Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/44219
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Getting your facts straight is one of the rules of literature. As with the other rules of literature, it is one thing to know the rule and know when to break it, but another thing to ignore the rule when it's needed. In the case of this rule, there is no substitute for knowing what the facts actually are. Only then can you justify presenting a different version of reality in order to serve the story. This is different from acting as if the facts are either not important, or as if you have rejected the facts because it does not suit you to accept them.

If you want your story to have an element that contradicts the best-supported version of events in the historical record, you should make it very clear (in some way) that you know what the record really says, and that you made this choice in order to explore a story with different conflicts in play.

If the historical record is well-known, and there aren't already an army of cranks who are pushing an alternate version of things, it may not be necessary to explicitly state that you are presenting an alternate history; everyone will grasp it readily enough. For instance, if Confederate States of America wins the American Civil War in your novel, everyone will know you are writing an alternate history and don't have a fringe agenda.

On the other hand, if the topic is already the target of politically-driven revisionism, you definitely should make it clear that the version of events in the tale should be seen as fiction. For instance, if you want to write a novel in which the Holocaust did not happen, do not fail to stress to the reader that you believe the Holocaust abso-{filtered}-lutely did happen.

In another case, it may be that the facts as known to history are familiar only to historians. So if your story has Julius Caesar married to a woman named Desdemona, someone unfamiliar with Roman history may "learn" this to be the case, and you should take the time to prevent misunderstandings.

Another case that requires a warning is when historians are honestly divided on what actually happened, non-historians are pretty much ignorant of this fact, and your story presents one of the versions vying for acceptance. In that case you would also want to advise the reader that the version of events you present is not the only reasonable interpretation of the historical record.

As to where you put this _caveat lector_, a brief author's note at the beginning should suffice.

Original score: 22