Writing historical fiction

Occasionally I receive submissions by publicists of articles by authors they're promoting. When one looks like it might of help to you, I'm glad to pass it on. Here's one by author Elizabeth Crook.

Seven Rules for Writing Historical Fiction

By Elizabeth Crook

Author of The Night Journal: A Novel

We grow up being told to write what we "know", but history is the unknown. You have to learn almost everything about a period and the social customs just to get your characters out of their beds, (or off of their skins,) and feed them breakfast.

Rule #1: Sweat the Small Stuff.
The authenticity of historical fiction depends on your knowledge and use of historical detail. It is not enough to say a character walked down the street. The reader has to be able to see the street, see the conveyances; he has to smell the smoke from the factories or the sewage in the gutter. If there are street vendors, he has to know what they're selling. This is a new world: the reader can't fathom it unless you give him images. These should be accurate and not recycled from old movies.

Two suggestions:

1. Find experts on the topics you need to learn about. It's easier to track down someone who knows about sheep ranching in the 1890s and call them up when you need to know about scabies than it is to find, in documents or on the internet, the answer to every question that comes up in the course of writing a book. If you're going to write a scene involving a train wreck in 1891, get books on train wrecks, read enough to know what you're talking about, Google the authors and find out where they work. Call and see if they'll talk to you. Latch on to the friendly ones. "What about the couplers?" you can ask, having read enough to know that faulty couplers were a major factor in train wrecks.

I once needed to know about Mormons in Mexico. I Googled "Mormons in Mexico," found a woman who had written a dissertation on a Mormon settlement near Juarez and found her through the school. She spent two hours on the phone with me, describing vividly the Mormon settlement that my characters needed to visit.

2. If your story takes place after catalogs were in use, get hold of reprints of old catalogs. I have an 1895 Montgomery Ward Catalog that has descriptions of, and prices for, almost every personal item used by people of that time: hardware, books, stationery, toys, guns, toiletries, wallpaper, stoves, laundry equipment, harnesses and saddlery - the list goes on and on. It represents the lifestyle of that decade.

Rule #2: Dump the Ballast.
In order to write authentic historical fiction you must know a period of time well enough to disappear daily through a wormhole to the past. There you must understand the customs and use the manners perfectly enough to be accepted by people walking the streets (if there are streets) and to dress yourself, and make a living. This said, the major trick of writing good historical fiction is not in compiling research or knowing the details, but in knowing which details to leave out.

Avoid overwriting. Keep perspective on what will interest the reader. Historical fiction writers tend to be overly conscientious and excited by minutia: if you succumb to excess, and put in too much detail, then go back and take some of it out. Think of your novel as a boat that is about to sink from having too much weight on board: some loved items will have to go. Toss them over with impunity! If a rare, surprising statistic, or a moving anecdote, or an obscure reference you saw to an interesting thing that happened in the county adjacent to the one where your story takes place, does not advance your plot or provide your reader with important information about your characters, then it is irrelevant to your story and must go.

The care and time it took to assemble all that you have just thrown out has not been wasted. It was necessary to gather these facts and assess their worth in order to know which ones to save.

Rule # 3: Keep Your Conscience Clean.
If your characters are based on real people and you are using their names, be reasonably responsible to the originals. You are probably going to have to fill in a lot of gaps in the historical record: you may know from the record what a person did and when he did it, but not why. It's the "why" that defines his character. Ask yourself: Am I getting this close to right? Am I doing this person a disservice?

Rule #4: Resist Judging Your Characters.
We live in the 21st century with certain shared values: our society disapproves of prejudice and chauvinism and provincialism. But your characters are people of their times; allow them to be bigoted or politically backwards. Don't pass judgment on them, don't apologize for their mistakes, and don't attempt to make them all into free thinkers who are ahead of their times. You have to be able to see the story from their perspective, even if it offends you. If you judge your characters, you will date your book. Years from now when your own moral sensibilities are antiquated, your book will be too.

Rule #5: Watch Out for First Person.
I put down three books recently because I was annoyed with the first person viewpoint, which came across as self-absorbed. Unless you're writing in the form of letters or journals, make sure any first-person character has a good reason to be telling his story. People tend not to like people who notice themselves too much or describe themselves or seem overly aware of how others perceive them. Anyone relating a story about himself -- what he said, what he was wearing, what inflection he had in his voice or what gesture he made as he spoke some pronouncement -- we dismiss as annoying and self-important. We feel the same about characters. There are many beautiful books written in first person, but know the challenge of this before you start out.

Rule #6: Don't Get Bogged Down by Back-story.
It is easy to be overly dutiful and bore your readers with too much background information delivered too soon. There is no surer way to lose your reader than to answer every question before he wonders about it. Instead, let your story unfold dramatically. The trick is to delay telling backstory for as long as possible. You will find that most of it is never needed. It percolates up through the real story when the real story gets going.

Rule#7: Anticipate a Long Process.
Historical novels usually take several years to write, as they require research at every turn. You won't always be able to anticipate what you'll need to know for a scene, and will constantly have to return to your references. This is entirely different from writing contemporary fiction.

Take, for example, a trip from Austin, Texas to the nearby town of San Marcos. If you are going to write a present-day scene, you simply need to put your character into a vehicle -- a pickup, or a Volvo -- and head him south for forty minutes on the flat terrain of interstate 35, passing strip malls and fields and the town of Buda. He will then take the exit marked "Wonder World", named for a local cave and visitor's center, and arrive in San Marcos. The only research needed to write this scene will be to drive the route yourself.

But if your character takes this journey in 1906, you will have to learn a few things before starting him out, and learn more things along the way.

First of all, you need to know where the road is, and what's on either side of it, and what kind of conveyance your character is driving. If it's a flatbed wagon, what's pulling it -- a horse, a half-lame mule, two mules? How often do mules need water? How much traffic will there be? Any cars? What kind of food or luggage do you have along? And what if a wheel breaks, and you have to fix it, and you cut your self with a rusty tool -- how do you disinfect the cut? Do you even know about disinfection? When did people figure out where tetanus came from? And -- assuming that you eventually make it to San Marcos, what's in San Marcos, anyway? As for the Wonder World exit -- when was the cave called "Wonder Cave" actually discovered?

But here is where the magic comes in: you begin to think, "Wow. The discovery of Wonder Cave. Now that would make a scene . . ." And then suddenly you have a story, and a book to write. The only problem, of course, is that you will soon find out that Wonder Cave was discovered in 1898 instead of 1906, so you will have to move your story back eight years and find out what sort of vehicles they drove in 1898 and along what road, and the rest of it, or else joggle the facts and sacrifice credibility in the name of literary license. Or ditch Wonder Cave.

Writing historical fiction is like trying to get to San Marcos when you have no car, you don't know where the road is, and you have never in your life harnessed a half-lame mule to a flatbed wagon. Assume it is going to be a while before you arrive.

None of these rules, obviously, is iron-clad. I'm sure there is a Brilliant counter-example somewhere for each and every one of them. I hope you find them useful. Good luck! Happy Travels! God's speed.

Elizabeth

For what it's worth.

Ray

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© 2006 Ray Rhamey

Comments

[Maureen]

I thank you so much for your comments about the ups and downs of historical fiction. I am in the middle of such travels, which (ouch) juxtapose two decades. What you say I have found to be oh so true. Detail, detail, detail. But I still have a question about characters and names (because I've checked out some other blogs and there seem to be reasons for and against). If I am using characters from the 1800s (some of them are indeed royalty) along with my fictionalized people, is it "right" to use their proper names? In using memoirs and other relevant documents of the time period I "think" I'm being true to their personalities without judging them. But should I be continuing in that vein and call them who they are (or were)and not disguising them behind other labels? I'm having the same dilemma in my 1960s thread with the shadow of civil rights leaders. (Of course, as you inferred, my boat is probably already too full of stuff in this first draft and much surely has to be dumped overboard, but these names...)