316. Bringing Historical Fiction to Life with Samantha Greene Woodruff

Author Samantha Greene Woodruff discusses the stereotypes of the 1920s, how she navigated them in her writing, and how you can bring your own historical fiction to life.

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Check out Samantha's website and grab a copy of The Trade Off:
https://www.samanthawoodruff.com/

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https://www.instagram.com/samgwoodruffauthor/
https://twitter.com/SWoodruffAuthor

Transcript

Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the author-focused podcast, but takes a whole-person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. What do you think of when you imagine a story set in the 1920s? Flapper dresses, bobbed hair, scenes from The Great Gatsby? Samantha Greene Woodruff is here to show how to move beyond the stereotypes and accurately bring the 1920s to life when writing historical fiction.

Jennia: I'm so excited to have you here!

Samantha Greene Woodruff: I'm thrilled to be here! Thank you so much for having me.

Jennia: And congratulations on your recent release. So if you'd like to get us started by telling people a little bit about The Trade Off.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Sure. The Trade Off, as you've already heard, takes place in the 1920s. And it's about a young Jewish woman—who is first generation, American born; she has a twin brother; she's one of two—who's incredible at math. She has, like, a real gift for numbers and math and pattern recognition. And of all things, she wants to work in the stock market on Wall Street. And unfortunately, what she doesn't realize when she decides to have this dream is she knows it's going to be hard because Wall Street is a boys' club—

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —which she doesn't understand is that she's actually got three strikes against her. She's a woman, she is poor and therefore not well connected, and she's Jewish. And the story takes us kind of through the second half of the 1920s, as the stock market is going crazy and Bea Abramovitz, who is our protagonist, is finding her way to sort of navigate around the ruls of Wall street and then comes to see that the crash is coming. And becomes a bit of a Chicken Little predicting something that nobody believes. It is a story that is set on Wall Street and is about this woman who wants to work on Wall Street, but she has a rich group of friends and they all have their own sort of storylines. And there's a lot—In addition to being technically about Wall Street, it's really about family relationships and family ties and her complex relationship with her parents and her twin brother and the wonderful friends that she has that really holds her up and help make the story, I think, a little richer and more fun.

Jennia: Oh, totally agree (laughs).

Samantha Greene Woodruff: (laughs) Thank you!

Jennia: So your story opens with The Great Crash of 1929. And it feels like when you're reading it that you can feel sort of that chaos and the fear of that moment, especially as she's—And it's not spoiling anything for people who are wondering what I'm doing because it is in the first, like, three to four pages. But even that fear for where is her brother as she's seeing people and the actions they're taking all around her . . . And that leads to one of the first questions I had, which was, can you explain the importance of adding emotion when writing historical fiction and bringing people into these moments in the past?

Samantha Greene Woodruff: I mean, I think that's like the critical job of any writer, but especially a writer of historical fiction, because you want your reader to feel the feelings of that time and place. Describing it from a distance is not enough. Right? I mean, that doesn't give you the experience. And I think part of what a historical fiction reader comes to historical fiction for is to feel like they've learned and understood something new about a time in the world that they were not alive for or did not participate in. Even if it's just more contemporary but historical—let's say the 1970s or 80s. But something that was not there. And so for me, I mean, interestingly, in the opening scene—and again, I don't think this is a spoiler, although you avoided saying it—there are people jumping from windows.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: That is a popularly propagated legend about what happened that day on Wall Street.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Some very dry, famous historians, like John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, have said that that's probably not true—

Jennia: Oh!

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —but to me, that was such a—it was such a visceral moment. And it's what people were feeling, whether those were the actions they were taking or not. And so I kept it in the book, even though it may or may not be true. I actually didn't even say that in my author's note because I was like—To me, that was just, like, a dramatic moment and it doesn't matter whether it's actually true or not, but people keep saying to me, "Oh, and they were jumping from windows!" And I'm like, "Maybe and maybe not. I'm not sure." Because, you know, I wasn't there. But I think things like that, like, dodging bodies that are falling from windows, whether it's metaphorical or physical—

Jennia: Mhm, yeah.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —gets you that emotional resonance. And so that was sort of part of why I kept it in, regardless.

Jennia: Yeah, exactly. So going into that, and this is sort of related to how you did open it, and that's, how do you create that immediate sense of time and place? Because here we did use—or "we"—(laughs) you used a major event that does just that. Most people are going to know, "Okay, the stock market is crashing. It must be the end of the 1920s."

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Right. I'm trying to think—with The Lobotomist's Wife, I did sort of the opposite in that I took you forward to an event that was going to happen, like, the early 1950s, but it was very much the early 1950s. I think . . . Part of it is I'm a huge consumer of TV and movies. So it's, like, I want to, boom! Put you in the scene—

Jennia: Ah yes.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —you know, I wanted to start and you know where you are and you kind of know what's happening. And in The Trade Off I took, eventually—I felt like I was very lucky because in order to create dramatic tension, they always say you need to have a ticking clock—

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —and the book, for people who haven't read it, then rewinds back to the mid-1920s. And so you have this ticking clock of the crash, which you know is coming and you know is gonna be part of the story because that's where we start.

Jennia: Right.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: You know, I very consciously did that, sort of as a device, to keep readers going, but also to orient you from the first moment that this was the world you're gonna be living in. Although not so much the world of finances it feels like it's gonna be in the first few pages.

Jennia: Right, yeah, we see that used a lot in thrillers too. It's that same sense of—Yeah, exactly. Let's open with what happens. And now we're gonna rewind.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Yes. I think it's super effective and it's a great way to tell a story if you are able to do it successfully. Not saying that I did, but I think that it, ju—And I think it is popular right now. So it's a little bit of a trope that everyone's following, but it gives readers a clue of where—some part of where the story's going. In The Trade Off, too, even though you're on Wall Street, she's worrying about her brother, she's worrying about her family. Like, you already see that there's gonna be more to this character than just—she's not worrying about money, basically. Right? Like, market's crashing and she's worrying about people.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: And So I think that also is a way of setting the tone and the, you know, expectations for the story.

Jennia: That too. And it immediately tells you something about her character and what makes her different. And not just that she's a woman on Wall Street during a time when it was extremely male dominated. Because we do see everyone around her and that really does seem to be where their focus is at. "I've just lost all these investments." "I no longer have a bank account that is filled to the top." Yes—

Samantha Greene Woodruff: (at the same time) Yes.

Jennia: —but, right. And she's immediately focused on, "Where's my brother? What's happening with people?" Like, just us.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Yeah, exactly.

Jennia: So how do you avoid using too much information? So I'm thinking especially about Wall Street, because we might have these ideas about what Wall Street is like, but they're all based on our modern perceptions of it. So then you had to somewhat counter those while also showing what Wall Street was like at the time.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: So I think this is one of my, like, natural born skills. Like, I used to do consumer research and business development, and I would write presentations. And when you're writing presentations, you need to take all the data points and then dial back and figure out which ones actually help tell a story.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: In my old life, it was to senior managers with very short attention spans. Right? So I was, like, how do you get your key points across? I did not approach this book wanting to write about the stock market. I wanted to write about the complex morality of money. And that there is this sort of assumption that if you're rich, and you're rich from the stock market in particular, and from Wall Street, that you're kind of fundamentally greedy and bad. And if you're poor but playing in the stock market, you are fundamentally the good guy. Like, there's a Goliath and there's the David. And I wanted to explore that idea, which I thought was actually a more modern phenomenon. But as my husband told me, because he is in finance, that is, you know, tale as old as time. Which, of course, you know, there's the Rockefellers, and the Vanderbilts, and all these, like, big industrial barons who also made a lot of money in the stock market.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: But I fundamentally think the stock market is boring. I've always thought stocks are boring. I have an MBA. I lean into strategy. I lean into marketing. I want to understand the why behind a business. I don't care so much about what a business is worth in any given day based on the financial analysis of the company's business in a particular moment in time. That's what the stock price is—it's the public perceived value of a company at any given moment in time, essentially. As soon as I kind of came across this story, I said, "Okay, I need to find a way to write about this that will make the reader feel like they know what's going on. Give them enough information to be dangerous. Give them enough information to follow the story. But not bore them."

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: And it's funny, my husband helped me a lot, but his comments were always, "You need to add more of this. That's too oversimplified. That's—" And I said, "If it's oversimplified, but it tells you the basic idea, perfect. Then we're good." For this one, I needed someone else to say, no, you're missing a huge piece of the puzzle, or you're not. But that is, to me, the hardest and most important job in doing any kind of research for writing is to immerse yourself and learn enough that you then aren't just spewing facts, but that you have some facility with the information that you can boil it down. And it's hard. But I think, like, if the question is, how do you do it as a writer? I think, for me, the way is to immerse yourself until you feel like you really know it. Until you're not, like, consulting your notes to answer the question. But you can actually have some sense of what it means in the bigger picture, because then you can communicate that. And that's all the reader really cares about. The reader doesn't want to know what's on the notepad.

Jennia: Well, even in contemporary fiction, we might see that a character has this job or does this hobby or whatever, but we never really get into the logistics of it because so rarely do we actually need that information.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Right.

Jennia: So yeah, it can seem almost like showing off a bit about, "Ah, look how much I know about the stock market." If someone does take the time to explain each of those nuances, which you don't, but (laughs).

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Which was not my goal for the book. Like, that's not where I was going. I was not trying to write a book about the stock market and a woman in the stock market. I was trying to write about all these other things—

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —But the Crash of '29 was, like, a perfect moment to set it. So I did. I wish it could have been a different time (laughs). Although the 20s are super fun to write about, for sure.

Jennia: Yes, they are (Samantha laughs). Do you have a reason why you're drawn to the 20s? Do you think [there's] something about them that just really resonates with you?

Samantha Greene Woodruff: I think that when I started conceiving of this novel, it had to be in the 20s because it was about someone who sees the crash coming.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: But one of the things that I always—in my mind, in my fantasies—love about the 20s is that it was this bubble of liberation for women, or seemingly so that you had. The suffragists had just gotten women the vote. And then you had the, you know, women were going out without escorts and the flappers being so—like, just doing what they wanted kind of. Women took a lot of power relative to what they had had in society in the past. You know, and then there's the Gatsby-ish, sort of footloose and fancy free. Like, it was just a big party and everything was so much fun. And obviously it was more complicated than that.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: And as it turned out, on Wall Street, while it may have been liberated for women in certain areas in the 1920s, it certainly wasn't professionally—particularly in finance, but in general, women still were not having real powerful jobs. And, you know, a friend of mine, Lynda Loigman, just had a—has a book that came out at the same time as mine, The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern—

Jennia: Oh, I read that, yes!

Samantha Greene Woodruff: It's wonderful, right? It's a dual timeline, but one of the timelines is 1920s, Jewish woman in Brooklyn who wants to be a pharmacist. And it's the same thing. Like, you know, it's unusual that she would be in a role like that. So there is that juxtaposition still. And then we go the wrong direction for a long time.

Jennia: No, and it leads in beautifully to my next question that I had, or rather one question I had. And that is the importance of character and how that lends itself to the descriptions. So, for instance, if this had been Jake instead of Bea, how would that have made the story different?

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Well, I mean, it would have completely changed the story because Jake is differently motivated than Bea. I mean, I think—I sometimes say psychology is my religion. My mom is a psychotherapist, my stepfather is a psychotherapist. I kind of grew up in a therapeutically minded world.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: And so I look at everything with that sort of psychological lens. And the role that Bea and Jake both had in their families was so different. The way their parents treated them, especially their mother, was so different that Bea has both a compassion and a grit, for lack of a better word, that Jake doesn't have. Because he never needed to. So I think that that is another critical piece of what I do in my writing process is—I've only written two novels. I'm working on a third. Actually, I'm working on two options for a third. So to say, "This is what I always do" seems a little bit ridiculous. But thus far I do get to a moment—You've got the story that's growing in your head, but I feel like you have to take a pause and do some writing just to get to know your characters.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: So, like, there's a book called Story Genius and it's all about that character drives the story. It's, like, my fave. She has, like, a bunch of prompts and exercises. I use those sometimes to help develop my characters because I do think it is all about the character. It's all about their perspective and the way they're seeing what's happening in the world and the way they're reacting to the things around them. And it's going to be different depending on who's telling your story. I mean, who your protagonist is, for sure.

Jennia: Exactly. Well, plus, Bea faces all these barriers that Jake would not have had to even think about.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Yes!

Jennia: So thinking, too, about how that would influence their worldview and just their interactions with other people. So thinking even early on with the professors, how these presented with an opportunity, or rather, the opposite of presented with an opportunity—

Samantha Greene Woodruff: (laughs) Right! Takes one!

Jennia: —yes! (laughs). Versus it would be freely given. So then how do you get that across too?

Samantha Greene Woodruff: I mean, I think some of it is in the interactions. Some of it is in the internal processing of the world. Like, by design you know the things that Jake would have had that Bea wouldn't.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: If this was a story told from Jake's perspective, it would have been, "Oh, I get to go to college? Cool. Oh, college isn't really doing anything, but they're gonna, like, pay me a fortune and train me to be a stockbroker? Great. I'm gonna go be a stockbroker. Oh, the stock market is going bananas! I can make money easily. That's great because I don't like to work hard. And now I'm making a ton of money, and I'm making a ton of money, and I have this annoying sister and she keeps telling me that this isn't gonna—real and it's not gonna last forever. And I'm gonna ignore her and, oh my god, I've lost everything!" That would be the story (both laugh). Right? Basically.

Jennia: Yes, yep! Actually feels like a story that has been written before, to be honest (laughs).

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Yeah! (laughs). Yeah. You know, so I think that you've learned that through Bea's interactions with Jake, through what Jake does endeavor to do. And also kind of—again, I mentioned that there's, like, the whole group of friends. You sort of learn it also through watching who they each are with their friends and the way that life unfolds for all of them.

Jennia: So true. I'm thinking even again about when she's first on the university and she compares her university to this other one. And just that different atmosphere of expectation and possibilities that are available. You never have to say anything about the gender norms or what's expected of each of them, because it's so clearly seen just from that short little blip.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Right. And I think that we as writers tend to be observers of the world in that way. There's always—We always have a sense of being a fish out of water. So for me, like, that was an aha. Like, I didn't realize that Hunter, which was the public girls' college, was, like, squeezed between buildings in the middle of Manhattan. And that city college for the men was, like, this big sprawling campus with all these opportunities. Things like that, as a writer, you go, "Oh, that's important."

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Similarly, the fact that Bea is Jewish and that she's poor and that those became big impediments to her success and, like, big obstacles for her to overcome. That was because I learned that. I was like Bea in the beginning when I started this research. I thought Wall Street was gonna be a man's world, but that it was also this liberated time and women could do something. And when I learned the degree to which that's not true—I mean, you can barely find a book about the history of women in the stock market before, really, like the 1950s or 60s.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: And that's because they were such a footnote. And I felt like that was an important thing to communicate to the reader because, you know, they had these ladies' departments that were for—That were staffed by rich, connected women to service rich, connected women. Right? (laughs). Like, I had no idea that existed—

Jennia: No, I, honestly, before this book, I didn't either (laughs).

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Yeah. You know, the things that get highlighted are also things that perhaps, as the writer, you're learning through your research and say, "Oh my god, I didn't know that," and that is—

Jennia: Yeah!

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —such a powerful moment about the history. A powerful factoid, or whatever it is. And there's a way to create some drama around it, which is insane (laughs).

Jennia: Yeah! And it also shows the importance of point—you know, paying attention to things like footnotes. That there might be a lot of material in there that people are just skimming over in their rush to get to the next big, huge, bolded section.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Yes! Yes, exactly.

Jennia: So when authors are doing their own research into maybe a historical setting or even specifically the 1920s, do you think it's best for them to focus on what's most distinctive about a historical element, or the details, or to use a combination of both to get that across?

Samantha Greene Woodruff: I think you can get mired in the details very easily, particularly with historical fiction, because I think . . . if you're a writer of historical fiction, you kind of like learning about those worlds. So in the research process, and I've talked to lots of other historical fiction authors, you can lose a day on a tiny detail. And I did a lot of that, especially with my first book, where, like, she lives—She's this American heiress, and she lives in Gramercy Park. And I literally spent a day online and researching, going down a million rabbit holes to find floor plans of what the brownstones would have looked like then, and how big, and did they have the thing with the keys? And, like, all these little things. And you don't want your book to be anachronistic. You don't want to get it wrong for the time, but you also want to be careful that there's not too much that the reader starts to glaze over it, because that's not fun either. I mean, it's the same as what we were talking about, the stock market—

Jennia: Right, yes.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —So I would say you put it well. Like, focusing on the things that are most distinct is where you want to start. And then—and this is what I've learned to do, you know, from book one to book two is—and I think it's the same for contemporary. You fill in some of the contextual details later. Like, when you decide if they're important. You know, like, it—in The Trade Off, actually, I wrote a whole chapter that I deleted where all the women go to Elizabeth Arden Day Spa. And there was a reason for them to be there. But I spent two days researching what it looked like then, what—you know, and I had all these descriptions of the rooms and the this and the that, and then I cut the whole chapter (both laugh). So, you know, there's that too. Like, you don't—sometimes you don't need to know it and fill it in unless it's actually going to be there.

Jennia: Yeah, that's a really good point too. Because I could see that happening even early on where you don't have the story maybe as fleshed out as you'd like to or as it will be before you send it to the editor. Yeah, and then only to find out, "Oh, so we're actually not going to use this part" or "It's not necessary."

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Yeah.

Jennia: So for this variety of reasons, really (Samantha laughs).

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Yes, exactly.

Jennia: Well, what advice would you give other authors about how to avoid having stock portrayals of any time period, such as what they wear or how they might interact with one another?

Samantha Greene Woodruff: The internet is such an unbelievable resource in this day and age. And I still, like, buy a lot of books and, like, look through books. But for fashion, for instance, like, you can look at magazines, and ads in newspapers—

Jennia: Yes!

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —ads in magazines. Like, there are those books that have, like, patterns and old catalogs so you can see the breadth of clothing versus, like, what if you went on—For instance, there's a brand called Vintage Doll that basically just does 1920s. Like, if you went on there it's all the one drop waist dress and a feather headband and a long cigarette—

Jennia: Ohh.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —That's sort of become the shorthand for the 20s. But there were many other—you know, and as they talk about with the 20s, the hemlines went up and the stocks went up, and the hemlines went down as the stocks went down, and, you know, s—So I think primary sources are really helpful for going into, like, the New York Times archive. And if you want to know about real estate, like, you can see what was being advertised or what was listed and what prices were, and those you can get accurate details from pretty easily—

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —again when you know what you need to get, which is not always as easy. But, like, if you're putting someone in an outfit or a room, you can find that in primary source documents pretty easily, I think.

Jennia: I love that you brought up magazines because I've even done that when I've had to help research for something or other. But it just gives you more of that sense of everyday life.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Yes.

Jennia: Yeah, what people were eating, what they were wearing, their concerns when you look at the advice column. Even the wording that they were using because it's not that formalized language that you'll find in a book or that artificial dialogue because it was created by an author versus written by someone as they sent it in.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Right. And I found when I was researching for The Trade Off I found this column from The New Yorker. It was basically like the society and, like—it was, like, out-on-the-town kind of thing. And I read through a bunch of it and it total—and that was written very much in vernacular. It wasn't written in, as you say, like, stuffy, more formal language. So I could read about, like, where people were going and what they were doing and hear the voices of the era as well.

Jennia: Mhm.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: I will also say, you know, AI gets a bad rap, but I used ChatGPT a lot for this book. And I find that if you use it as a tool and as a starting point, that it is a great way to give you other ideas for where to look and what to do to help move the research process along. I say embrace it. And for dialect. Like, I would sometimes be like, "I don't feel like going through all my flapper things to see what would be a flapper word for this. So I can just do that in ChatGPT." And then it gives it to you and then I can kind of cross reference it somewhere. And then I have the word to look for. Because most of the resources for flapper language are the flapper word and then the definition versus the inverse—

Jennia: Oh.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —So, like, if I wanted to say, "This is really cool," you know, I—

Jennia: Right.

Samantha Greene Woodruff: —I could get 12 ways from ChatGPT and then see which ones were accurate. Because you still have to be careful about the accuracy of the information you get there.

Jennia: Oh yeah, definitely (laughs). Was there any way that you checked the accuracy of this? Because you did say you looked it up. But what were some of the ways that you did look it up just to verify that that information was accurate?

Samantha Greene Woodruff: I had a book called Speak Fl—if we just stay with flapper language, like, I had a book called Speak Flapper. There were places that were more legitimate and verified sources and that would have flapper words. And then I would see, does this correlate to what ChatGPT taught me? And you have to be willing to really roll up your sleeves and spend a lot of time if you want to do that.

Jennia: Well, just as a fun last question, is there a favorite flapper word or phrase that you found while doing your research?

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Oh, man. You know, I used it a lot, I think, because I loved it, which is "cat's pajamas." Like, everyone knows the bee's knees, but I've never really heard the cat's pajamas before. And I love that one. I think it's just—you can picture someone saying, "Doll, that is just the cat's pajamas." (laughs)

Jennia: It is very cute (laughs).

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Yeah. Yeah.

Jennia: Well, thank you again! And then do you have any last thoughts you'd like to share?

Samantha Greene Woodruff: If you like historical fiction and you like research, like, you know, go for it. Just—And just remember that you have to balance a story with all the information that you're trying to give people, because that's the key. At the end of the day readers are coming because they want a story that's gonna pull them through the pages. And hopefully that's an experience I can give them!

Jennia: I think it is (laughs).

Samantha Greene Woodruff: Thank you! (laughs)

Jennia: All right, well, thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for additional information, including all of her links and a link to The Trade Off. And then please join me next week when J.D. Barker will be here to share his insights on the future of hybrid publishing. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please share the link with a friend. Thank you!