H.L. Delaney · August 9, 2026

What I Owe the Reader When I Invent a Scene

Every historical novel invents. The question is whether the reader can tell where. When the history in question is still contested, and the people in it are still here, leaving that line blurry does real damage.

The scene that is not in the record

There is a morning in the Modoc War that no document describes. Men who were there left accounts of what came before it and what came after, and the middle is missing, and I wrote it. I had to. A novel cannot stop and tell the reader that the sources thin out here.

What I can do is be exact about it afterward. The record supports where those men were, roughly when, and what they did next. It does not preserve what was said. So the words in that scene are mine, built to be consistent with everything documented on either side of the gap, and offered as what plausibly filled it rather than as what did.

That distinction is easy to state and easy to let slide, and letting it slide is how historical fiction turns into bad history that people quote.

Why the stakes are not general

If I were writing about the Tudors, a blurred line would be a matter of craft and taste. The history I write about is contested in the present tense. It concerns land, water, and treaty rights that are live questions right now in the Klamath Basin, and it concerns the reputation of people whose descendants I know.

An invented scene that reads as documented can be picked up and repeated. It can end up in a school paper, then a local history, then an argument about who did what to whom. I have watched invented details from older novels get cited as fact about the Modoc War, and once that happens there is no calling it back.

The record about my people was already made mostly by their enemies. I wrote about that problem directly in Writing History From the Records That Tried to Erase You. Adding new inventions to that pile without labeling them is not a neutral act.

What the mark actually looks like

In practice I use three things, and none of them interrupt the story.

The first is an author's note that says plainly which characters are documented, which are composites, and which scenes have no source behind them. A specific accounting, item by item, in place of the usual blanket disclaimer.

The second is a source register, published where anyone can check it. For the Modoc War book that is The Record, which lays out the documented history the novel is built on. For the games it is a claim-by-claim list, like the one behind Return of the C'waam, where every fact the game asserts is tied to the public source it came from.

The third is restraint inside the prose itself. When the record is thin, I keep the scene short and concrete and I do not have anyone explain the meaning of events they could not have known the meaning of. Invented interiority is fine. Invented certainty is where the trouble starts.

The temptation to smooth

The strongest pull in this work is toward tidiness. Contradictory sources are inconvenient. A number that appears as thirty in one account and ninety in another is a problem for a sentence that wants to move. The easy fix is to pick one and write it as fact.

I have come to think the contradiction is usually the more honest thing to put on the page. When two accounts of a killing disagree by a factor of three, that disagreement tells you something true about how the event was recorded and who was doing the recording. Flattening it to a single confident number hides evidence.

So the novels carry some of that roughness. A character notices that the story does not add up. The narration declines to settle a question the sources do not settle. It costs a little momentum and it keeps the book honest, which is the trade I want to make. I wrote more about working between archive and oral tradition in Researching from the Inside.

What the reader is owed

A reader picking up a novel about the Modoc War is owed a good book. They are also owed the ability to find out, without much effort, which parts they can repeat as history and which parts are mine.

Giving them that does not weaken the fiction. Knowing where the documented ground ends makes the invented parts land harder, because the reader can feel the author working at the edge of what is knowable rather than filling a void with confidence. The gaps in the record are part of the subject. Marking them is part of the story.

You can read the opening chapter of Captain Jack & The Original Renegades free, and the documented history behind it is collected at The Record. More essays are in Notes from the Basin.