From Publisher’s Weekly:
When I pitched One Woman’s War: A Novel of the Real Miss Moneypenny in October 2020, I had no idea that Operation Mincemeat, a movie about the same subject matter, would be released in early 2022, just a few months before One Woman’s War was due out.
Both fictional works are based on a real British Naval Intelligence operation of World War II, where a corpse dressed as a royal marine was left in waters off the coast of Spain. The deceased marine carried papers suggesting that the European invasion would take place via Greece, rather than the true landing point of Sicily. Spoiler: German spies got hold of the documents and Hitler fell for the ruse, diverting troops from Sicily to Greece. Many thousands of Allied lives were saved as a result.
There have since been several retellings of this eccentric operation. The truth has all of the trappings of a good, old-fashioned spy story, perhaps because the mastermind behind it was destined to become one of the best-known thriller writers of all time: James Bond author Ian Fleming. When real events unfold like fiction, it becomes the task of the fiction writer to make those real events seem plausible. But do authors of historical fiction have a greater duty to readers not to stray too far from the truth than filmmakers have to their audiences?
Avid readers of historical fiction seem to demand historical accuracy in every particular—or at least in the particulars in which those readers, themselves, happen to be experts. Yet even the keenest historical pedant has low expectations of anything out of Hollywood. These movies exist to entertain not teach.
However, people do expect greater adherence to the facts in novels. They want to experience history. Readers of historical fiction want to see events unfold through the protagonist’s eyes and feel the characters’ emotions. Whether they are conscious of it or not, historical novel readers crave a narrative that has conflict, meaning, and some sort of dramatic arc, even though real life might have a lot of the first and none at all of the second and third.
In the case of Operation Mincemeat, fortunately for screenwriters and authors alike, the bare facts of the strategic effort provide a strong plot. Still, a little creative intervention was needed at certain points to turn those facts into a novel.
A common problem I see in war novels occurs when a significant part of the action takes place in theaters in which none of the main characters are present. This is particularly difficult when writing from a first-person or close-third-person point of view.
Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly
A common problem I see in war novels occurs when a significant part of the action takes place in theaters in which none of the main characters are present. This is particularly difficult when writing from a first-person or close-third-person point of view.
Well that’s why you don’t write in those POVs if your story is supposed to have such a broad scope. There’s something to be said for multi-POV stories, e.g., Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. First person and limited third-person work fine if the story is only supposed to be limited to what those characters can see. If a 360-degree view is required, you need more POV characters. Even if a minor character is just telling about an event as a frame for a flashback that shows it.
Also, I thought half the fun of historical fiction was “filling in the gaps.” We know A, and we know C, but what we don’t know is B, which connects A and C. So a historical fiction writer comes up with a plausible and compelling point B to bridge A and C. Do readers care, so long as A and C are attended to?
To execute point B, isn’t that part of the fun of using characters who are known to have existed in the relevant time period, and were positioned to be in assorted places where the action takes place? Best example I can think of are Vorenus and Pullo, who are briefly mentioned in Caesar’s memoirs of the Gallic War, but we know nothing else about them. So, they can be wherever the writers of HBO’s “Rome” needed them to be, because we have no proof they weren’t present or involved in certain set piece events, yet their presence is plausible nonetheless. They can be with Caesar in Egypt and meet Cleopatra, because they served under Caesar. And such characters can be used to solve historical mysteries, e.g., was Caesar really Cleopatra’s baby daddy? Or was it someone else, i.e., Pullo?
Then again, it’s possible the OP really means that readers would be annoyed by definitive anachronisms, e.g., the boomboxes in “Samurai Champloo,” which takes place in Edo-era Japan. As opposed to disputed anachronisms, e.g., stirrups existing centuries before the Genghis Khan-era Mongolians.
I prefer the original:
The Man Who Never Was 1956 Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXyFkINMcI8
Based on the book:
The Man Who Never Was (book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Never_Was_(book)
I read his book in high school. The wiki page points to his autobiography, so I’ve added that to my “to be read list”.
Thanks…
BTW, the OP talks about the problem of showing what happened in Spain. I would do it the same way they did in the movie, simply “Show” what happened.
People forget that the “Reader” will see everything, while the characters in the novel may never see what happened. There is no need to change the Story to force a love interest that wasn’t there or manufacture a character to “Show” the “Reader” what happened off site.
As George Takei might say, “Oh my.” Look at the assumptions in here (several of which are directly relevant to things precisely like “Operation Mincemeat,” the public name for part of a larger, much shadowier effort).
• It assumes that the “facts” known to readers are indeed accurate and complete. Consider, for the moment, a “historical novel” written in 1945 or so regarding the Battle of Midway; the signals-intelligence aspects were all still so deeply classified that even the captains of the carriers did not know why there was such a rush to get them into a particular location at a particular time. (That rush, arguably, led to the sinking of a US carrier, because nine weeks of necessary structural repairs and testing were rushed through in a matter of days without any of the testing.) Or a historical novel on espionage actions in the 1980s that doesn’t consider Venona.
• It assumes that whatever “facts” are at issue have only one dominant, accepted, and indeed acceptable interpretation. One wonders what a historical-political novel on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would look like coming from a truly bilingual, thoroughly-imbued-with-both-cultures-in-the-1930s author would look like.
• It assumes that nobody involved in “establishing the facts” was lying for other purposes. (Which was rather the purported point of Mincemeat and the larger efforts of which it was a part. And neither OKW nor Hitler was the only target.)
• Then there’s the problem epitomized by The Wind Done Gone. I won’t hijack PG’s blog with 3,000 words of detail; just suffice it to say that the very definition of “historical fact” resembles that of “inconceivable” in The Princess Bride: I do not think it means what you think it does.