An Exploration of Writing About Historical Events with Elana K. Arnold & Brandy Colbert

The full title of this breakout session is "An Exploration of Writing About Historical Events: The Spectrum of Possibilities in Nonfiction."

Elana K. Arnold is the author of many books for and about children and teens. Her novel, Damsel, was a 2018 Michael L. Printz Honor award winner. Her novel What Girls Are Made Of was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature and the winner of the Golden Kite Award, among other honors. Her middle grade novel A Boy Called Bat was a 2018 Global Read Aloud selection. Elana’s books have been listed on numerous best lists and earned many awards, including Junior Library Guild Selections, an ALAN pick, several selections for the Rise: A Feminist Book Project, a Westchester Fiction Award, a Bank Street Book of the Year, and a Gold Medal in the Moonbeam Children’s Book Award. Elana holds a BA in comparative literature from the University of California at Irvine and a master’s degree in English and creative writing/fiction from UC Davis, where she has taught creative writing and adolescent literature. She teaches in the MFAC program at Hamline University and lives in Southern California.

Brandy Colbert is the award-winning author of several books for children and teens, including Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which was a finalist for the American Library Association’s Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award; Stonewall Book Award winner Little & Lion; and The Only Black Girls in Town. Her books have been chosen as Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections and have been named to many best-of lists, including the ALA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults and Notable Children’s Books. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, and her short stories and essays have appeared in several critically acclaimed anthologies for young people. She is on faculty at Hamline University’s MFA program in writing for children and lives in Los Angeles.

From the top, Brandy Colbert, ASL sign language interpreter Jenny Blake, and Elana K. Arnold

Elena and Brandy start with a discussion of why they went from writing contemporary fiction to historical fiction — and for Brandy, nonfiction, too.

Brandy considers how her journalism degree helps. She knows news sources, what's a reputable source and not, and has done fact-checking as a freelancer as well. All that background and being "a very detail oriented person" who "really want[s] to get things right." 

Brandy speaks about the research she did for "Black Birds in the Sky." Brandy couldn't go to Tulsa because of the pandemic. She used as main research the Oklahoma committee 2001 report on the Tulsa Race Massacre. Highlighted sections, used the online version as well. Much evidence was destroyed, with people trying to hide this history.

She did a lot of research through ebooks. Didn't want to sensationalize the history. One source she didn't use, because she felt the tone was off - she's critical of an author making up a speech in a nonfiction source. She used materials from local Black historians, and a lot of online resources. Couldn't really speak to survivors. She asked herself, "Do I want to re-traumatize people in their 90s and 100s?" Decided not to - she found great survivor quotes on website for the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation and Peace. Wanted to amplify the survivor voices, finally, after 100 years of them being silenced.

She also used newspaper articles, historical society, magazine articles, documentaries, TV shows showing clothes and cars, etc...

How did Brandy take care of herself as a writer when working with such personal and painful material like the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre?

She recalls writing it in summer of 2020, with the new racial reckoning happening, and watching it all play out and drawing parallels from past to present.

"It was a lot to take..." Brandy admits that "Sometimes, I typed through tears. A lot of anger." And then considers how, "For me, it's therapeutic to sit and write." "I would rather know the history than not know," and it's so important for kids to be educated on what she herself didn't learn. 

She also advises that you have to take breaks, get outside, doing yoga, talk to friends...

1/3 of the YA novel Brandy is working on now is historical. A Black Hollywood family, three perspectives, historical sections going back to 1940s. She's fascinated by old Hollywood, read a few memoirs (like Diahann Carroll's) of Black actresses from that time, and a history book about Black Hollywood 1910-1950s.

For nonfiction, doing the photo research (and getting rights for them) was a surprise for Brandy. Looked at creative commons for photos that were easier to get. Consider photo budget... Got help from the photo researcher at the Tulsa historical society.

Elana loves the research part of it. Like going into the history of Kabala. "Research is always a way in for me" when writing fiction. Especially if she gets stuck. Writing historical fiction scared her at first. Her grandmother told Elana the story of her survival of the Holocaust in Romania after Elana's first book was published, and while Elana tried to write it as a dystopian future novel, she's now re-doing it as a historical novel. She's spent the last four years actively writing drafts of it. 

When writing for kids, Elana says "you have to be at least as committed to the truth, even in fiction." She spoke about how the "particularities of plot can be fictions, but the historical events need to be true."

She found it challenging to make the person in her novel a character and not her Nana.

Elana's research included her finding and reading memoirs, journals, fiction and poetry, written at that time period. She also consulted historical articles, even fables and fairy tales. Her grandmother had tuberculosis at that time, so Elena researched how they treated it back then. She even looked at advertisements about vacations in that area!

Elena also found a Holocaust survivor to read her manuscript, paid her for her labor, and they actually became friends.

How does Elana take care of herself, when working with such personal and painful material like her grandmother's experience in the Holocaust?

Elena felt a responsibility to her siblings to tell their shared history. First draft was her grandmother's life, and then she needed to make it a story. Took years between drafts. "Breaks are important."

She advises that all historical research is personal. It's important to pick topics that resonate for you. 

Final gems:

If you can't find at least two (or three) sources with the same information, be cautious about using that. —Brandy Colbert

Finding the things you didn't know you were going to find - and then putting them into your book - is one of the biggest gifts of research. —Elana K. Arnold

M.T. Anderson - The Past is Another Country

M.T. Anderson performing his Delaware Theme Tune

M.T. Anderson is one of my favorite authors and speakers, you'll know his LA Times Book Prize winner FEED, or maybe Octavian Nothing, or Symphony of the Dead, and most recently The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge with Eugene Yelchin.

Tobin will specifically talk about how historical research can transform a novel or nonfiction piece. He starts with some quotes, this from British author L.P. Hartley: "The past is another country. They do things differently there."

And from John W. Campbell, an important author and editor during the golden age of science fiction:

"Too few build civilizations before they build stories. But a story is only an incident, and an incident takes place against and because of the civilization. And a civilization is a mass of a billion details, each interacting with the others. Histories tell of kings and emperors and dictators. To get a picture of the civilization they ruled, archaeologists seek broken pots and beds and plowshares, the details of life that give the forgotten times reality. Not kings, but broken pots paint life's realities."

Tobin says he doesn't love the 18th century just because everyone was a super snappy dresser, it's the strangeness of the past that makes it fascinating to compare that same place against today's time.

The Octavian Nothing book kernel idea came about because he'd read something about the Pox Party. In the 18th century, small pox was a huge huge problem decimating societies. If you made an incision and put matter from the sores of a small pox victim into your own body, you'd get a less severe version of the disease, people (usually young people) would be closed up in a house together for a month, with no contact from the outside world, curtains drawn.

"Like an episode of The Breakfast Club movie but with running pox pus sores," says Tobin.

Tobin recommends doing your research from general/broad overview histories, like an inverted pyramid, drilling down to more specific events/issues/people. He read general histories of the Revolutionary War period, then histories of the region of Boston he wanted to write about, and then onto a certain biographies of people living there during that time period, and so on.

As you read: Go to the footnotes! Any general history anecdote that inspires you, look for where that came from in the book's bibliography.

At the same time he's doing general research, which is chronological, Tobin is also doing social history which he describes as more of a fluffy cloud level of information, what are people eating/wearing, where do they get gun powder from, etc.

He loves the Writer's Guide to Every Day Life In... series, though they do have a few drawbacks—A problem with scope, the Middle Ages spans a thousand years, not everything can by represented in one book; and the series is well-trod, they are used by authors everywhere.

But the series always does cite their sources, so try going to the bibliography there, too, for making your work more unique.

The point of doing social history research early in the process and even as you are writing your first draft, Tobin says, is that sometimes you discover important facts that may turn into important plot points.

"Even while writing there's a wonderful felicity to continue to do that sort of social research."

Establish your setting mood and plot, but use this research to highlight the differences between that time and the present. Give your reader the tools to understand what those historical details signify.

Think about how historical facts really play out on the ground and how you could use or omit them for your stories.

Details should give you a stronger sense of your character in that time, and should also help you move past the clichés we all think we know of those times and experiences.