All Behind the Book essays

Priya Parmar is a former freelance editor whose first novel, Exit the Actress, was based on the 17th-century actress (and royal mistress) Ellen "Nell" Gwyn. Her second novel, Vanessa and Her Sister, is based on the life of the artist Vanessa Bell. In this behind-the-book essay, Parmar explains how important—and how personal—choosing a historical fiction subject can be.

For me, choosing a subject for a historical novel is a tricky thing. Historical fiction is a guess, a hat tossed into the ring. But it is a guess that is based upon a real life. Choosing the historical figure is a bit like choosing a roommate for my brain. I have to want to see this person first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I have to not mind if she does things that might irritate me. Things like leaving dishes in the sink or singing in the shower. I have to feel an immediate kinship, a recognition that this is a person I could spend an enormous amount of time with. Because it can take years to write the novel.

"Choosing the historical figure is a bit like choosing a roommate for my brain."

First comes the research. After the initial honeymoon period, the wrong historical figure could start to grate. If her choices feel illogical or her decisions poor, or her laughter shrill, she can quickly fall off her pedestal. But the right person from history will only grow more dear, more beloved and more real.

After the honeymoon, comes the immersion, the falling down a rabbit hole period. It is the part where I become completely absorbed in a character’s life and time. This is the fun part. This is when I am committed, devoted and off and running. This is also the time when the history blurs and fiction gallops in. The facts are cemented in truth, but the moral, emotional reasoning is an educated guess. The figure becomes a character and the engine of the novel turns over.

My research for Vanessa and Her Sister began with a letter. In the summer of 1906, Clive Bell proposed to Vanessa Stephen. No. She would not marry him. But she strayed from the usual, demure sort of letter a young woman of her social class was expected to write. She told the truth. She told the whole truth. She sort of liked him but was not truly mad about him and had no idea if this would change in the future. She began this letter at home but finished the postscript in pencil at the dentist’s office. She apologized and explained that she was in a hurry and was off on holiday the next day. The letter reads like an email written circa last week.

Reading this letter roughly a century later, I was astonished by her frank, self-deprecating tone and her modern, uncompromising words. She was absolutely the person I wanted to write about. The character stepped off the page fully formed, like a woman alighting from a railway carriage. But Vanessa Bell came as a package deal with her better-known sister, the writer who would eventually become Virginia Woolf. And their collection of eccentric, intellectual, artistic friends would also tag along into the story: the bohemian crowd who would be remembered as The Bloomsbury Group. They are quirky and brilliant and difficult and gifted and daunting but I loved them all, and so I fell down the rabbit hole.

I began to read their letters. I started with their volumes of collected and selected published letters: Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Roger Fry. After the published works, I moved on to the unpublished. I got to know Vanessa’s sloping uphill handwriting and Virginia’s outsized Vs in her signature. I read about Roger Fry’s exhibitions and Leonard Woolf’s cattle problems. Then the circle widened. Like a complicated spider web, the correspondence took me round and round in larger and larger circles. Vanessa’s art world, E.M. Forster’s publishers, Virginia’s teeth and Roger Fry’s building projects. I spent time in archives and museums. I moved back to London and lived in Bloomsbury. I walked their bus routes and photographed train stations. And at each turn along the way, Vanessa Bell did not disappoint. She was exactly the person I hoped she was and more. It was wonderful to have her in my brain. She was such a lovely roommate and I miss her dreadfully now that she has gone. 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Vanessa and Her Sister.

For me, the first act of writing historical fiction is resistance. There are tropes within the American imagination that pop up readily; it takes a slapping of your own hand to not reach for these tropes and recycle them. 

When I began working on Jam on the Vine, I did not want to write about a dysfunctional black family. Nor would I put a black woman protagonist into a role I have seen too often—maid, prostitute, junkie . . . unloved, uneducated, uninspired. Luckily, mining black history, which I have done scholastically and creatively for 20 years, brings you face-to-face with so many wonderful characters that it is easy to resist the tropes.

I wanted to attempt what I believe the best historical writing—both scholarly and fictive—can do: shed light on the seed of a social problem that cripples its current society. I had no idea what the “problem” might be when I set out to write; however, I knew that any articulation of said problem would be found in the newspaper.

More than any institution in black America, including the black church, African-American newspapers have held the government accountable: demanding rights for its black citizenry and disseminating life-sustaining information. I knew my protagonist was an editor and journalist who, realistically, would not find employment at a white newspaper and therefore would have to launch her own.

Two trailblazing black women journalists inspired Ivoe Williams, the heroine of Jam on the Vine: Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) and Charlotta Bass (1874-1969). Driven by the murder by lynching of black male friends, Wells, who wrote for the New York Age newspaper, began to document lynchings and their causes, most notably in her monographs Southern Horrors (1892) and The Red Record (1895). Bass was a suffragist and the first black woman to own and operate a newspaper, the California Eagle.

Like both women, Ivoe is a bookish girl who goes to college. (Ninety-four black colleges and universities thrived in the first decade of the 20th century, yet we don’t encounter their stories in Progressive-era narratives. Ever.) Like Bass, I wanted Ivoe to launch her own newspaper. Like Wells, I wanted Ivoe’s journalism to have purpose, but felt I could not write about lynching for my own mental health.

Drawing on the early 20th-century history of Texas, one cannot help but notice the birth and proliferation of prison farms—the roots of the incarceration crisis we now face. The moment I stumbled across this fact, I knew that Ivoe’s newspaper would call attention to shady police procedures involving the racist arrest and (often erroneous) imprisonment of black men. This crisis continues to plague America.

The last value I brought to Jam on the Vine hinged on sexual orientation. Much damage has been done to disconnect the social and political—not just artistic—contributions of homosexuals from the American narrative. Placing a black lesbian activist at the center of an early 20th-century story was a natural choice and also a political one.

In writing Jam on the Vine, my valentine to the black press, I’ve exercised my strong belief that historical fiction can go a long way in restoring marginalized groups  to their rightful places within a society’s past, present and future. Today, black newspapers continue to trumpet the age-old call for justice.

Missouri-born author LaShonda Katrice Barnett is also a playwright and editor. She now lives in Manhattan.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Having grown up in Wisconsin, I was surprised to learn that German prisoners captured during World War II were shipped across the Atlantic to my home state. They were housed in rural areas—vacated schools, fairgrounds, migrant worker camps—and were put to work in canneries and on local farms. Between 1942 and 1946, Wisconsin housed POWs in 39 camps across the state.

Thinking on this, a story began forming in my mind—a frightened family on one side of the gate, the enemy on the other. But as I looked into it, I learned that in many rural areas, the prisoners were needed more than feared. One such area was Door County, Wisconsin.

In 1944, when The Cherry Harvest opens, my fictional cherry orchard is threatened because there are no workers to pick the cherries. Nearly all the able-bodied men have left for war, and migrant workers have taken better jobs in the Army or at the shipyards. This would be the second year without a harvest and my family is about to lose their business.

In writing fiction, I typically write from a sense of place. I need to know the feel of it to better appreciate my characters’ relationship with their environment. With that in mind, in May 2011, I traveled to Door County with my daughter. To get a sense of the WWII era, I made numerous trips to the Door County Library and also interviewed people who remembered that time in Door County.

Door County is a lush peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan, a tourist destination dotted with summer cottages, cherry orchards, lighthouses, beaches, and state parks. It’s known as the Cape Cod of the Midwest.

But it wasn’t always so. The name comes from the many ships that crashed along the rocky coast of what was known as Death’s Door. Today you can hire a plane to glide along the coast and view the shipwrecks still resting on the rocks below.

Because The Cherry Harvest is a dramatic story, I wanted it to take place on the stormy side of the peninsula—the Lake Michigan side—and so we booked a stay at a home right on the beach. I later learned that very home was the site of a former orchard. That spot became the location of my family’s homestead, and there, my protagonist, Charlotte, a farmwife, began to come to life.

I woke early each morning and listened to the birds, monitored the weather, walked barefoot in the grass and along the shore as my characters might have done. My daughter and I visited blooming orchards, tasted cherry pies, and learned of the old harvesting processes. I interviewed people who had lived on cherry orchards back when they worked alongside German POWs.

Charlotte came to me strong and brave, insisting on bringing POWs to pick the summer’s harvest. But she has a son, Ben, fighting in Europe against the Nazis. How would bringing prisoners onto the land play into her relationship with her son? Would he come home to find POWs on the land?

Just north of the spot where my daughter and I stayed was a lighthouse. This became the lighthouse where my character Kate would visit her friend Josie. My daughter and I walked across the isthmus to the island and climbed to the top of the lighthouse, which became the perspective of many of my scenes.

Continuing north along the shore is an expansive summer home owned by a politician; this became the home of Kate’s Cinderella boyfriend, Clay.

Thomas was the last character to come clear to me. He flowed out of Kate’s intellectual desires to leave the farm and pursue a writing career. While Charlotte and Ben share a pragmatic, physical sense of purpose, Kate and her father have an intellectual connection through poems and stories. Once the Thomas character developed, I could give him a backstory as well.

By the time I left Door County, I had my story. All I had to do was write it.

Lucy Sanna is the author of two previous relationship books, but The Cherry Harvest is her first novel. She and her husband divide their time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Madison, Wisconsin. Find out more about Sanna and her debut novel on her website.

Author photo by Hope Maxwell Synder.