Rant warning!
...and what was happening? Disappointment was happening. You wanna say, "YES!" but all you can say is, "Are you simple-minded?"
Mutter.
There's a very common mistake made by far too many writers: they start with backstory. Now, as someone who has sold work that started with backstory, I can say conclusively that this is not an automatic ixnay. However, I'm frustrated enough at the moment to do an analysis of just exactly why one particular method of starting with backstory just ain't gonna cut it.
Take your well-known historical fact. Tell your presumeably well-enough educated audience all about it, in terms of the commonly known bits, and then and only then explain how your story differs. Then describe some more set-up, mostly so that you can get your Historical Hero from point A (historical placename where said HH was known to have been) to point B (ahistorical placename, or all-out fantasy placename, your choice). Then start your story.
Um.
I'm going to suggest the following: If you choose to ignore writing rule 1A.11b(6): "Don't start with backstory," then you MUST follow both corollaries (adjusted to fit your story circumstances):
1A.11b(6a): Make it relevant.
1A.11b(6b): Make it short.
For instance: Just about anyone and everyone born and raised on the North American continent (and a good few born and raised off it) know that the Kennedy assassination occurred in November of 1963 in Dallas, Texas. If the point of your story is to take a miraculously saved-from-major-head-trauma young President to the far side of the moon where he is going to meet the One (the One what, I leave to the peanut gallery to decide on) and proceed to have an epiphany from the ensuing conversation, then telling us all about what he had for breakfast that day is both overkill and boring. Get to the frickin' convo already, you pea-brained pencil-pusher, you! At most, you need to sum up, possibly like so:
"At 12:30pm on November 22, 1963, a 6.5mm Italian cartridge fired from a Carcano bolt-action high-powered rifle passed through the rear of President John F. Kennedy's head, spraying the interior of his limousine with blood, brain matter, and skull fragments. He was taken to Parkland Hospital's Trauma Room 1, where he was officially pronounced dead at 1:00pm. A casket was ordered and a few minutes after 2:00pm the casket was loaded onto Air Force One for return to the capital, which was before the Dallas County Coroner had examined the body, a violation of Texas state law which caused a confrontation between the Dallas police and the Secret Service.
Well it should have, for the body which was loaded onto Air Force One that day was not that of Kennedy. His corpse was already miles away, packed in dry ice and being loaded into a cargo box which would be concealed inside a large high-altitude weather balloon. The balloon was released, ostensibly on a routine data-gathering mission, and by the time Air Force One left to deliver the casket and its 'presidential' contents to the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland for the official autopsy, Kennedy's body was twelve miles high and climbing. By 8:00pm, when that autopsy began, the balloon had been captured and transferred to a small, v-shaped spacecraft called a 'Boomerang' by those with the security clearance to know about it. Three days later, as the casket flown from Dallas was being lowered into the ground at Arlington National Cemetery, John Fitzgerald Kennedy opened his eyes in a room on the Moon and frowned at the ceiling he saw. Raw rock and a bare lightbulb spelled 'Russian attack' to him, and he wondered how many nukes had landed, and how many were still flying."
The above is not a historical event nor personage which figured in any of the stories I am being cranky over. I am using it as an example of one way to sum up well-known events as a means of springboarding into a fiction piece which uses a historical event as a base. The Kennedy assassination is very well documented; I looked up the details of the above two paragraphs in less than two minutes of reading Wikipedia. Because the assassination was so well-documented, I can give a timeline of important events, both real and fictionalized, which gives the reader a grasp of both the speed and scope of what happened. In part; for instance, Kennedy was riding in an open-top car at the time of the shooting, and his blood and brains got splattered well outside the confines, including over the motorcycle cops on both sides of the car and over the hood of the car behind Kennedy's vehicle, and the left arm of the Secret Service man driving that following car. But that detail, however splashy (pun intended!) isn't pertinent to 'Kennedy goes to the Moon and has a conversation with the One'. Governor Connally, wounded by one of the two bullets which passed through Kennedy, is also omitted -- in fact, this bullet, which struck Kennedy in the back and exited his throat, isn't mentioned at all.
This is presumeably a story about Kennedy and the One (whoever/whatever he/she/it/they/... is/ar). Note that two paragraphs in, the only character introduced by name is Kennedy. He is the focus, and all other details revolve around him, either to explain the timeline or to point up the fictional elements. This story actually starts in paragraph two, when the deviation from history is first revealed. One could also start at a slightly later point:
"John Fitzgerald Kennedy opened his eyes and frowned at the raw rock ceiling above him. A bare lightbulb on a wire dangled from a staple in the rock, harsh light for ugly surroundings. He didn't remember getting here -- he remembered daylight and Dallas and pain, a thick burn from back to front which had hammered the breath out of him before darkness swallowed him.
This is a bunker, he thought. It's the Russians. How many nukes did they fire at us, and how many are still flying?"
Both examples do similar jobs, namely set the scene. The first, loaded with details, many of which Kennedy could not know, is suitable for a non-intimate 3POV where the story is going to be detailed and gritty. It fairly screams, "If you don't like your facts coming at you hot and heavy, stay back!" The second is more suitable for an intimate 3POV, one concentrating more on Kennedy's personal experiences and reactions. If the story of the conversation with the One is going to show off a Big Idea, the former style might be better; if the purpose of the piece is to display how a man deals with being officially dead and so far out of his element that there are literally no zip codes, the latter would be more appropriate. Sticking all those details onto a personal reaction story would be overkill. Leaving them out of a Big Idea would be confusing. Or annoying, since they obfuscate the Idea and clutter up the mental experience, to boot.
Which, incidently, isn't to say that you can't do either or both. But that would invoke sub-corollary 1A.11b(6a)i: "All bets are off if you WANT your reader confused," except 1A.11b(6a)ia: "Lifeline! LIFELINE!"
There. I've crabbed here. Maybe this means I won't crab on them as desperately needs being crabbed on...