just want to get into the story,’ is her mantra. ‘I hate it when I have to start skipping pages.’

So she is my litmus test. When I give her my books to read I always say: ‘Did you have to skip?’

If she had to skip, I cut that bit out.

But the most difficult thing about writing history is that it’s chaotic, like life.

Because it is life, only life that happened a while ago.

A novel is not chaotic, by its very definition. Neither is a movie. That’s why the makers of Braveheart, for instance, messed with history like they did. They were trying to make an epic and when the facts got in their way, they just ignored them.

Authors can’t do that. Film directors can play tennis with the net down. We can’t.

 My latest novel, East India, was based on one of Australia’s most iconic stories, the wreck of the Dutch retourschip, the Batavia, that grounded on a reef fifty miles off the Australian coast. But this was no ordinary shipwreck. One of the senior VOC officers decided to turn the islands into a personal fiefdom, murdering all those who were of no use to him – such as the male passengers and the children – and forcing the women to become sex slaves.  He was defied and thwarted by a small band of soldiers who built their own fort out of limestone rocks and made their own weapons from flotsam and held them off until help arrived.

It’s a truly extraordinary tale – but it’s not a novel. There’s been many books written about the episode in Australia, and I’ve read most of them, but it’s deeply unsatisfying as a story. The main character turns out to be an utter coward. No one tries to defend the women. The real hero only emerges on the last ten pages.

Sorry, doesn’t work.

So even though my story was closely based on the story of the Batavia, I realised early on that I had to fictionalise it. I changed all the names. I called the ship the Utrecht. I turned it into a story but made it clear in my afterword where the inspiration was from and pointed readers who were interested towards some great history books on the subject.

History was still a pain in the butt though, because there were some parts of the story that just begged to be retold and yet, like much of real life, they didn’t make sense. Could a sixteenth century skipper really navigate an open boat not much larger than a racing skiff across the open sea all the way to Indonesia? Well yes they could.

But there are other problems you can never get right. No matter what I do, someone will write me and say I’ve drawn too much from real history or missed something about a tomato.

But for my litmus test I always go back to my sister. ‘What did you think?’

‘Couldn’t put it down.’

‘Great. Did you skip anything?’

‘Not a paragraph. I cried at the end.’

There you go. Great.

Job done.