7th Graders Learn About Historical Fiction

This fall, 7th-grade students have studied historical fiction in English class, and on Thursday, Nov. 10, they had the opportunity to talk with a novelist about the origins of her latest book and how much research was involved in the writing.

 

Monica Hesse's The Girl in the Blue Coat tells the story of a teenage girl living in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam: Hanneke works within the city's black market, and one day she is enlisted to help find a missing girl.

 

Hesse showed the students three photographs that helped establish the story she would tell. One was an Amsterdam streetscape during World War II: As shoppers on a sidewalk went about their day, authorities marched a small group of Jews in the middle of the street toward a train station. Another photo depicted a young woman with a camera secreted in her purse, and the third showed a girl standing alone inside the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a famous Amsterdam playhouse that was used during the war as a holding facility for Jews headed to concentration camps.

 

"Ideas come from so many places. Mine came from these photographs and wondering about the people in them," said Hesse, who is also a feature writer at the Washington Post.

 

She added that she wanted the book to explore "normal people having normal emotions but in this intense time." So just as teenagers do today, the people in Hanneke's world form friendships, make decisions, and have disagreements, but theirs are freighted with enormous stakes.

 

Students asked Hesse detailed questions about the twists and turns of The Girl in the Blue Coat, and they also asked for advice in forming their own stories.

 

Hesse, who has written three novels, noted that the writer of historical fiction has a "different responsibility" than one who writes other kinds of fiction: "You have to write something that feels true for the time."

 

And one student asked how Hesse went about balancing facts with plot. She replied that, at the outset, she learned only enough history to fix the personalities of her characters, so that she could think of them as fully formed people. Hesse returned for more research whenever the story demanded more details, but she said she was mindful that she was telling a story, not a history, and that she needed to "write about the world as something behind" these characters.

 

We are very grateful for Monica Hesse for making the time to be with our students. She is one of several published authors who have come to the Close in 2016, including Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming), poet Joseph Ross (Gospel of Dust), and Tracey Hecht, who talked with 4th graders this fall about her Nocturnals series.