Anybody Can Write a Novel

Historical and Alternate History

I do not believe in much of a hard line between history and historical fiction. The reason for my belief is that as soon as you begin to fill in the blanks for events and motivations outside of the historical record, you have already altered the history. Blurring the line even further is the fact that people of different countries, regions, and ideologies teach historical "facts" that contradict one another. If you need an example, compare how different countries look at the world wars or revolutionary war and what caused them.

Since it's highly unlikely that any particular group of people has everything factually correct, all historical storytelling is in some part fictional. What makes a historical story more or less fictional is how much imagination you contribute to the gray areas between commonly accepted and evidenced historical fact. Today, I'm going to give what I believe to be a more helpful and accurate analysis on the genre and provide tips for writing in either extreme.

Know where you want to write on the scale between historical fiction and alternative history.

As soon as you make up a fictional character in a historical timeline or give a guess of how a real-life person might have been feeling, you are asserting an imaginary history onto the events that took place. What puts you more firmly into an alternative or highly fictitious genre is the level of historical accuracy. Saying that a soldier on the battlefield was scared that he would die is fictitious in the strictest sense, as we really can't know what any person is feeling at any given time. However, it is highly likely to be true, based on evidence and our knowledge of human nature.

If we take a story a step further into the fictitious realm, we can write about Genghis Khan having nightmares because of the deaths he caused. It perhaps isn't true and has no historical basis, but we can imagine it happening and it doesn't oppose evidence or commonly accepted historical fact. We can even empathize and imagine ourselves as Genghis Khan, feeling that kind of guilt.

On the polar extreme of fiction, we can write about the Nazis winning WWII with the help of dinosaurs. This obviously did not happen. It's an impossibility, spitting in the face of everything we and the audience know to be real. This purposeful deviation from realism and evidence-based historicism puts your work into the genre of alternative history.

Of course, all of these are valid and wonderful ways to tell a historical story. These categorizations have nothing to do with quality of your work. They are styles. Knowing the style that you want to use can help you be strategic in how far you deviate from historical accuracy in order to attain internal consistency. That way, you stay in one style instead of veering accidentally all over the spectrum of historicity.

Be honest about how fictional your story is.

If you do intend to blur the lines of history or if you are asserting events that might not have happened, be honest with your audience about it. I remember when I was young and learned that all the stories of George Washington and his cherry tree (among other such stories) were completely fictitious. I immediately gained a distrust for my teachers and all books that taught such parables without acknowledging their fictitious nature. Because of that, I didn't enjoy the stories that I might have if my sources had just been honest and accurate.

As an adult, I feel the same way when I learn a source of information is being careless. At best they seem foolish and at worst they seem like they are purposefully adding or omitting information to manipulate their audience. You don't want to break the trust of your reader by repeating this mistake. So, either in your cover, your description, or even in the text itself, be perfectly clear in how studied/accurate/fictitious you plan to be about the historical events surrounding your story. Your readers will appreciate your honesty and take your novel for exactly what it is meant to be.