How Modern Events Influence Historical Fiction: Reflections on Blood and Soil

I started writing Blood and Soil before our present POTUS descended the golden escalator in 2015, the upwelling of antiracism protests in 2020, and the emergence of populist, anti-democratic governance that rules our nation by fear and grievance.

These events have changed us as a country, and as I developed my story through the past decade, I found that they influenced my writing as well. But was that to the good of a story set 65 years ago?

All novelists draw upon their personal truths, but when the storyteller injects the civic issues of their day into an historical drama, does it cease to be true to its time, or worse, become a polemic?

Historical novels and plays are often (rightly) criticized for anachronistic language, social conventions, behavior, and technology, like the clock that strikes three in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Yet Shakespeare effectively used Caesar to illustrate the peril of despots then playing out in his bloody Elizabethan age. Did he mean for this Roman tragedy to be a parable for his own era? Did the influences of his own time muddy his rendering of Caesar’s?

In our day, I witnessed the seductive power of a demagogue in the White House and the naked racism of white protesters in Charlottesville, and as I continued to revise my writing, the story’s chief antagonist, strongman Sheriff Otto Schmidt, took on some of the character, motives, and tactics of the modern MAGA movement.

As for most of us, the nationwide protests that followed the death of George Floyd riveted my attention. I took some time that summer to investigate America’s systemic racism, bias, and privilege, and my part in it. I read and listened to Black voices.

Up to that point, I had struggled to fully flesh out the character of Jake, the multiracial backwoodsman, a man like no one I’d ever known. I found that our national reckoning on race in 2020 helped me more credibly conceive Jake’s motivations, beliefs, and relationships with Blood and Soil’s white players—and in particular, the interracial romance at the heart of the story.

All creative writing has a point of view and conveys a message, intended or not. An open, reasoning mind can and should be influenced by the wisdom of all ages, including our own, but the writing that results needn’t turn a gripping story into a political broadside, or foist the author’s beliefs and mores upon characters of another era, and a different lived experience.

The short of it is, a story rings true so long as a writer informs it with solid research and an clear-eyed view of human nature—no matter if set in 44 BCE or 1960, whether written in the age of MAGA or Elizabeth I.

With Blood and Soil, I like to think I embedded a cautionary message for our present times without bombast in a compelling mid-century tale of love, suffering, and redemption.

How Modern Events Influence Historical Fiction: Reflections from Blood and Soil

#BloodAndSoil #HistoricalFiction #WritingProcess #AuthorInsights #VinnyCusenza #CreativeWriting #RacialReckoning #ModernHistory #FictionWriter #StoryBehindTheStory