Robert McGill, a Canadian historical fiction writer, discussed the process of researching, writing and revising his novel, “Once We Had a Country,” Nov. 7 at Oswego State’s Living Writers Series.
“One of the appeals of writing historical fiction is that it allows us to think about how we got to where we are now, and this was a question I had to think about when I started thinking about writing this novel way back in 2006,” McGill said of the novel, which took him six years to complete.
He started the novel in 2006 when he lived in Boston, drawing inspiration from the Iraq war occurring at the time and finding parallels between the era and the Vietnam conflict in the 1960s and 1970s, neither of which Canada had participated in.
McGill said he had seen dozens of books, including historical fiction books, with soldiers in Vietnam or draft dodgers themselves, so he wanted to find a perspective that had not yet been told.
“The notion of Canada as a progressive country, a peacekeeping country, a home for refugees, all of this came from the myth of the Vietnam War, this particular concept of the country during that time,” McGill said.
The protagonist is a woman from Boston who follows her boyfriend as he flees the draft to form a commune in Canada, and her father, in Laos, who serves as a contrasting character.
During the years McGill spent researching history, he read texts and interviewed people who experienced being a seasonal migrant worker from Jamaica in the Canadian program, violence in Czechoslovakia, the effects of the Vietnam conflict in Laos and the taboo of sexual content. He alluded to these events by incorporating characters who went through these experiences, through the protagonist witnessing it on television and, in the case of Laos, by planting the protagonist’s father in the middle of it.
McGill said to make a historical fiction stronger, it is necessary to include specific details to make it more believable. He discussed how his father would tell him about a specific camera he had received as a child, and McGill worked it into the story by giving it to the protagonist as her first camera.
“When I was looking at 1972, I saw some interesting precursors, particularly with regards to the relationship between technology and exposure,” McGill said.
He said historical fiction can let a writer include details about their own lives that they would not be comfortable enough to include in an autobiography or nonfiction piece, and he likes this because he can write more freely without self-censorship and make the story more authentic.
McGill said the biggest challenge historical fiction writers face is telling an old story in a new way. He said writers have to take a recognizable event and come at it from an oblique angle, using two different photos from the 1972 Summit Series between the Canadian and Soviet Union ice hockey teams. One photo shows the reaction of the Canadian team at the moment they won the eight-game series, and the other is taken from a different angle to show the Soviet spectators’ reactions of disappointment. He took the inspiration of the same moment with different photo aspects to write his novel.
Another challenge McGill said he faced was properly placing imagery when he has always had an easier time with dialogue. To help with this, he decided to give his protagonist a camera to record video of her experience living in Canada, which allowed him to write better visual details.
“For some people, it can be more exciting to write about what you want to know about, because that process of exploration, of learning can push you to write about new things, to write new kinds of things, and that can be a serious fuel,” McGill said.
Photo by Kassadee Paulo | The Oswegonian
