Characters Matter—Characterization in Maelstrom

Characterization is a crucial element of fiction. Novelists must know the people they write about, or they may behave in ways contradictory to their personality. Historians don’t generally try to get inside a subject’s head, while a novelist thrives in invading others’ privacy. A novelist makes personality and motivations central to the story. 

Before I write the first word of a historical novel, I read several biographies of the major characters to get a perspective on their distinctiveness. I read positive and negative perspectives to get a grasp of who these people were.

Where do you find these personal descriptions of historical figures? First, I go to history books. Historians do not normally try to portray their subject’s thoughts and feelings, but they don’t ignore personality. Good ones dutifully quote contemporary descriptions of the subject to satisfy documentation requirements. The second place I go to is to the historical figures’ own writing. A person’s writing always reveals something about their character. Letters are the most valuable, autobiographies and memoirs next, speeches (especially when speakers wrote their own talks), and finally nonfiction tomes. Finally, what did these characters do versus what they said they were going to do? Everything reveals character.

In Maelstrom, I needed to thoroughly understand Lincoln and Davis, plus get a handle on many secondary players. Lincoln and Davis left extensive documentation in the form of speeches and letters, plus everyone they encountered described them. After the war, Davis also wrote two revealing books. After my research, I came away with an overriding impression of these two men. Lincoln had a knack for turning enemies into friends, and Davis persistently turned friends into enemies.

Among the other players, some were easy, some were not. For example, everybody described General George McClellan, and the descriptions were generally consistent. In contrast, Judah Benjamin destroyed most of his personal papers, and only two modern biographies have been written.

Novels are stories. In stories, the reader must care about the characters. A simple—and oft-repeated—explanation of a story arc is that in the first fifth of a book, you put your protagonist in a tree, then in the next three fifths, you throw rocks at him, and in the final fifth, you get the protagonist out of the tree. Lincoln’s presidency fits this arc. But a good story also needs a bad guy, an antagonist to throw the proverbial rocks. Jefferson Davis set himself up perfectly for this role.

Thus, a natural story arc already existed, and the players were all in their places. All I needed to do was scribe their story. It was a pleasure.