Readers surmise that fiction writers start a book with a blank page of limitless options. In reality every writer is constrained by past experience and predilection; nowhere are the limits more severe than in writing fiction based on history.

To craft such a narrative, past events not only demand a fixed time setting but also a cast of characters integral to the historic events. More importantly the sum of their combined actions creates a virtual character with attributes that shape the very story. Thus the past becomes a central force when integrated into fiction, effectively becoming the author’s co-director, co-producer and a leading actor.

The fiction writer however is not bound to the tyranny of the past as is the lot of the historian. For them the best that can be hoped for is to craft a different narrative to explain the recorded events. For the fiction writer, there remains the potential to transcend the constraints of the historian by using the historic record as a powerful foil to shape the drama of the story.

Historic events like a page in fiction represent a finite fixed period of time. The writer has the option to construct his pages along a timeline so that his characters may evolve at any point of time before or after a known event, knowing however an acknowledgment must be made at some time to the reality of that event. It is that dynamic between real and imagined that is the essence of historical fiction.

It is a dynamic that provides advantages by allowing the voices of individuals to be heard above the summated narrative of famous men and measurable outcomes that dominates the historian’s craft. That this genre cannot exist without its historic precedent is obvious. The challenge for the writer is to create characters and dialogue that can stand apart from the enormous force of the historic record. Failing that, like Icarus, if the writer flies too close to reality its pull will sublimate and destroy the fictional construct.

At is best however, a writer of historical fiction by sublimating an historic event to a supporting role can provide through the imagined experiences of individuals a more intimate picture of not only where we have been, but where we may be going.