Ethical Imagination

or How to Fill the Gaps in your Family History without Fabrication

May 08, 2025

When crafting narratives rooted in historical events, writers walk a delicate tightrope between factual accuracy and creative expression. The challenge lies in honoring rigorous research while employing literary techniques that bring history to life. There are many authors who have chosen to harness the history of their family in order to write both nonfiction (memoirs, narrative family histories), and fictitious accounts (historical fiction) novels about the genealogical finds they have made.

People like Mae Wood, Sepher Haddad, and Ann Leary have used historical research to write historical fiction novels. Wood’s Genealogy: a Novel revolves around the exploration of family history and identity. Haddad’s A Hundred Sweet Promises revolves around the exploration of love, hope, and the complexities of human relationships. While Leary’s The Founding discusses motherhood, identity, and societal expectations through the story of a young woman who finds herself in a reform school for unwed mothers in the early 20th century.

Then there are the nonfiction authors like Dani Shapiro, Henry Louis Gates Jr. or even Maya Angelou known for their memoir, historical, and nonfiction novels that address various approaches to integrating family history and historical research into compelling nonfiction, memoir, and creative nonfiction works

These works exemplify a balance of storytelling and ethical imagination by demonstrating how historical context can inform plausible reconstructions of motivations and relationships without sacrificing truth.

The Foundation of Factual Research

Before any literary embellishments or transformation into historical fiction can occur, thorough research must serve as the foundation. Regardless of your end goal, it is important to understand the world your novel will live in. Taking the time to perform comprehensive and factual research will help you do this.

This research should include:

Primary source documents: letters, diaries, newspapers, and official records
Secondary academic sources that provide historical analysis
Cultural and social histories that illuminate everyday life in the period
Economic data that reveals underlying pressures on individuals and communities

Our preliminary research provides the skeleton upon which our narrative flesh can be added. Without proper research, we increase the chances of unintentionally embracing bias and presenteeism, jeopardizing our credibility and authenticity as writers, and even diminishing reader engagement by not fully understanding the economy, political climate, religious influence, and other daily life attributes.

Even the most beautifully written historical account will collapse under scrutiny.

Literary Devices as Tools, Not Shortcuts

Literary techniques aren't meant to replace facts but to illuminate them. One of the best ways to make your story engaging and enjoyable is by sprinkling literary devices to help create dimension and depth to your narrative. They are tools that help you to define the story by adding foreshadowing, including symbolism, or creating allegories that build on the facts, transforming them from black and white bullet points into an immersive world for your readers to get lost in.

Here are some literary devices to consider while plotting and writing:

Scene construction: Using documented events as anchors while building plausible connecting scenes based on established behavior patterns and cultural context. With setting, literary devices will help us transport our readers with vivid descriptions of architecture, clothing, and cultural norms. Use sensory details to evoke the past's sights, sounds, and textures, ensuring settings align with historical records while enriching fictional elements.

Internal monologue and dialogue: Creating thoughts that align with a historical figure's documented opinions, beliefs, and choices. Literary devices help us blend period-specific vocabulary and grammatical structures by sprinkling them into dialogue or internal thoughts. This allows us to avoid alienating readers. By strategically placing vocabulary and dialect inside internal monologue and dialogue, we can use vernacular to signal social class or education levels (e.g., refined speech for elites vs. colloquialisms for lower classes).

Sensory detail: Adding period-appropriate descriptions of environments, clothing, food, and customs to immerse readers in the historical moment. Describing textures like rough-spun wool, sounds like church bells or carriage wheels, or using tastes to signal class division (e.g., sweet cakes vs the same pot of leftover soup).

The Role of Historical Context in Reconstruction

Historical context serves as both constraint and creative wellspring. Develop protagonists whose personal growth reflects broader societal changes, like a soldier’s disillusionment could mirror a nation’s wartime decline. Understanding the larger forces at play allows for plausible reconstruction.

Here are more examples:

Economic influences: Financial pressures during periods like the Great Depression or the Panic of 1873 shaped decisions in predictable ways. A character's actions might be reconstructed by understanding typical responses to economic hardship during their era. By reading or listening to oral histories, examining newspapers of the era, or even exploring wills and land records, we can begin to notice patterns in behavior or better understand how people of that era may have made decisions.

Cultural traditions: Social expectations, religious practices, and cultural norms created boundaries within which historical figures operated. These contexts help writers fill gaps with plausible motivations. Examining social history, sociology, anthropology or religious studies can help us to expand our knowledge of the time period we are writing in, and better prepare us to write with accurate historical context.

Political climate: Understanding the political tensions of a period allows writers to accurately represent how these forces might have influenced relationships and decisions. Volatile political climates are not new. Utilizing sources, like the Library of Congress, or other libraries that offer research guides on various subjects – including government and politics by decade.

Technological limitations: From communication methods to medical knowledge, technology defined what was possible and shaped experiences in ways modern readers might not intuitively grasp. Before 1440, all works in print were either associated with the Roman Catholic church or Government, but after 1454, when the printing press finally went public – everything changed. Research sites like the American Heritage Society’s Invention & Technology Magazine to help better understand the technology in the timeframe you’re writing in.

Ethical Considerations

When employing literary devices in historical writing, several ethical principles should guide the work:

Transparency: Being clear with readers about where fact ends and informed speculation begins
Plausibility: Ensuring reconstructed elements could have reasonably occurred given known facts
Proportionality: Using creative elements to enhance understanding rather than distort historical significance
Research primacy: Never contradicting established historical facts for narrative convenience

It is important to understand the ethics of historical writing, and that they exist for a reason. While we want to entertain our readers, certain aspects of history should not be altered for entertainment purposes. Opinions and facts are not interchangeable. Conducting thorough research will provide the historical foundation of your writing, and give you the arena you are able to work in.

Learning from the Approach of Others

Dani Shapiro, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maya Angelou’s works demonstrate how writers can breathe life into historical moments while maintaining integrity. Their approaches includes:

Grounding character motivations in documented economic and social pressures of their time
Using cultural context to inform plausible relationship dynamics
Acknowledging gaps in the historical record while providing well-researched interpretations
Creating emotional resonance through literary techniques without distorting known facts

Finding the Balance

Ultimately, the most compelling historical narratives achieve a harmony between factual accuracy and narrative engagement. They honor both the historical record and the reader's need for connection, enjoyment, and even personal growth.

The best writers will recognize that literary devices aren't a replacement for research but rather a means of making their research accessible and meaningful.

When done well, the result isn't a compromise between fact and art but a powerful synthesis—where literary craft serves to illuminate historical truth rather than obscure it. In the end, this invites people who may say, “I don’t like history, it’s boring,” into a world of history that is anything but.

By studying approaches of the mentioned authors, and other nonfiction and historical fiction authors, writers can learn to navigate the balance between fiction and facts, creating works that honor both the people who lived history and the readers who seek to understand it.

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