Writing history while living it summarizes my post-Oct 7 writing experience.
I recently sent revisions of my middle grade novel back to my agent. While waiting is associated with the initial query process, in finding an agent, it’s actually a part of the entire publishing process. Agented writers wait to hear from their agents on revisions and then they wait to hear from publishers. So here I am waiting though now I’m waiting for publishing news and for hostage news too.
Waiting for news
The manuscript I just sent back to my agent is a very different one from the one I started revising last summer. How could it not be? I’m very different.
My manuscript, historical fiction with magical realism, begins September 1945 and ends in October 1946. I wanted to write a hero’s journey with a twelve-year-old girl (Frayda) as the hero, but I initially planned on glossing over Frayda’s personal trauma and the Jewish community’s collective trauma. That was setting and not the story that I wanted to tell. I didn’t want the focus on Frayda and her incredible journey and her wants and desires to be shifted to focus on the trauma of history. Perhaps that was naive or misguided. She’s a product of the history she lived.
October 7 forced me to reexamine my manuscript just as it forced me to reexamine my relationships and my worldview.
In my new draft, I lean into my character’s trauma and directly spell out the antisemitism responsible for it. The characters now comment on the state of the world in 1945 in language that speaks directly to the situation today.
It’s as if they tried to warn us. It’s as if history is pounding on the door of today.
As writers, we can write about a past that we can only imagine or we can imagine an entirely new world, but the truths remain the same. We can only see history through the lens we know.
