There’s No Easy Way to Write a Historical Novel

To write historical fiction we need to become citizens of the era where our story is set

What is it that you like about historical fiction to the point to choose it over any other genre?

For me, it’s the magic of living in another time.

A well written historical novel makes me forget what time I’m living in

I enter the world of the story and I’m not in 2019 anymore. I may be back in the 1920s (my favourite time) and feel the excitement and the fear. I see women making themselves up and be accepted for the first time in centuries, while they appropriate new ways of behaving and presenting themselves to others. I see people getting their first car (a Ford Model T, most probably). I hear jazz for the first time in history. Or maybe I’m in a 1916 trench in the middle of Europe, in the mud and the rain, with people dying all around me, and I’m scared and fear that I might not be alive a second from now.

When a historical novel is well written, it makes me experience situations I have never be in and probably will never be in my life. As if those were events I live every day. As if centuries of history had disappeared and I’m not a XXI century woman anymore.

Making a reader achieve that kind of immersion is no easy task for a writer. Not only because we need the storytelling skills to help the reader going there, but also because we need to know that time we are writing about just as intimately and in-depth than our own time. We need to be comfortable living there ourselves.

It’s a complex, comprehensive process. One that requires patience, dedication, and a lot of time.

How then do we go about it, then?

Here are my three top tips.

1. Don’t rush it. Discovery requires penitence

Historical fiction isn’t the only genre that requires the creation of an entire world. Much speculative fiction (notably fantasy and SF) requires just the same ability and dedication, the same attention to details.

But there’s one thing where historical fiction differs, and it’s a notable one: we don’t invent. We discover.

The historical world we depict did exist at some point in time, independently from us. Whereas we create a fantasy world functional to the story we’re telling, which makes sense to the plot that unfolds inside it, the historical world we’ll be using in our story has its own life. Its existence doesn’t depend on us. It’s a world that anybody can discover, whether we’ll tell our story or not. It has a substance on which we have no power or control.

To an extent, the historical world exists at the intersection between fantasy and reality. Like the speculative world, the historical world is complex and rich. It’s comprehensive and diverse, and we need to recreate it in details to let the reader enter it.

Like the real world, the historical world really existed in the past. We don’t need to invent anything. And yet, we’ll never have the possibility to actually experience it, because it’s a world long gone.

What we need to do, then, is recreating an entire world, just like speculative writers do, but without inventing anything. We need to discover that world piece by piece. And we need to be aware that finding a little detail may require a lot longer than just inventing it.

Researching history is a labour of patience, especially when we want to use it for fiction. Because fiction lives in the details, and details are devilish to discover.

2. Don’t content yourself with web research

I’ve heard it many times: this is the best of times to be a historical writer because never before resources had been so readily available.

I do agree. I would have never been able to research my 1920s Chicago story from Italy without the net. But I believe we need to learn what the internet can actually do for us. What are its limits and strengths. And above all, we need to come to terms with the fact that web research will never give us the familiarity we need to be able to write a particular time.

We should never be content with looking up the answer to a question on Google. That’s a good starting point, it’s never the final goal.

The internet has a way to just answer your exact questions (and not always accurately, I should add), but history is always — always — more complex than a few-lines answer. There might be side-notes that we overlook, and that will change that answer completely.

That’s why I recommend researching on books. The best thing is to research both on books and the net. Just never rely on the net alone.

Similarly, we should never assume that because someone answers our question in a forum, we’re done researching.

I’ve answered questions in forums too. As much as I try to be thorough, my answers just scratch the surface. As we should expect since there are always volumes to be read about the subject.

And we should always remember that, although the person who answers us may be an expert in the field, we certainly are not. We may do more damage by using a piece of information imprecisely than not using the information at all.

Although the person who answers us may be an expert in the field, we certainly are not

I’m sorry, but I’m afraid there is no going around it. If we want to become expert in our chose period, if we want to be comfortable with it enough to write about it, we need to put in the research, and it needs to be as comprehensive as possible.

3. Allow yourself the time to internalise the period

Internalising means make something part of ourselves.

That’s precisely what we need to do if we want to effectively write a different time. We need to become so familiar with the period, with its way of life, with its way of thinking and feeling, that it becomes second nature to us. We must come to a point where we can guess the answers to our questions, at least to some extent. This means that it’s more unlikely that we’ll make gross mistakes.

Unfortunately, internalising is a very slow process that requires constant feeding and on multiple and diverse resources.

A friend of mine theorised that we need to read at least 50 books on different aspects of an era before we start understanding that period in any depth.

I tend to agree.

Just reading those 50 books will give us not only the resources and the actual information we need but also the time to internalise the spirit of the era.

Never let this stop you

Is it a lot of work?

You bet it is.

And that’s why we need to choose a period we love. Like it is not enough. We need to love it because we’ll spend a lot of time there before we can confidently write about it.

But this should not deter us from writing the story we want to write.

I go about it on both sides: on the one hand, I write my story, on the other I research. It does help that I’m a slow writer. In this way, my story and my era awareness grow side by side.

On the other hand, because historical writing requires such a huge investment of time in research, I think it’s a pity to write just one story in our favourite era. We should use that investment repeatedly. Maybe for a series. Maybe for many stories set in the same time.

Writing historical fiction confidently and accurately is indeed a significant investment on so many levels. But I do believe it is worth every second of it.

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Sarah Zama wrote her first story when she was nine. Fourteen years ago, when she started her job in a bookshop, she discovered books that address the structure of a story and she became addicted to them. Today, she’s a dieselpunk author who writes fantasy stories historically set in the 1920s. Her life-long interest in Tolkien has turned quite nerdy recently.She writes about all her passions on her blog https://theoldshelter.com/