Historic and Historical

We have an answer-guy in our local paper. Clay Thompson gets some very weird questions (some even from me) that he replies to in a sardonic way. Trust me. You want Clay to take your question and take you down, too. I know. That’s weird, too.

Recently someone wrote in wondering about the difference between the words “historic” and “historical.” I know. Don’t these people own a dictionary?

In his inimitable way, he succinctly answered that historic is an event worthy of noting, commemorating, or celebrating. Historical means something from the past, noteworthy or not. Simple, right?

Unless you’re an historical fiction writer. In that case, what is “historical” becomes quite important. Along those lines, one of my Facebook historical fiction pages had a thread going about just when is something historical?

When I attended the conference in Portland, Oregon last June, someone said if something is fifty years old or more, it’s historical. Uh. That’s my lifetime. I’m historical (though not historic). Sobering thought.

The Facebook thread wasn’t so definitive as the conference person. Still, fifty, sixty years--that works most of the time. But what about more recent events that are historic, if not historical? Could an historical fiction writer write it as historical fiction if it’s on the cusp of fifty years?

Someone suggested such writings be called “vintage”. I like that. The term vintage first came to my attention vis à vis clothing. Vintage is something high quality, denoting the best or most important of an era.

So if you were writing about an event in 1968, perhaps a novel about the integration fight in the south, maybe you could call it “historic fiction”, instead of “historical fiction”, or is that just adding layers of confusion? Maybe the answer is a category of “vintage fiction.”

I honestly don’t know that our readers care what label publishers and book sellers put on a novel. However, that labeling can make it easy or hard to locate the book.

When pondering this topic, I was reminded of university courses I taught in children’s literature. Contemporary fiction and historical fiction are easy designations, right? But what about the copyright date? When Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) was published, it would have been considered contemporary fiction. But as we read it today, we call it historical fiction since it is over 100 years old.

Do you see the problem? When does contemporary fiction become historical fiction? And what is the definition of what makes it historical fiction? Does merely depicting an earlier era make it historical fiction or would The Secret Garden be better labeled as vintage fiction?

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