The Devil's in the Details

Hi, I’m Eleri Grace, a new blogger at Romancing the Genres, and I’m excited to share more about me and my novels with all of you. I write WWII historical romance featuring trailblazing Red Cross Girl heroines and flyboy heroes. My novels reflect my passion for the 1940s era, and my hope is that readers will come away with an appreciation for the many couples swept up in war-time courtships forged in a time of larger-than-life uncertainties. 

 

We’ve commemorated many “75^th” anniversaries for key milestones in World War II in the last year, and recently marked the 80^th anniversary of the start to the conflict in Europe. The war years lived by the Greatest Generation seem paradoxically a bygone era and not so long ago. Many elements of our current lives were in existence and use in the 1940s. But as a historical author writing in that time period, I take special care to confirm the specifics. I know I’m not the only historical author to find that being a stickler for historical accuracy can be a slippery slope. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost hours to a research rabbit hole that ultimately didn’t perhaps merit that level of sleuthing. The trick is knowing when to stop, when you’ve hit a brick wall and need to “write around” the issue, when you’ve learned all you can via Google, or when you’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.

Some details are fun and relatively straightforward. I have always enjoyed perusing baby name books, so naming my characters is particularly rewarding.  I regularly consult the online Social Security Administration database of “Popular Names by Decade.”  My heroes and heroines were born in the 1917-1922 time period, so I browsed both the 1910s and 1920s lists and created a master list of possible character names. Now, some of the popular names in those decades don’t appeal much to modern readers. So I made a list of era-appropriate given names with modern currency. In my first Clubmobile Girls novel, Courage to be Counted, my heroine is Vivian Elaine Lambert, and the hero is John “Jack” Peter Nielsen. Both Vivian and Jack have seen a resurgence of popularity in the last few decades.

One only needs to read a few memoirs to pick up on the era’s propensity to bestow quirky nicknames. So while I’m reading memoirs and historical non-fiction for research purposes, I add to my ongoing list of unusual nicknames. While I probably won’t use those names for my hero or heroine, I do populate my cast of secondary characters with names like Ace, Tink, Duck, and Bizzy.

Some details are easy to verify. If you are writing a Christmas scene, your characters might sing songs that remind them of home, and a large number of familiar Christmas songs still enjoyed today date to the 1940s and 1950s. Most of us immediately associate Bing Crosby’s classic “White Christmas” with the WWII years, but it only takes a few seconds to confirm that it was originally performed and released in 1942. Whew, your 1943 Christmas scene can easily incorporate this well-known Christmas song. But you can’t include “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” which was first recorded in 1949.

Many common items were rationed during the war years. Internet sleuthing usually yields a quick answer to what sorts of food items were rationed in different countries, but you have to be careful here too. Even if a food wasn’t rationed, its typical packaging might have been.

WWII authors should always keep the blackout regulations in mind. Consider this scene from Courage to be Counted:

A trace of musty odor hung about the stuffy room. Vivian crossed the room and pulled on the sash to raise the window. A waft of cool, damp air left a light mist on her face. She closed her eyes in contentment.

She should move back and let the blackout drapes fall closed, but the delicate spray of mizzle continued to beckon, refreshing and relaxing.

Other regulations, such as the restriction on bath water limits, provide another opportunity to immerse one’s readers more directly in the realities of life during that time: “Did she have time to run a bath? It would only be a few inches of tepid water, but a big improvement over her toiletry for the last several days.”

Reading deeply in memoirs and narrative non-fiction can illuminate customs, patterns of behavior that weren’t dictated by regulations but were prevalent at the time. I wanted my hero’s scenes to reflect the challenges he faced in the air but also the realities of his life on a bomber base in southeastern England.

Bowie opened the door, and Jack followed him out into the night. A crisp bite of wind stung his chapped face and whooshed through his heavy clothing, chilling him deep in his bones. Darkness, dense and inky, enveloped them like a shroud. Occasional pinpricks of light marked a hut door opening and closing. They stumbled across the mucky footpaths by instinct, the huff of their breaths and the crunch of their boots on the frost-coated ground the only sounds.

No one talked. Not on their way to the mess. Not in the chow line. Not even as they ate powdered eggs and fried Spam washed down with black coffee. Apparently, they had been up too many times this week to merit the fresh eggs and bacon that would normally be served on the morning of a maximum effort mission.

These are but a few examples of the ways a historical author can weave tiny details into the story, giving it depth and color. At the same time, it’s important to use those sorts of details with a deft touch. Translating every line of dialogue into the slang of the era would be overkill. Avoiding the information dump is equally important. For all the research I do – and I do way more than I probably ought to – I only include a fraction of what I know. You have to know when to stop researching and when you’re laying it on too thick in your writing. The devil is in the details. 

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Learn more about me and my writing on my website, and you can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.