Historical fact and historical fiction

There are two or three very well-known authors I can think of (and many more whose names don’t spring to mind right now!) who write what I call historical biographies. 

They select a known person from history and write as if they were them, or knew them; in other words, they write dialogue for them, tell us their thoughts, their emotions as well as the major points of their lives. This is fine, and I read a lot of them. But writing fiction about well-known  and well documented figures and events is one thing; writing about characters who once existed about whom little is known is problematical.

Readers ask me if the main character in my book Alba is Mine is really MacBeth. Well, the answer is partly yes and partly no; MacBeth started it all. Or rather, Shakespeare did when he made him a short reign villain when in actual fact he reigned successfully for seventeen years. 

I wanted to know more, but could regrettably find very little about the real MacBeth. Dunnett researched him for five years before she wrote King Hereafter and as a successful historical novelist she had access to all sorts of information sources that I, with nothing to my name, did not. So I contented myself with imagining a time period and its culture, clothes, poetry and weapons, added one or two historical characters and then leapt off into the realms of pure fiction, by which I mean I simply imagined everything.

Knowing how much was my imagination, I couldn’t bring myself to call my hero MacBeth, so I called him Finlay mac Ruaidhri, which wasn’t so far removed from the name most family trees gave his step-father. Dunnett’s conclusion was that MacBeth and Earl Thorfinn were one and the same person; Thorfinn was his Orkney name, and MacBeth his Christian name, but I made Thorfinn and Finlay half-brothers sharing the same mother. Since I was writing fiction I shamelessly telescoped events so that the book covers less than a year in the life of my hero – but it is a very eventful year!