Walking in Your Footsteps

I am writing this from one side of a snowy field. When I look behind I can see the path of my own footsteps so I try and walk backwards through them, like someone in a bad mystery novel.

When I started writing my novel it was only an idea based upon historical events. However, as I have become more involved in the project the history seems quite different. It actually seems real. In some ways this is a little paradoxical. After all, it actually happened and so it was probably more real before I tampered with the facts and twisted the story for my own means. Yet, at the same time, it is more real because I feel like I know the people involved. As my research followed their lives I engaged with it, put myself in their shoes.

When reading books I make friends with characters, hated characters, fell in love with them and through the process of fictionalising historical figures I have made connections with them that I would never have made from simply reading the very factual history books.

Maybe how I've written it isn't exactly what happened, maybe they didn't really feel things in quite the way that I describe but a certain truth is found nonetheless, or at least I hope so. As long as the characters remain believable and true to the situations that they face then what really happened, the absolute truth that is lost in the recesses of time, becomes nothing more than a historian’s game.

It never hurts to put yourself in someone else's shoes and writing is a very good way of practising how to do that because it doesn't matter if someone is real or fictional, alive now or hundreds of years ago it is still good to try to understand them a little better and sympathise with then.

So, in the case of the characters in my book, I hope it can be understood that, although wrong, they turned to cannibalism for a reason and, given a similar situation, maybe you, or someone like you, would have chosen to do the same.