Am I doing the right thing (details inside)?

First, I want to say that I would read this book. You had me interested in the first paragraph of explaining the premise of the book.
Remember that all stories are told from different perspectives. No one will be 100 percent accurate in presenting history, even in history books. And from what you’ve presented, you aren’t trying to write history, you are telling a work of fiction. And it will be from your point of view.
Please finish this book.

I fell that you’re overthinking this. Readers are looking for a good, engaging, plausible plot, not something that rungs 100% totally historically accurate.

(Have you seen some of the crap that has been published recently? A lot of authors stray very far from reality).

For my two cents: make the people engaging, and the plot plausible and reasonable, and don’t stress over the minute details of history. Most of those details are arguable, anyway.

It’s historical fiction Mimi. And your instincts are serving you well that you hesitate for reasons of historical accuracy. The plot and theme of your love story is universal, but why saddle yourself with the rigors of the research required to set your story here? It would be SO much easier to follow the old adage “write about what you know”. Why not set this story in your own country, using your own civil war as the backdrop? That eliminates the difficulties of tedious research on a foreign land some 250 years back. It would allow you to concentrate on the flow of your narrative as opposed to worrying about the things necessary to reflect 18th century colonial America.

Historical fiction will always have a modern perspective woven into the historical setting. Arguably, as a genre, historical fiction is still ultimately “about” the contemporary time it’s written even though it is set in the past… about those parts of the human experience that transcend time.

It sounds like you are doing your job as an author to research the facts of the events and to better understand the varied perspectives of and about the time period. Your other job as an author is to tell a compelling story, and it sounds like you have that, too.

I guess I would say as advice: Remember that historical fiction is still fiction. You are expected to take a few creative liberties, and you have space to do that even within a historical setting. An individual’s experience in their individual life will be different from the overall perspective later generations understand about that era. Just think about how varied people’s opinions and experiences are today, compared to how future generations will understand the more streamlined and digested “broad strokes” of our time. You won’t capture all facets of the Revolutionary War, but you will capture enough for a first draft, and then enough for subsequent drafts, and then enough for your final draft.

It’s an interesting idea for a story, but if you’re not already particularly interested in the history of that time and place, you might consider a different time and place for the same story, either historical or invented. Possibly generic, avoiding specifics and just referring to a kind, rebels, loyalists, etc generically and only in as much detail as is needed for the interpersonal story which might be your actual main interest and focus.

I’m pretty struck by anachronisms in historical fiction – even though it is fiction – so in my mind, I would either prefer it to be quite accurate or the setting to be one that you are more familiar with.
If you’ve put a lot of work into already, it’s worth continuing and then maybe run it by some readers for comments before revising.

That being said, there are certainly many works of historical fictions that take great liberties with accuracy and do very well. So I’m not trying to discourage you.

I don’t mean to discourage you either. It’s just that it’s important that your reader isn’t distracted from the focus on your story by details inconsistent with the period and location of your tale. I feel this is another way of stating what your question here is about, and it strikes a nerve with me, because such stuff drives me bonkers. This is particularly true with movies, and for me, movies with historical themes, military themes in particular. Even excellent movies, like Saving Private Ryan and Patton have technical errors which drive the drama involved right out of my thoughts with “what’s THAT doing there?”.

I say go for it..sounds like an intrigueing tale, with an interesting background. As long as you do the research and get the back ground straight, it makes no difference where the hell you are from. For example, if I were to research the history of your nation, and wanted to write a historical novel set in Ancient Viet Nam say, does it matter if I am an American? I mean as long as I respect your culture and have my facts straight, why would it matter?.PS I want a role the movie version. Maybe General Cornawallis. The red coat uniforms and swords really grab me. : )

How about a line of diologue? Conrnwallis surrendering at Yorktown: “Here Leftenant, surrender my sword to this Washington chap, will you? I need a spot of tea. Wouldn’t take it so bad, were they not allied with those beastly Frogs. Run along now, that’s a good fellow!”

@stanleybmanly @janbb Thank you for your suggestion of writing about my country. This is actually a question that I asked myself at the early stage of my brainstorming, “why waste time obsessing over a foreign country while I can just write about my own country instead?” But I think I now have my reason for not writing about my country. First, I’m afraid I can’t be objective enough when I write about my own history. At least there is one person who attempted to write about the Revolutionary War in a neutral way and received praise for it. The situation is very different here. If someone was to write a similar book about the Vietnam war, they would be criticized heavily for sympathizing with the enemies and condemned for being “unpatriotic”. There are actually some people who attempt to portray Vietnamese history in a less glorious way on FB, but they don’t post their things too publicly, and a lot of them are attacked on the Internet It’s actually understandable since Vietnam has yet to see a thorough research done in the scale of the above-mentioned book, and a lot of people are just using historical facts to help with their agenda because it’s the Internet. Not to mention I can have my own bias too, and that will affect how I analyze data :(

Secondly, there isn’t any civil war in Vietnam that is similar to the Revolutionary War. There was actually a period of time in Vietnam when society was really chaotic. It was when the kings became corrupted and people just fought to be the next king on the throne. Almost every war at that time can be summarized as “dissatisfied nobleman fighting against the king while civilians were unsure if this was the right leader”. This period of history was glossed over by my textbook, so I have very little information to go on, except for some one-sided, exaggerated tales from the past. This means I will have to do research for it, and that would cost me even more time, considering that I already did more research into the Revolutionary War than those wars.

The only war that I can think of that is the most similar to the Revolutionary War is the Vietnam War. This was a war that actually involved regular people, and was highly supported by both sides, and meant something other than just noblemen fighting against each other, and in many ways looked like a civil war. But again, people in my country are extremely biased about this war, and I don’t think they would be happy to see a Vietnamese who supported America being portrayed as sympathetic.

@Nomore_lockout “Here Leftenant, surrender my sword to this Washington chap, will you? I need a spot of tea. Wouldn’t take it so bad, were they not allied with those beastly Frogs. Run along now, that’s a good fellow!”

I know you are saying this just to be funny, but I can actually see this happening. According to this, Cornwallis was invited to a dinner party by Washington after he surrendered, and he and his people were treated like a noble guests there although he himself didn’t come to the party. He was even given money by the French to pay for his soldiers. This was because people like Cornwallis and Washington weren’t just ruthless generals, they were also gentlemen, and they strictly stuck to some kind of noble “honor codes”, like not throwing tantrum when defeated or treating losers with respect. I can totally Cornwallis telling his men to stop fighting when he was defeated :)

@Mimishu1995 Well when the movie version of your book come out let me do the script. Not some Hollywood circle jerk.. : )

It fascinates me that you don’t think the Vietnam war was a civil war. For me that is EXACTLY the mistake the United States made regarding the war. Mimi, YOUR revolutionary war was with the FRENCH. Your country won that war of independence and was every bit as heroic in doing it as our forefathers here. I don’t believe you understand just how significant the eviction of the French from your country is for the history of this world. It was a monumental and damned near unbelievable achievement. It signaled the world that the age of colonialism was over. For my money, the second greatest failure of my country in the 20th century was in its inability to recognize that Dien Bien Phu was the death knell for colonialism in the world, and that the subsequent war between your North & South was indeed a mirror of our own civil war—it was a struggle for the unification of your country. You just don’t realize that as glorious and romantic as our fight for independence was some 250 years ago, your own country duplicated the same feat and must receive the same credit in the annals of history!

@stanleybmanly for a moment I didn’t know what to say… My textbook did say something about Dien Bien Phu being a historic fight against colonialism and inspiration for other countries, but for a long time I was very suspicious of that claim, thinking it was too much of a hyperbole. My suspicion was fueled even more when I joined Fluther and realized that people here see the Vietnam war much differently from what I was taught. It didn’t help that my history and literature textbooks emphasized too much on America’s involvement in the war, making it look like America came to invade our land and we just fought them off, just like our time with China. So until now my version of both wars was like this: the French came to invade Vietnam, people fought them off. Then America came to invade Vietnam, managed to convince South Vietnam to convert to American, and North Vietnam fought them off. Both were typical wars against invaders, and both were overly glorified by the textbooks.

What you just said about the French invasion was a confirmation that my textbook was right after all! It was not just a typical wars like the ones with China, it had reached international recognition! And the part about America was an eye-opener to me. I have never thought of the Vietnam war as a civil war because I didn’t learn much about the Vietnamese that fought for the South. They are portrayed by the textbooks to be insignificant cowards who was just brainwashed by the Americans to fight for them.

I said before somewhere that joining Fluther was the best decision in my life, and I stand corrected.

The French were more than invaders. They occupied and colonized your land. Your country was part of French Indochina on every map and globe in the Western world. It was the Second World War when the Japanese drove the British and French from the Pacific leaving Ho Chi Minh and his guerrillas to resist the the Japanese occupation. Did you know that when the British marched into Hanoi after Japan surrendered to MacArthur, Ho Chi Minh stood in Ba Dinh Square and recited word for word to the assembled crowd the AMERICAN DECLARATION OF IINDEPENDENCE? If you didn’t know it, don’t fault yourself. If one American in a million knows it, I would be shocked. Ho actually believed that we meant what we said. And the British disarmed Ho and his fighters announced that they were going to hand the land back to the French, and assigned Japanese prisoners the duty of maintaining order in the interim. Truman who knew little to nothing about French Indo China had bigger fish to fry, and missed the chance to develop a friendly ally as opposed to the renewal of French exploitation in the interests of suppressing Communism. If you want to further discuss the history of your country, pm me. I would love to blab on as to why your general Giap was probably the greatest general of the 20th century.

@stanleybmanly

Were you drafted during the Vietnam War?

I was on that precipice after Canada rejected my attempt to emigrate from the US, during the Summer of Love in 1967.
I “chose” the Navy, and luckily avoided all combat.

Nope. For all my interest in war and death, back in 64 I hadn’t a clue as to what was going on. What I was aware of was the draft board’s constant insistence on knowing my grades and status in college along with the fact that every time I returned to town on breaks and in the Summer, the streets had been swept clean of boys my own age. And I’m not joking. Nebraska had a tough time fulfilling it’s draft requirements, because so many boys left the state on graduation while exemptions were available for farm boys. No city boy made it through the Summer following graduation.
By 66 I was brutally aware of what was awaiting me, I had boned up on the history of Viet Nam and read a book by Bernard Fall titled “Hell in a Very Small Place”. It remains to this day the most gripping combat narrative I have yet to read. It just has to still be in print, and available at your library. Once I opened that book, I dove into the history of Mimi’s country like a fiend. I cannot overstate the significance of that book to my education regarding not only the war, but what we are taught. Read it & I guarantee you will never feel the same regarding the Viet Nam war.

Did you have a student exemption?

If you did, did it expire before 1973 (when the draft ended)?

My brother got a draft lottery number of 331, so he was virtually exempt.

I love how a question about a silly love story sparked a lively discussion about the Vietnam war and my history. I am learning so much :)

@Mimishu1995 Read and learn and forget the lovey dovey stuff : )

No. By first semester of my last year, I had determined to talk to our family doctor who had treated us all growing up about my allergies. I was reluctant to tell him that I was going to weasel out of the draft, but the moment I told him, he whipped out his pen and said through the haze of cigarette smoke “what you need is an allergy to wool”. I took the letter to the local draft board and the little woman in that fishbowl booth that I had been dealing with for 3 years told me “Not so fast bub. You have to take this letter to the induction center for evaluation.” I went straight there, and the assumption of all concerned was that I had been called up. I was ordered to strip to my shorts, and handed a gruff sergrant my letter while I explained. He steered me with my clothes to a captain’s office who read the letter, took one look at the scar tissue on my arm then announced “these things only get worse in the army”. As he said it I glanced at my bundle of clothes that I had tied with my WOOL sweater. What a dummy I was. But he never looked up. He just muttered “your troubles are over. You’ll never have to worry about the draft again”. He took a big rubber stamp to the letter and and announced “wait in the office next door”. 5 minutes later a corporal called my name and passed me an envelope, and told me to report back to the draft board. That little woman was so dejected and told me how unfair it was that both of her boys were drafted and I escaped. But I left there with a 1-y deferment.

@stanleybmanly

LMAO! Best war story ever!

I don’t regard it as such. I came to understand that I have been uncommonly lucky virtually my entire life. And now that I’m old I get a very creepy feeling that I owe someone or something a debt I cannot possibly pay. This troubles me. I hate superstition.

@stanleybmanly don’t feel so guilty. The war was horrible and both sides suffered the same amount of pain. And it’s not like you wanted to fight us in the first place. Except for the power-hungry politicians, everyone was just in a horrible place at a horrible time and no one had much say in it.

I’m even luckier than you not to witness the war in the first place. I don’t think I would do well if I had. I’m also living in a time when people are actively trying to prevent another war. I think I’m also indebted to someone for being born in such a time as well, mostly my grandpa for hist part in the war. At the end of the day we are just all in it together, it’s just some of us have it better than others.

This is also a theme I want to explore in my story. The feeling of powerlessness in the midst of war and survivor’s guilt, and what to do about them.

Thar war is and remains a summation of perhaps the greatest threat to democracy—an ill informed electorate. That war would have been politically impossible had even a small fraction of the people in this country any knowledge of Vietnam and its history.

An oddity of history, that few people know about. During WWII, the U.S. had an opportunity to make an ally of Viet Nam, and Ho Chi Min reached out to General Stillwell, American Commander in China, for US troops to enter his country to help drive out the Japanese. As well as the Vichyite French, who were technically our enemies as well, as they were collaborating with the Axis Powers. President Roosevelt ordered Stillwell not to get involved, to let the Vichy French stew in their own juice. Japan was on the brink of defeat at the time anyway, and the U.S. and our Nationalist Chinese Allies decided to by pass Indo China at the time. Talk about a missed opportunity.