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We experience the confrontation of opposed moral perspectives, of clashing views of reality. Thus, when Character A clashes with Character B, we as readers perceive something more meaningful than just two people beating each other’s brains out. Each character represents something greater. In a novel, remember, no character stands solely for himself. Because it had nothing to do with the story we were endeavouring to tell. Now, too, we can answer our critics who quiz us, Why did you leave such-and-such a famous incident out? Because it wasn’t on-theme. Cassius might have to become a little leaner and a little hungrier, in the service of the theme. Indeed we should never deliberately turn them on their heads. Now we can answer our question about being true to the reality of historical characters. They represent the theme: the love/hate dynamic that the city found itself in, in relation to Alcibiades – and other exceptional personalities, including Socrates. (Note how different this model is from a biography of Alcibiades.) Now I understand why the secondary characters feel so important to me.
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This book is not “about” Alcibiades it’s about the jealousy that Athens (and by extension all democracies) felt toward its exceptional leaders, and how that jealousy impelled the citizenry to tear down those leaders, even at the cost of the ruin of the state. Then why, I kept asking myself, do I find myself compelled to keep writing other scenes about other, secondary characters? Finally it hit me. I knew the events would be those of the Peloponnesian War and the fall of Athens. In Tides of War, as I began to work on it, I knew the central character (though not necessarily the protagonist) would be Alcibiades. The theme should arise organically out of the historical era or the historical events. What the hell is this thing about anyway? Am I within my rights to impose a theme on the material? I don’t think so. 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.)
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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.”
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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.