Is it a Detective Novel or Historical Fiction?

I think of LIFTERS as an historical novel, though I don't think that's where it would be shelved in the bookstore.  I'm not a big fan of the Maisie Dobbs novels, but the category is similar: a female detective working in a past period of history, post-WW I in Winspeare's stories.  World War II must be about the cut-off point.  If you wrote a detective story set in the sixties or eighties, you'd be careful to have the right president in office and no cell phones, but your novel wouldn't be called historical fiction.  Maybe that's because, though the slang will be different, your characters talk and act the way people do now.  Avoiding anachronisms is a different thing from creating a past milieu.  

In my next post I want to write about the challenge of immersing yourself so far into a past period you forget the reason you've immersed yourself is to write a novel.

Creating and Leaving Out the Back-story

My novel, Lifters, is about a young woman mercantile detective in Seattle circa 1908. Spending the better part of four years getting into her head as a writer really helped me get into character as an actor. As you fiction writers know, you have to create a history for your character that brings the character to life for yourself.  But you have to resist the temptation to cram all that back-story into your novel.   parts of the character that never make it into the story. Something similar happens when you are acting.  The script is the starting point for your character.  Your imagination and life experience let you grow an imagined life from your character's lines.  You draw from this imagined life to enrich the character you are playing.  But you cannot go beyond the script.  As a novelist, you have to impose your own script on your story.

Writing a Novel and Acting

One of the things I've learned about writing fiction is that I can save myself difficult work if I break off for the day before finishing the scene I'm working on.  This lets me get back into the story's  imagined world more quickly the next time I sit down at the computer.  When the process is working well, I set the characters in action and write down what they say.  The scene almost always needs reworking, but the essence of the interaction of the characters is there.

Earlier this year I decided to take an acting class.  I had several motives for doing this.  One was curiosity about how acting is taught.  Another is that I've suffered from a lifelong compulsion to undertake just those activities for which I have the least aptitude.  A third motive was to see if I could acquire some of the poise and presence I've admired in the actors I've encountered.

The experience of acting in my classes has brought both humiliation and great pleasure.  But it has also brought an unexpected bonus for me as an author.  The core theme of the classes I've taken at the Freehold Theater in Seattle is "living authentically in imaginary circumstances."  And isn't that what you need to do as a writer of fiction?

I discovered that my most basic assumption about acting was wrong.  I thought that the script was the play, and that actors voiced the lines with interpretive guidance from the director.  I learned that the script is only the starting point.  The interaction between the actors is the essence of the play.  One set of actors can create a drama from a script that is completely different from what another set of actors will produce from the same script.

So writing fiction and acting have more similarity than I thought.  I create imaginary circumstances, and then through some process of both pushing and listening I set my characters in motion and write down what happens.