Other Mostly-Untapped Reference Resources

Last week I wrote about using vintage cookbooks for more novel detail and to give your novel authenticity and accuracy. I didn’t mention another “new” cookbook that I recently acquired.

You know Toll House cookies, right? The cookie was created by Ruth Graves Wakefield who ran the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. She and her husband bought an old toll stop house and converted it to an inn. Ruth’s cooking became famous so she wrote a cookbook in 1931. She later sold her now-famous recipe for Chocolate Crunch Cookies to Toll House chocolates. Her story is so interesting, I believe it deserves telling here at some point.

The book is a cornucopia of information about the 1930s and 1940s. Recipes, food available in season, manners and etiquette, and more. If your era is early twentieth century, this cookbook could help.

Where else, you may wonder, might you acquire “insider information” from commonplace resources on your era?

Historical research leads one to primary documents like newspapers and magazines to find obits and articles about topics of interest. But take another bit of time and look over the ads around the articles. You will see pictures of machines, tools, clothing, and more that you could tap for inclusion in your novel.

Again, including artifacts appropriate to your time period lends credibility to your novel as well as making it more descriptive.

If you are focused on early- to mid-century stories, there are lots of archived TV and radio programs that can give you a feel for the time. The cultural info you will get about dialogue patterns and vocabulary/slang of the era can be directly transferred to your characters’ interactions.

And watch/listen to the commercials of your era. Look for patterns such as were there lots of tonics for digestion? Those patterns provide clues as to what concerns people of the era had so that you can refer to them as well.

Yet another source of information for you is to read novels written during your era, the contemporary fiction of the times. Again, you will get cultural references and language pattern information that you can use.

This post won’t work, obviously, for all eras. But once there is print available to the general public, you can explore the cultural aspects of your era.

If you are writing about the Roman Empire, I'm sorry. None of this applies. Another time, perhaps, you'll find something helpful.

UPDATE:

I attended a session at Left Coast Crime about historical fiction mysteries. Fascinating! The panel moderator was Laurie King, and the panelists were Catriona McPherson, Priscilla Royal, Kelli Stanley, and Jennifer Kincheloe.

One question asked for resources, beyond the traditional primary resources, that these authors used. I was happy to hear that perusing ads in periodicals was recommended as was letters to the editor to get a feel for issues of the time. I am listing their unusual ones here for you to tuck into your research arsenal.

Check out Baedeker guides first published in the 1830s for names of hotels, etc. and real peoples’ reviews of them that you can include as details. You also can find out what’s on restaurants’ menus.

Also, add an almanac to your arsenal that will give you events for days so you can refer to them. McPherson said, “You don’t want your date to be when the king dies and you never even mention it.”

Need to name characters? Check out Census rolls for the era. Also there are books of names (and Internet sites) for different years with their different spellings. The white pages of phone books are another resource for names. Use the yellow pages for actual businesses that existed in your time frame. The Oxford English Dictionary of Christian Names (not just Christian) is another resource.

Books on the history of American slang will help keep your language accurate for the era.

This session was well worth attending, don’t you agree?

Vintage Cookbooks: A Mostly Untapped Historical Resource

Okay, maybe not totally ignored, but I venture to say that few historical fiction authors go hunting for vintage cookbooks of their era in order to add yet another level of veracity and fulsomeness to the story. A dinner scene described and not just mentioned. An interaction in the kitchen while preparing food that reveals some intrigue brewing. A shopping trip to the village market for local produce that allows observation of an historic event.

These are some of the ways vintage cookbooks can beef up (so to speak), your novel’s authenticity and inform the reader of culinary aspects they might not know of. We want to tell a good story, right, but we also want to illuminate our era so others learn and are as fascinated as we are.

I collect vintage cookbooks (and replicas of cookbooks no longer available or beyond my budget). They are fascinating! The oldest cookbook to survive is 2500 years old. Fish with Feta was described by Mithaecus, who lived in the late 5^th century B.C.E.

He was Sicilian who spoke Greek. He is the one, purportedly, who brought knowledge of Sicilian cooking to Greece. He also worked in Sparta and in Athens. He got kicked out of Sparta because he was a bad influence. Plato dissed him in his work, Gorgias.

Not only is his the first cookbook in Greece, his cookbook, The Art of Cookery, is the earliest cookbook author whose name is known in any language.

Only one of his recipes survives, unfortunately. When I tell you the original recipe, you’ll see why people have adapted it. In a single sentence, here is Mithaecus’ recipe for the fish, tainia: ‘Gut, discard the head, rinse, slice; add cheese and oil.’ Inside the fish? On the top? A cook of the era would know.

Even then, good cooks knew you didn’t have to spell out everything. Of course you cooked it! Just the facts, ma’am. ‘Tainia’ is known in modern Greek as ‘kordella’. Apparently adding cheese to the fish was a controversial move back in the day. One Greek guy warned about spoiling good fish by adding cheese. To adapt this recipe, use tilapia, haddock, or another firm white fish.

If you want to try it, my adapted recipe (with stuff he didn’t have access to) for “Fish with Feta” based on Mithaecus is below.

But back to cookbooks, when I was working on my middle grade bio of Elizabeth Jennings Graham, I got hold of recipes from an 1840’s cookbook that I could include in the text to show the kind of food Elizabeth might have helped her mother prepare.

Anyone interested in Victorian and Edwardian eras should know about the Downton Abbey cookbooks and Downton Abbey: Rules for Household Staff. These are not themselves vintage, but they include pretty accurate era-specific recipes (updated with ingredients and directions) to bring realism to your work.

Another cookbook/household management book that is vintage for the era is the 1112 page, 1861 Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, a compilation of newspaper columns over a two-year period. My copy is a replica, obviously! There’s an interesting back story to this book that I might share on this blog someday. Fascinating!

But back the volume,

As I work on my historical fiction of a Singua woman from the mid-15^th century, I am tapping into recipes for cooking game as hunters do when they cook in the wild. Catching the food and cooking it was an essential element of her culture, and I want to be as accurate as I can be.

One thing I have noticed as a difference between vintage cookbooks and modern cookbooks is the amount of detail. Few if any pictures are in vintage cookbooks. Often they give information about availability of certain foods in specific seasons. They didn’t have access to foods in the same way we do.

All in all, reading cookbooks of different eras offers cultural insights and allows for another layer of authenticity for your writing. Happy cookbooking!

Fish with Feta (adapted from 2500 year old Greek recipe)

¾-1 pound of fresh white fish fillets (tilapia, haddock, etc.)

¼ cup plain dried bread crumbs or panko

3 ounces feta cheese, crumbled

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon minced fresh dill

1 tablespoon minced fresh chives

Fresh ground pepper

Take fish out of refrigerator 30 minutes before cooking.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Mince fresh dill & fresh chives.

Combine bread crumbs/panko, feta, olive oil, dill, and chives in a bowl.

Pepper the fish and place it on a lightly greased baking sheet.

Lightly press the bread crumb mixture on top of each fillet.

Bake the fish uncovered until the fish is firm and cooked through, about 20 minutes.

Serve immediately.

Book Review: The Taste of Air

One quote I loved and read several times serves as the theme of The Taste of Air, I believe. “The chain of connections and separations is how our lives pass.” So beautiful and so true not just in the context of this novel.

Cleare used one of my favorite devices in her tale: Alternating chapters for different points of view AND time periods. Having lived through the Viet Nam years described in her book, I could relate to the angst and the horrors she shared. I had friends and relatives there. We got a feel for the era in the mother’s chapters that brought back vivid memories and images. This book isn’t billed as historical fiction, but HF readers will find much to like.

Gail Cleare’s USA Today Bestseller is a novel of three women, a mom and her two daughters who discover that they may not be as familiar with one another as they had thought. It is a novel that will move your spirit through recognition of your own life and your relationships with those close to you. How well do we really know anyone, even those we think we know best?

We learn that each woman’s secrets, yearnings, struggles, and choices have an effect on their own lives and the lives of those closest to them. When Nell learns that her gravely ill mother led a secret life for decades, she is hurt, baffled, and determined to unravel the mysteries created by her mother’s choices. She enlists the aid of her sister, Bridget, and her mother’s closest secret friends, breaking down their barriers meant to protect their mother.

Through their discoveries about their mother’s secrets and the reasons for them, Nell and Bridget come to realizations about their own lives that, in the end, profoundly affect both of them. Each woman struggles with what self-actualization, modeled by their mother’s actions, must mean in their own lives.

The theme of air plays out in a variety of ways, from the mother’s ventilator to the freshness of country air to the emotional air that separation from the familiar provides. Cleare uses air in so many literal and metaphorical ways that one finds oneself looking for the next description.

Cleare’s descriptive language is poetic, evoking literary fiction without the pretentiousness of some books in that genre. She creates scenes with words that put you in the middle with the action, sights, smells, and tastes happening all around. It is a beautifully written book.

I loved The Taste of Air, and I predict you will, too. It touches us on so many levels.

You can read your own copy of this beautiful novel. The Taste of Air, published by Red Adept Publishing, is available on Amazon.

Disclosure:

This review is modified from one I posted on another of my blogs, Romance Righter, by Angelica French, my romance pen name.

Historical Fiction from a Different Perspective

It occurred to me as I was writing this post, and thinking about what graphic I could include, that a very appropriate illustration would be one typically assigned to fairy tales: Once upon a time . . .

That’s what we try to do. Write realistically about a very long time ago. Separating mystery from history. Usually that means picking a major person, event, and/or era to capture with our words. But there are alternatives to the major-person pick.

A very successful historical fiction strategy is to pick a minor or secondary character who was around a great person or an historic event, or better still, both! Then expand that story by creating a what-might-have been story as historically accurately as possible.

America’s First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie is one example. Thomas Jefferson’s daughter is known about but not known by most of us. Perfect for showing Jefferson and creating a fascinating peek into his world from someone close to him. Based on thousands of letters, they recreated the Jeffersonian world.

Another example is Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker (Jennifer Chiaverini), an actual personage that we know something about, who shares her thoughts about the President, his wife, and their marriage. This black woman wrote about Mrs. Lincoln but she was ridiculed and marginalized and discounted. Chiaverini took that tidbit and spun her engrossing tale.

Dava Sobol had little to work with when she researched and created Galileo’s Daughter. She used 124 surviving letters from Sister Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun and the oldest of Galileo’s three illegitimate children, to her father. Galileo had enormous respect for her and described her as “a woman of excellent mind, singular goodness, and tenderly attached to me.”

See how taking a small role person connected to a larger life or event can give new life to biographical treatment of a well-known person? These different points of view can illuminate in ways that direct biography cannot.

Now imagine the tale you could spin by taking the point of view of the first Native American that Columbus encountered when he landed in what is now the Bahamas. How astonishing to see the large ships and people dressed so differently. Enemies? Friends? The conversations in the villages must have been fascinating.

Or you might take the point of view of Juan de la Cosa, Columbus’s cartographer. He would have a lot of insight into Columbus’s motivations, understandings of the natives, and actions he took. Juan kept a diary. What if there were a secret, lost one you wrote about.

Imagine how those stories could be very different.

When you find yourself intrigued by a person or an event in history. Look around that world and latch onto a small character that you could create a book around. Being “into” the era or person already will give you a leg up when you create that world from a different perspective.

Facebook: Historical Fiction authors, looking for a unique take on a person, era, or event you are intrigued by? Check out an idea from Caroline Adams-Author. http://bit.ly/2Fyp6iv

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Book Review: How to Do Biography, A Primer

Nigel Hamilton’s tome is much more entertaining than I expected it to be. I mean, 400 pages! How could that be, well, fun?

Weighty topic. Weighty in weight. So it was a delightful surprise to find myself enjoying, as much as I did, the sections I read.

Full disclosure. I did not read the entire book. Yet. There were sections I’m not interested in even a tad. Autobiography and memoir? Meh. I don’t ever want to write those. And this exploration was about improving what I write.

Even the sections I am interested in, I didn’t get all the way through. I’ll be dipping into this book as I continue my quest to learn about writing better biographies.

How to Do Biography, a Primer is, as I told you last week, one of the few available texts on biography writing how-tos. So what sections did I find helpful thus far?

First, let me tell you what’s here. The book is divided into three sections comprising sixteen chapters. Chapter titles are:

The Task of Biography

What Is Your Agenda?

Defining Your Audience

Researching Your Subject

The Shape of a Life

The Starting Point

Birthing Your Subject

Childhood and Youth

Love Stories

Life’s Work

The Twilight Years

Ending Your Story

Autobiography and Memoirs

Memoir

Truth—and Its Consequences

The Afterlife

Now tell me you didn’t find some of those chapters intriguing! I dipped in and out of sections and chapters, letting my interests lead me.

He begins the first chapter with this:

You wish to write or produce a “life”, but wisely pause to think about the task. I have no wish to hold you up; but no would-be biographer, in my view, should embark on the depiction of a real life without bothering to know something about how—and why—previous biographies have addressed the real individual in the past—and with what results.

He goes on in the following chapters to talk about successful and unsuccessful biographies, and what made them that way. In the chapter, Researching Your Subject, Hamilton makes a clear case for understanding historical methodology and biographical research. The bottom line for him is ethical. You cannot exclude information that doesn’t fit your bias, nor accept iffy research that does. You cannot partially use quotes to fit your bias. In this chapter he also discusses research sources, and he makes it interesting.

In “The Starting Point,” he shows myriad ways biographers open their books. He compares writing biography to writing a musical composition. Both have notes that must be arranged in pleasing, satisfying, cohesive, and coherent ways. When successful, they both sing.

At the end, there is a chapter, “Truth---and Its Consequences”, that is very informative. We don’t always consider the impact of truth-telling, or in some cases the word choices we make to tell truth, and how our work can hurt feelings or harm reputations. Telling the truth isn’t always admirable. He raises some very interesting points with his examples. I am not an apologist for his perspective, but what he wrote should be considered by every biographer.

There is much more for me to garner, so I’ll probably be writing again about Hamilton’s book. But why wait for me? If you are writing biography, buy your own copy of How to Do Biography, A Primer.

If you enjoy what I write, consider liking my Caroline Adams page on Facebook.

Facebook: Need to know more about how to write biographies? This book, described by Caroline Adams Writer, can help http://bit.ly/2DAqQr9

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10 Tips for How to Write Biographies

Now this was interesting to learn about!

Last summer I wrote the first draft of a biography for middle grade readers. I was passionate about my Intrepid Woman, filled with enthusiasm for the project, eager to share the bits I knew, and then, BOOM!

My writing group, bless their honest and insightful hearts, told me, essentially, “Umm. That’s not it. Try again.”

Well, okay, then. I get it. I challenged myself with two new-to-me writing tasks. Writing biography (when I been noveling for many years) and writing for middle graders (when I have written for adults for many years). To use the vernacular, I guess I sucked!

I am grateful to them for helping me identify what my heart knew wasn’t working. So what’s a passionate, enthusiastic, eager wannabe biographer to do? What I always do. I hunt for resources to help me. I can learn anything. I know that about myself. I taught me to write plays, and I can teach me to write biography.

So I made a couple of trips to America’s Book Store (aka Amazon) using different descriptors to find book on how to write biographies. I found two. There were beaucoup books on writing memoir, but only three for how to write bios and two about writing bios.

One of the how-to books, 24 pages, had one review and it was one-star. Another book is 166 pages from the University of Nebraska press with no reviews and almost 15 years old. Also, at $45, I’d be paying almost 30¢ a page to read it. The last book is a 400 page reprint edition from the Harvard University Press, but it does have four and a half stars.

Does it surprise you, too, given the popularity of biographies, that there are so few resources on how to write them?

Two! So what’s a wannabe biographer to do? Of course, I ordered the 400-page How to Do Biography, a Primer by Nigel Hamilton, and then I went searching for classes and other online resources.

My initial search was more than disappointing. There were few resources out there. Some YouTube vids and a few articles, but not what I expected. There is a dearth of resources on how to write biographies. There are tons on other forms, like writing comedy or horror, but surprisingly few for bios.

From combing the Internet, I did identify some common principles, some of which are “duhs” like “do research.” Umm. Okay. I guess that’s a good idea.

Biographies are about people who stories reveal struggles, conflicts, and accomplishments. The biography elements that I came up with and others I found in my search on biography writing are these:

1)   Identify in a page or two, why this person caught your attention and what is important about the person’s life. From this identify the overarching theme you will use in your biography.

2)   Write an engaging opening with quotes or anecdote to hook the reader just as fiction does. Like stories, bios have a beginning, middle, and end.

3)   Make a timeline of everything you can from the person’s life and then circle the ones you will use. But put them all out there for consideration. All bios give demographic info (birth, death, locale).

4)   Create a biography outline by taking the circled events from #3 and make headers and detailed notes on each.

5)   Get creative with your research by contacting authors of books or articles you read to see if they will share some of their resources so you are not just reading their summaries.

6)   Identify the point of view and text structure you will use: chronological, cause-effect, description, comparison, or problem-solution.

7)   Develop an understanding of the era and location of the person through the biography.

8)   Create a tone appropriate to the material. Find a voice that will engage readers.

9)   Keep incidents, dialogue, and historical personages as accurate as possible by using primary sources where available. When not, use secondary sources that help you understand the times, events, and locales for accurate re-creation.

10)  Avoid stereotyping. Don’t create a hagiography. Rather let the real person show through the biography.

Next week, I’ll share insights from Hamilton’s book as well as from my secret strategy—mentor texts.

I will learn how to write biographies. I love to read them, so I can learn to write them.

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Dita Kraus--Intrepid Woman

Cindy Nord, a Facebook friend, shared information about an Intrepid Woman I had never “met.” Dita Kraus was the children’s librarian at Auschwitz. Just that identifier signals that she was intrepid to have survived the horror of a Nazi death camp.

Her story is one I had never heard. In fact, I have only vague recall of a fake camp the Nazis ran to influence world opinion. In fact, I believe my most recent (still years ago) knowledge came from the movie, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

I read about the fictionalized biography, The Librarian of Auschwitz (Antonio Iturbe), and bought it for my librarian son. I thought he’d appreciate it. I’m sure he’ll pass it back to me when he finishes the book. Right?

Little information is available to me in my first research foray. I can see that locating resources in English is going to be challenging for me. But, the destination is worth the journey.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau, Block 31, the Nazis created a special camp for families and the children’s section was overseen by Fredy Hirsch, who despite his best efforts to protect them, couldn’t save almost 3800 from execution.

In this special camp, Dita Poláchová, who was the secret children’s librarian there, hid books from the Nazis so children could have literature, an important part of maintaining their humanity, she believed.

“If human beings aren’t deeply moved by beauty, if they don’t close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they are capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance,” Iturbe writes, “then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons: Nothing significant distinguishes them from a salmon or a zebra or a musk ox.”

In 1942, when she was thirteen, Dita and her family had to move into a Jewish ghetto from their home in Prague. They stayed there until December, 1943, when they were shipped to Auschwitz-Birkenau, along with Fredy Hirsch, a Zionist, and others.

Hirsch told the counselors to make sure the children were clean and educated in order to retain some semblance of normality and to ensure they could have a better life when they were released. Dita was put in charge of the small numbers of books they had, keeping them hidden while still encouraging children to read and enjoy them. Keep in mind, she was a young teen when given this responsibility. How brave she must have been.

Word came that there was to be a mass execution and resistance leaders wanted Hirsch to help organize and uprising. His death from an overdose of Luminal was suspicious. Suicide? Many thought not, but we’ll never know.

Somehow, Dita and her mother escaped the mass execution on March 8, 1944 and instead were transported to Bergen-Belsen, the camp made famous by Anne Frank. Dita’s mother died there, but Dita was liberated in April, 1945.

By the end of the war, she had lost parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. All alone now, her family all dead, Dita had to navigate the post-war years on her own. She returned to Prague and later married Otto Kraus, a man she knew from Block 31. They emigrated to Israel and reared their three children there. They taught English, interestingly.

Dita’s formal schooling stopped in fifth grade because the Nazi’s came to power when she was only ten. She felt the gaps in her education her whole life but she loved books and reading and learned what she could from them. She still lives in Israel.

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