Hey there.
I don't post much in the Historical forums because I'm awfully inexperienced, as I do mainly SFF. For the past year or so, though, I've taken a strong interest in someday writing a WWI historical.
My question is this: excluding the actual historical knowledge, what does someone need to know before writing historical fiction?
Apart from the actual historical facts, such as dates, events or inventions, I think it is equally, if not more, important to learn about the culture, social structure, conventions, values etc. of an era. Most fiction deals with people and human experience (in one way or another), therefore in order to make historical fiction accurate and convincing, it is important to know what people of that era were like.
For example, because of the differences in societies, cultures, experiences and values, the experiences of the British soldiers in the Great War differed from those of the British soldiers in the Second World War. The experiences of the British soldiers in the Great War also differed from those of the American soldiers in the Great War. If one were to assume, all soldiers experience war in X way, one would make an enormous mistake that would in all likelihood misrepresent the experiences of those people.
I would also strongly encourage to know the basics of the previous 100 years and (if applicable) the following 100 years or so, as history is a continuous story of change and no era exists in a vacuum of its own. I think it helps to know how the group of people in question got where they were and where they went from there (if known).
As others have already mentioned, historical setting will set some "restrictions", you will also have to do a fair amount of research, but both are true of many genres of writing. Other than that, I think you can use any technique or style of writing when writing historical fiction, too, as long as it fits the story and its setting (which, again, is also true of any other genre).
I think that well-written historical fiction can be a good way to learn about history, but badly-written historical fiction can badly misrepresent history. Personally, I would not want to do that, nor would I want to read someone else do it, either. There are probably different views on this, but if you love history and see its value, why not try to represent it as accurately as possible. On the other hand, if you are only using a historical setting as a "backdrop", why not just make up a world of your own if you don't want to bother with the research. (Just my view, there are probably others.
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