Your comment "catered to" caught my eye, Chris. Since we read a lot of picture book history too, I get the distinct impression in the newer books that there's a bit of pandering and "dumbing down" -- "hey, let's focus on the childhood aspect" or "let's invent something fun" -- because of course children couldn't possibly be interested in the real life, adult life events.
And another problem that I've seen come up, especially on hs groups, is parents who are concerned about their own lack of knowledge about history or science and, in the books where the lines are pretty blurry, can't help their kids determine where the nonfiction leaves of and the fiction starts.
Hey, I have a music book list started that I have to get to you!
Hey there, Chris,
Interesting post. This is a topic that gets me into trouble every time I broach it. Still, here I go again …
Why write a fictional story that features an actual person doing and saying things that never happened?
One reason is to sell books. That is, said “actual person” may be important enough to bring attention to your book and, if you are lucky, boost sales. The corollary is that the book would not have achieved the same sales/status if the “actual person” were replaced with a character born completely from the author’s imagination.
A second reason is to make history more fun for young readers. But if it is made up, it isn’t actually history, is it? So, then, what is the point?
Here is an example of the distinction, as I see it. D.B. Johnson brought Henry David Thoreau to children in his amazing picture book series about Henry the bear. These books are clearly fiction, since the main character is a bear, but they are just as clearly meant to introduce children to the actual man. O’Neal and Westengard’s THE TROUBLE WITH HENRY, on the other hand, features the actual man (the book’s title and S. D. Schindler’s spot-on illustrations leave no doubt) in a fictional scenario that I, as an adult familiar with Thoreau, actually believed to be true until I read the Afterword.
Please, please, please realize that I am not claiming one of these books got it “right” and the other got it “wrong”. (Who am I to say which is which anyway?) My point is only that the line between fiction and nonfiction is getting blurrier with each crop of new releases and that we writers, illustrators, editors and publishers should start to talk about the issue more intentionally.
Whether fictionalizing a historic figure (or placing a fictional character in a historic time or place) helps a book sell more copies or makes it more fun, I would think that the primary purpose is to make a story interesting -- interesting at least to the writer and ideally for the reader as well.
I've written a manuscript based on the life of an actual musician, and it was inspired by a description I heard of her learning to play her too-large instrument when she was a young girl. It was my interest in fleshing out that description -- based as much as possible, though not entirely, on documented facts -- that led me to pursue that story.
What I think is crucial, though, is that young readers have no doubt in their minds whether a book is true or not, or even just partially true. There are lots of ways to accomplish this, many of them probably not much fun, but it sure doesn't help when adults muddy the waters by taking a not-entirely-true book and affix a "Nonfiction" label to it.
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