Meeting My First Reader

A few friends have read LIFTERS and told me how much they liked it.  But they’re friends, and strongly biased in my favor.  Today I talked with a woman who is a student at the Lifetime Learning Center, where I’m the director.  I don’t know her beyond the casual chatting I do with the three hundred or so students who take classes with us.  But she had overheard me telling someone about the novel, and asked where to find it.

She came to me bubbling with enthusiasm.  What a sweetheart!  She’d recently had the experience of reading an e-novel published by a local author someone had recommended to her, and had been disappointed.  “Probably never would have found a publisher,” was her judgment.  But my book was great, she said.  She loved the writing.  I hear that praise with caution; it’s possible to write fluently but not have much of a story to tell.  She asked me about the research.  “You can tell you did your homework,” she said.

That led to a conversation I’ve had before in book discussion groups.  Is a novelist who brings historical events into his story required to be accurate?  Those discussions sometimes become a debate between what I call the historians and the storytellers.  The historians argue that you can create dialogues that no one could have recorded, but you shouldn’t alter what is known as historical fact.  The storytellers say the novelist can do what she wants as long as she holds the reader’s interest and faith in the world she is creating.

I could go either way on that.  I find myself intrigued by the motives of certain historical figures, and enjoy speculating about them in what I write.  An example is the wrestler Dr. Roller in my story.  There is no documentation that will get to the root of his ambivalent behavior.  You can read the newspaper accounts, and you’ll be left, as I was, free to speculate.

But newspaper accounts of life in Seattle during the first decade of the twentieth century were the starting point for my story, and I came down on the side of the historians.  Nothing that I knew had actually happened was altered in my slice of early Seattle life.