I pursue this vague sensation that has seized me. (Notice Paddy Chayevsky said “Once I figure out …” – meaning he didn’t have it all worked out from the start.) Questions arise: How true should we remain, as writers, to actual historical fact? How much license can we take when shaping characters who really existed? In other words, he did exactly what a writer of “pure” fiction does.Īdmittedly it gets tricky with historical characters. In each play (and all his other historical works) the great dramatist first found his theme, then built his characters and constructed his narrative to express that theme. The real-life figures were only a starting point for Shakespeare.
Julius Caesar was not “about” Julius Caesar, any more than Hamlet was “about” the historical Melancholy Dane. After that, nothing goes into the play that isn’t on that theme.”
Paddy Chayevsky said this about writing a play: “ Once I figure out what the theme of the work is, I type it out in one sentence and tape it to the front of my typewriter. If it’s an historical novel, it picks a theme that (hopefully) arises organically out of the true historical era or the life of the central character, and then uses versions of actual historical characters (and a few fictional ones, if necessary) to illuminate that theme. A novel picks a theme and focuses on that. Its legitimate object is to give us the measure of its subject from birth to death in all his or her contradictions and complexities.Ī novel is different. What is a biography anyway? A biography is the “life story” of an historical individual. I think it contributes, as well, to historical fiction not being taken as seriously as it deserves, or being treated as a stepchild among literary genres. This confusion affects all of us who write or read historical fiction. I’m not writing a biography, I’m writing a novel. “Why did you leave out such-and-such an incident?”, “How come you didn’t include so-and-so?” STEVEN PRESSFIELD speaks of his experiencesįrom time to time, critics have taken me to task for certain omissions in books I’ve written, particularly when the book was centered on a true historical personage.
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