Putting pencil to paper brings out the emotional authenticity of a historical novel.

When Annie Rushton came into my life, I already knew how to be a writer. As a book author and magazine columnist, I’d written about autism, baseball, history, and politics. I even wrote about writing. I knew how to be a writer! I sat at my desk in front of my laptop and banged out a thousand words a day, often more, often working on three things at once.

For thousands of years, writing was a one-handed affair. Barely 150 years ago, the keyboard became the writer’s right- and left-hand man. From the advent of the manual typewriter to today’s electronic devices and apps, the ever-evolving technology of being able to write with two hands instead of one increases our speed, our output. It allows our hands to better keep up with our brains and all the words that need to flow from them. Onto paper, onto disks, onto clouds. Faster and faster and more and more efficient our writing becomes. I zoomed along with it, until I met Annie Rushton, a woman who’d left this planet long before I arrived.

Then I backslid.

And it was the best thing that ever happened to my writing.

I never thought I’d write historical fiction. All of the history I’d written was nonfiction, and it was good nonfiction—factual, well-researched, relatable, spiked with personal experiences that created moving perspectives. One editor faux-grumbled, “I hate the fact that you hook me all the damn time with your heart-wrenching stuff.”

I found Annie Rushton (not her real name) after years of banging my writer/researcher shovel against a century-old genealogical brick wall. Every family has one, and Annie was the ancestor no one would talk about. When I found out why—she endured recurring postpartum psychosis—it became to me a story of devastating personal misfortune and social injustice that needed to be brought into the light, a different light than the one she confronted in her era. And because, even with concerted research, I could breach that brick wall but not topple it, I would tell Annie’s story in a novel, The River by Starlight.

Every writer of historical fiction grapples with how much literary license to take. Can certain aspects be merely plausible, if not precisely accurate? In what degree are we allowed to change history? I was prepared to grapple with deep questions of whether to change history at countless turns in the telling. But not prepared for how that history would change me.

I became a pencil pusher. I got the lead out.

I closed my keyboard and began writing my novel, beginning each day at 5:00 a.m., in pencil, in spiral notebooks . . .

Continuing reading the full post at READ HER LIKE AN OPEN BOOK: A man reads literary fiction by women