What might have been: where research ends and imagination takes over in fiction.

In my most recent novel, Third Girl From the Left (Houghton Mifflin Company, September 2005), one of the protagonists, a young actress named Angela Edwards, meets Black Panther leader Huey E Newton at a wrap party for the film Coffy, in which she has a small part. A few words are exchanged; Angela is left with a less-than-favorable impression and the story continues. In fact, Newton's attendance at such a party, if there ever was one, is highly unlikely (though he did spend some time on the fringes of the film business). In 1973, when Coffy was released, he was in the throes of a long trial for murder. He ultimately jumped bail and spent three years in exile in Cuba. If he ever did see Coffy, it was while he was on the run.

One of the many great things about writing a novel is that I didn't have to hew to what was literally true. In nonfiction, adherence to the fact of the matter is paramount.

But in fiction, there's a joyous freedom to play with what might have happened, what could have happened, what you wish had happened. The scene I created between Angela and Huey tells you something about her (but please keep in mind that she is an entirely fictional creation) and a little bit about an imagined Huey Newton. I also hope it tells you something about the times in which they both lived. That's what I decided was most important in working with the research I did for this novel.

Burdens of History

I am fascinated by history. I think it underlies most of our waking lives, particularly those of African Americans. But it does so in complex and myriad ways. It's not simply a matter of knowing your history so you'll know where you're going. Sometimes knowing doesn't help a bit. Sometimes we ignore it. Sometimes the weight of it is just too much to bear. Sometimes we need to let it go and move on. My novel's protagonists, actress Angela; her mother Mildred, who is a 1950s homemaker; and Angela's daughter, Tamara, an aspiring filmmaker, all have complicated, conflicted relationships to history. In the end, I wanted the role history played in the novel to reflect that. I learned a lot about using research for a novel in the process.

This novel started as a short story entitled "Show Business" that I wrote more than 10 years ago as part of my graduate-school thesis. It has been anthologized in its original form in the collection Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers, edited by Rosemarie Robotham (Basic Civitas Books, December 2002; see BIBR, January-February 2003, NONFICTION REVIEWS).

The only research I did for that story was to look up a speech from Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire that Angela uses in an audition. When I began to think about reinventing Angela and Tamara and their story for a novel, I spent time with them first. I didn't look things up or go to the library or surf the Web or anything like that. I tried to imagine what a young actress who never quite made it might have felt. I tried to imagine what her daughter might have felt watching her struggle. I tried to imagine the ways this struggle would bring them together and the ways in which that struggle would push them apart. I needed to get to know them before I knew what I needed to know about them.

At the same time, I learned the importance of staying open to history, to whatever might invite itself into the novel, almost from the very first. One of my earliest decisions in writing was to move the action from New York City to Los Angeles, where most of the blaxploitation films Angela appeared in would have been made. In deciding that, I decided her hometown should be somewhere out West. Say.... Tulsa, Oklahoma. I chose this with no conscious recollection at all of Tulsa's ugly racial history as the home of the worst racial attack ever to take place in the United States (in June 1921. You can look it up).

If it hadn't been for the gentle prompting of playwright and screenwriter Richard Wesley, whom I interviewed for background material early in my writing process, I don't know if I'd ever have made the link. But once I did, the novel was immeasurably enriched by exploring the weight of that history on my three characters.

Time in a Bottle

Once I decided to make a direct link to the Tulsa riot, I began my research in earnest. But I always tried to remember that I was writing a novel, not a narrative of a real person's history. I read quite widely about all kinds of subjects that touched my characters lives: the Tulsa riot, the life of a Playboy Bunny in the 1970s, the film industry in the 1970s, especially the blaxploitation films, and the art and craft of filmmaking today. But in many ways, the books that were most important in helping me figure out my relationship to this research and by extension, the novel's relationship to this research were two novels: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (Random House, September 2000) and Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (Plume [reprint], May 1997).

Both of these extraordinary novels play fast and loose with time, with history with what the facts are and are not. In both, fictional characters chat happily with nonfictional ones, the sequence of events is moved willy-nilly to serve a fictional purpose and in the end, the calling of art is served. These authors worked hard (as did I) to get internal chronology right, to make their novels convincing in the lived sense of their times, to create a believable world on the page. I wouldn't turn to either book for a strict recounting of the periods in which they are set--the 1940s in the case of Kavalier and Clay; the early 1900s with Ragtime but for a fuller understanding of the human condition, either in those times or in ours. They're both right on the money.

Reading those books set me free. In our highly nonfiction-oriented times, people all too often assume that all novels are autobiographical, that the more you research (and the more of that research you display in your novel), the better it is. People assume you don't learn as much from the stuff that's made up. But I don't believe that. I think art can teach us as much or more than the stuff that's "true." That's what I love about writing fiction. That's what I love about making up things. And that's what was so exhilarating about creating Angela and Mildred and Tamara and telling their stories. In writing and researching Third Girl From the Left, I learned a lot about when to tell the "truth" and when--in fiction the larger truth lies elsewhere.

Martha Southgate is the author of three novels, Another Way to Dance, The Fall of Rome and most recently, Third Girl From the Left. The Fall of Rome (Scribner, December 2002) received a 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post. Her first novel, Another Way to Dance (Laurel-Leaf, January 1998), won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She received a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. You can visit her Web site at www.marthasouthgate.com.