Looping the Endless String

The original impulse that animates many writers of historical fiction is a marvelous figure from the past. For illustration’s sake, let’s say the personage is a pioneer in aviation—a barnstormer. You recall some book you read or movie you saw, and the memory of the early age of aviation inflames your imagination. You look up barnstorming on Wikipedia, and you spot names of fliers that intrigue you. One of those names catches your fancy, and you start looking up everything you can find on him. It turns out his wild antics aloft were only a reflection of a turbulent life on the ground—countless affairs, three marriages, sudden death in a tailspin at a tragically early age. Now, that’s someone worth writing about.

The process of immersing yourself in the person’s life begins. You read their entire life story and then pick out important episodes, or way stations, that you would like to inhabit. You experience the pleasure of imagining how she felt during that point in her life. The only limitation, you come to realize, is that recording all of the events in her life could mean writing a thousand pages or more. But hey, that’s not really a problem, is it? People are going to love reading about this person—I mean, character in my novel.

The pursuit of an entire life may lead to many satisfying hours researching history, but you may end up with a book that seems rather flat and disappointing. That’s because the very qualities that are attractive about a dashing personage may make for an episodic novel. If a reader is constantly meeting new people that the hero finds and discards along his journey through life, the novel will never gain any depth.

That’s because character relationships are, to a large extent, the ties that bind a novel together. The only way they can develop is through repeated appearances of the two characters together. If your protagonist grows up in the South and then lives in Chicago before she realizes her true calling, which requires that she attend flight training in California, that character had better be married with a husband who likes to move in order to maintain a relationship that lasts longer than 50 pages at a time.

You’d be better off choosing a tight time frame to cover actively. In other words, all of the other parts of the personage’s life are told in narrative summaries. The childhood in the South might consist of 25 pages, with a few short flashbacks to cover the formative incidents in the character’s past. The same approach might be taken with the time spent in Chicago, and even the training in California might be circumscribed. If you cut down the active time span to the final years before the personage/character goes down in glorious flames, the relationships developed during that brief time period will tie your novel into a cohesive whole.

“Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.” 
—Blaise Pascal

Copyright @ 2026, John Paine