One of the great gifts I receive as a writer are the messages from readers who
say they never truly understood the situation in Tibet or life on the colonial
frontier –the settings of my two series—until they read my novels. It highlights
an aspect of writing that we too often ignore. Good fiction can, and should,
help us understand our world more effectively than nonfiction. Historians deal
with sterile facts, on a macro, societal level—and our collective understanding
of history slips lower every year. Skilled novelists translate those facts into
personal human experience, providing the reader with an opportunity to
viscerally connect with another time and place. Your mind may grasp the dreadful
statistics of China’s occupation of Tibet but if you truly want to understand
that world, your heart needs to grasp the anguish of the gentle lama who is
tormented for sitting at an altar with his Buddha. You can find plenty of
timelines and bodycounts reflecting life in the American colonies but they pale
beside experiencing the power of an Iroquois shaman through the eyes of an
exiled Scot sitting at his campfire. “Fiction,” Emerson wrote, “reveals truth
that reality obscures.”
For those of us who anchor our novels in faraway places or faraway times,
telling that truth is a duty we owe our readers. This is a bond that must not be
broken. Without authenticity in our backstory, we not only lose readers, we
damage the genre. I work as hard at keeping my background true to fact as I do
at building intrigue in my characters. But it is never simply a matter of
fact-checking. Mastering the facts is only the beginning. Much more arduous, and
even painful, is deciding what not to write, what not to use directly. Writers
who invest long hours in research too often succumb to the temptation to use it all.
The hardest work comes in accurately weaving the backstory into the fabric of my
plots and implanting it in the DNA of my characters. One of the tools I use for
this is building a private history for each of my characters; there are elements
of my characters’ lives that never appear directly on the pages of my books—only
I know those detailed biographies, the “facts” of these fictional lives, but
they help me breathe life into the players on my stage. If I succeed, then when
readers wrap themselves around my characters they are also wrapping themselves
around the backstory, accepting my invitation to be transported to that very
different world. Novelists who take on this challenge have to distill the
essence of their chosen time and place then let it seep and concentrate into the
story in a thousand subtle ways. This is what Hemingway meant when he said “all
good books are truer than if they really happened.”
About SOUL OF THE FIRE
When Shan Tao Yun and his old friend Lokesh are abruptly dragged away by Public
Security, he is convinced that their secret, often illegal, support of
struggling Tibetans has brought their final ruin. But his fear turns to
confusion as he discovers he has been chosen to fill a vacancy on a special
international commission investigating Tibetan suicides.
Soon he finds that his predecessor was murdered, and when a monk sets himself on
fire in front of the commissioners he realizes that the Commission is being used
as a tool to whitewash Tibet’s self-immolation protests as acts of crime and
terrorism. Shan faces an impossible dilemma when the Public Security officer who
runs the Commission, Major Ren, orders the imprisoned Lokesh beaten to coerce
Shan into following Beijing’s script for the Commission.
He has no choice but to become part of the hated machine that is devouring
Tibet, but when he discovers that the most recent immolation was actually
another murder, he realizes the Commission itself is riddled with crime and
intrigue.
Everywhere he turns, Shan finds new secrets that seem to lead to the last
agonizing chapter of his life. Shan must make a final desperate effort to
uncover the Commission's terrible secrets whose painful truth could change
Shan’s life - and possibly that of many Tibetans - forever.
About Eliot Pattison
Edgar Award winning Eliot Pattison has been described as a "writer of faraway
mysteries," a label which is particularly apt for someone whose travel and
interests span a million miles of global trekking, visiting every continent but
Antarctica. An international lawyer by training, Pattison first combined his
deep concerns for the people of Tibet with his interest in fiction writing in THE SKULL
MANTRA, which launched the popular Inspector Shan series.
Pattison's fascination with the 18th century American wilderness and its
woodland Indians led to the launch of his second critically acclaimed Bone
Rattler series. ASHES OF THE EARTH marked the launch of his third series,
set in post-apocalyptic America. A former resident of Boston and Washington,
Pattison resides on an 18th century farm in Pennsylvania with his wife, three
children, and an ever-expanding menagerie of animals.
3 comments posted.
I am often totally amazed at the research some authors go to in order to write their books. One can indeed learn so much by reading.
(Gladys Paradowski 12:24pm February 21, 2015)