Editing Historical Figures

Writing about real people is tricky. First of all, people are complicated, and historical figures often don't conform to modern morality, so there's a great temptation to 'upgrade' them into an acceptable character. Second, there can be major information gaps: we may know little about someone's emotional life, their personal relationships, or even their childhood and general background.

That said, certain seemingly innocuous edits can carry a lot of meaning. The biggest ones, in my opinion, are age, ethnicity/race, and social class. The issue with these alterations is that although they do not result in the author explicitly changing the character's motivation, these elements will fundamentally change how the character views and interacts with their world. This is also a location where Unfortunate Implications love to lurk. (I would rant about Randall Wallace here, but the Nostalgia Critic has already laid into everything that's wrong with the revisionist history fest that is Pearl Harbor. You can watch the video here).

The optimist in me wonders if some of these revisions spring from innocent intentions-- either we overtly want to make a character more like us, or more 'relateable to the hypothetical audience, or we have some deep-seated cultural misunderstanding that causes us to misread the character's motives, or we are clueless about the person's inner life.

The first is a natural instinct, and one you have to resist, or risk peopling everything you write with an army of your clones. Unless that is actually your premise, or you are actually the Master, this is something to avoid. Focus on making your characters realistically complex and uniquely recognisable as themselves, and your readers will be interested. The second is an invitation to really educate yourself about your setting-- not just the facts and date, but what deep-seated values underpinned the culture, what beliefs were considered irrefutable fact and which were being actively questioned.

The case of the last is trickier. In many cases, we have to imagine the historical figure's inner life with only a small amount of context. However, we can guess many of the specifics by doing research about the time period. Even if that particular person didn't record their thoughts, we can learn about the beliefs and attitudes and typical experiences of the time and construct a life story that fits into that world, rather than importing modern sensibilities into another era. Finally, you have no excuses if you actually can find out what your historical character was thinking-- for example, if they wrote reams of letters or kept a diary or lived within the past 50-odd years.