How to Write Historical Fiction

6. Fact versus Fiction

When writing a historical fiction novel, many writers get hung up on how to balance the fictional and factual aspects of the story. Fictional aspects of a historical story are those that are imaginary or made-up. Factual aspects of a historical story are those that actually happened. In this chapter, I'm not going to give you a clear formula on how to balance these various aspects. It is up to you, as a unique writer, on which factual aspects you choose to depict and which you choose to change or omit. However, I will give you some pointers on how write a historical story that feels authentic without leaving the realm of fiction.

The good news is, your experience as a human being can lend a lot to writing a novel set in the past. Historical characters are not mythical creatures or inhuman beings. People in the past experienced the same things you and I encounter today, including pain, loss, romance, love, friendship, family relationships, joy, faith, hope and more. The emotions you encounter in your everyday life were felt by people hundreds of years ago. Including these emotions in your story will help characters to come alive by making them more relatable to your readers. In fact, if you don't include emotions, feelings and other aspects of the human experience, then your work may come across as rather dry. 

On the other hand, as people living in the twenty-first century, we are think differently than our historical counterparts in many ways. For example, someone from the 1300s wouldn't have understood the influence of viruses on the immune system. Men and women in the regency era would never have been permitted to visit one another unchaperoned, only ever being alone together after marriage unless under extraordinary circumstances. Democracy largely worked differently than it does today, where only select groups of people were able to vote in elections. Use your research skills to better understand disparities between modern-day thinking and the thinking pertaining to the historical time in question. Looking at primary sources (newspapers, books, diary entries, letters, etc.) can help you understand how people thought in the past. 

When you write your historical characters, you should keep in mind the vast differences between what we know about the world around us today versus what people knew in different historical periods. You can get away with adding fictional elements to your story that contravene what actually happened in the past, but you should only do this when it drives the plot of your novel forward. 

For example, in my book Daughters of the King, one of my main characters is particularly independent and "forward-thinking" for her time. But considering the vast uniqueness of human beings, it isn't so outrageous to assume that women like her did exist in 1600s France. I portrayed Celeste this way both to make her more relatable to the audience, but also because she became a more dynamic character than one who simply follows the conventions of their time. She was also a foil to the other character in my story, her friend Lorraine. 

If you use fictional elements that don't seem at all probable—for example, adding airplanes or some other advanced form of technology to your novel set in the 1400s—then you will likely throw the reader off. 

You can also tweak places, events and historical figures depending if it suits the plot of your story and doesn't seem too outrageous. Remember, you are writing a work of historical fiction, not a history essay. You want to make your work unique and fresh, which may require you to think outside the box.