4 tips for writing historical fiction
BY Sean Lusk
11th Nov 2022
Sean Lusk studied on our London-based Writing Your Novel course in 2015. He is an award-winning short story writer and his debut novel The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley has been named a BBC Two Between the Covers pick, you can watch the episode here.
Here Sean shares four tips on writing historical fiction – how to swim (but not drown!) in the currents of the past.
I love reading historical fiction, from Wolf Hall to Hamnet, Fingersmith to The Silence of the Girls that feeling of spending time in past centuries, with characters who are real and alive on the page is a joy. And if at the end of it you have learned something, better still. But how do those writers do it? How to they avoid getting entangled in their research, or hitting false notes? How do they keep the plot moving swiftly while being faithful to historical fact?
I’m now well into writing my second novel set in the 18th century, inspired by the remarkable life (and lost diaries) of Mary Wortley Montagu. I learnt a lot writing my debut novel, The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley and, yes, I got entangled in research, snarled by anachronisms, bogged down in exposition along the way – all mercifully weeded out in the rewrites!
So here are my tips for you historical writers.
1. Set research targets, but don’t try to learn everything about your chosen time and place. It’s important to immerse yourself in all that you can find about your chosen period and characters and there are fantastic resources available digitally. The British Library, National Archives and their equivalents in other countries provide wonderful opportunities to access primary sources. Visit your chosen setting, walk the streets, breathe the air. Even if everything has been rebuilt, paved over, turned into car parks, there are always traces and echoes of the past lives who occupied those spaces. BUT set yourself a cut-off point – perhaps three months of intensive research before putting it to one side and beginning to write your story. By all means check facts along the way once you’ve started writing, but if you try to research while writing, you are likely to feel you never know enough, and you will never finish your novel.
2. Plot and history are not the same. In other words, you still need to do some plot planning before you write your novel, even if the story is one well documented in history. You need to know your principal characters – their inner thoughts, their moods, their secrets – things history may not tell us. And you need to know the arc of your story, which might well take us in different and surprising directions from the ones familiar to us from historical non-fiction or biographies. Even detailed diaries give us only one dimension of a person’s character – the one they want to present to the world. In a novel we as writers have to offer so much more.
3. Keep your research off the page. Once you know the story you’re going to write, and you have found the voice (or voices) that are going to take the reader through that story, the research needs to recede far into the background. Yes, give us a sense of settings, smells, and sounds from the time. A detail here and there of a hairstyle, a meal, of dress and manners is great, but only where it helps the narrative drive. If you’ve done your research well, your reader will know that without you ever having to put it on the page, other than with the lightest brushstrokes.
4. Use plausible language. You are writing in the 21st century for 21st century readers, and so you want to make your style and register work for those contemporary readers. Yet at the same time if your novel is set in the 16th century, or even in the 1920s, we know enough of how language was used in those times to know that it was different. This can be one of the greatest challenges for the historical fiction writer. In a sense you are creating a new language, one that was not exactly as spoken in the time of your setting, but one that is believable to the modern reader as being so. Novels that mimic the language spoken a hundred or four hundred years ago can be hard to read – and anyway, we have work written in those times to enjoy if that is what we are looking for. But putting 21st century words in the mouths of our distant ancestors, imaginary or otherwise, can also feel incongruous to our readers. So avoid anachronism, and check etymology. For instance, damn has been used as an oath since early modern times, blimey only since the mid 19th century. So no one would have said ‘blimey’ before about 1860.
Blimey!
To find out more about Sean visit his website or follow him on Twitter @seanlusk1 or Instagram @lusk7122.
The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley featured on BBC Two’s Between the Covers in Nov. Watch here.
Buy the book here.
if you want to delve deep into the past and learn more about historical fiction, join our six-week online Writing Historical Fiction course.