I want to write Historical fiction. What do I need to know.

Get the small details right and the big details. Craftsmanship in being true to the time period.

Simply put, no anachronisms. Made up example: If your story is set in 1878 in America, you would not want to refer to something that was not in the area/invented until 1899 in France.

Oh yes, don't get so tied up in "world building" that you forget to have a plot and the best story you can tell.

Final note: research extensively. If you love history, you are well aware that many do not realize when a new product or concept was introduced.

If you gain a reputation as telling an interesting story and your details are correct, you will gain a following. HTH

Put in enough historical detail to make the setting, characters, and plot come alive and be convincing, but don't dump in stuff just to show you learned it. It's not homework, it's a story, so whatever you include should be there to make the story better.

Know more than you put in--the exact amount, as you've guessed is impossible to state. But do enough research early so that you don't write yourself into a corner by hinging your plot on something anachronistic.

Apart from reference books/sites, there are a lot of period newspapers and books available online (and more in your local library). Cookbooks are great to give an idea of what people ate; the newspapers will give not just the important news of the day but articles on fashion, editorials, advertisements--even stuff like jokes. Fascinating stuff, and you can use it to enrich your story.

Have fun!

When you're writing in a setting that's well-documented, it's a good idea to read up on it -- primary sources (things written at the time by the people who were there) are a particularly useful thing to immerse yourself in, so you can start to understand the setting & the people from the inside. They can also supply a lot of the little details of daily life that many history books don't actually focus on.

Fortunately, there's a ton of that material available for your period, and a lot of it is pretty easily available. Google Books and archive.org will be your best friends!

(I'll also give a special plug for a book that made a big impact on me many years ago, even though it's outside my main areas of interest: The Children of Pride by Robert Manson Myers is a collection of letters by members of a plantation family in Georgia from the 1850s to the 1870s. There's an abridged edition that covers just the middle years (1860-68), but if you can get hold of the original full version it's well worth it.)

I agree with the other comments, but I'm more focussed on the characters living in that time and world.

Nothing about humans has changed in the last few thousand years. Intelligence is the same, emotions are the same. People are still driven by the same things they always were; food, shelter, greed, revenge, sex etc.

Ask how you would behave in that world.

Be aware how the historical period would affect those elements. For instance, you can steal something today, be caught and possibly (even likely) stay out of jail. It's something a contemporary character might risk without a huge amount of thought. But if, in another time, the punishment is torture, losing a hand or death, there's a whole new emotional dimension to the decision.

Antebellum America is a good place to start since theres still a ton of primary source stuff still floating around online from that era.

You might want to zero in on an exact place and exact year so you have a specific research target. I like to start with general sources like books about the period (so I know the overall lay of the land), then get specific with primary source stuff like Benbenberi mentioned. Old magazines and newspapers are a great place to get a sense of a time and place. You can really immerse yourself that way. Often ill start researching before I even know what the story is. A lot of times story ideas can come from the research itself.

I would say the number one thing to do if you want to write historical fiction is read historical fiction. Of all times and places. That will help you get a sense of how to balance fact and fiction, how to make a time period come alive, and how to avoid the dreaded historical info-dump. You don't need a PhD in history with a specialization in your time period to write, but you do need to do as much research as you can.

I would agree with the others. Do as much research as you can on your subject, it's only then and by reading historical fiction that you will know how much detail you should add. It's better to know too much about the subject you're writing about than too little as you can always filter and decide what to add more easily when you do know. When you don't, then you run the risk of not having enough detail. Part of the enjoyment for me personally when it comes to HF is the detail, and I can tell when a writer didn't know enough or filtered the details too much for me to personally enjoy a book.

If I had waited to become an expert on everything I ended up needing to know about the period that interested me to make a story feel real, I would never have finished a first draft.

My suggestion would be that if you have the seed of the story in your mind or an event that interests you, to start writing, and as questions come up that you need to answer to make the story real to yourself, to go away and research.

You don't need to be a world expert on the period, but you need to be fluent in it--you need to know how things worked at the micro and macro level, i.e., the details and the society your characters live within. This does require a certain level of expertise. You should be familiar and comfortable with it; if you aren't, it shows in your writing.

I'm writing in the Antebellum period, too, by the way. Aside from the availability of diaries, memoirs, and newspapers, there are also many preserved sites: historical homes, battlegrounds, etc. For me, visiting these places was at least as informative as any book.

I agree with the suggestion to read historical fiction. Perhaps you already do, but if you need any suggestions, hit us up.

Also when I was reading books about how to write historical fiction, one of the things that stood out to me was the reminder to not get so caught up in the research that you don't get around to writing the book.

With that I'm mind my strategy is to do some research first (which I love), and then start writing. As I write questions come to me that I hadn't thought about before, and that leads to more research. I imagine that later going over it (if I ever get through my first draft) I will find some anachronisms (because I continued research while writing) which I can correct at that point. The thing to keep in mind is that it is okay for your first draft not to be perfect. I've heard it called the FSD -- First Shitty Draft. So get writing, but keep researching.

And keep reading historical fiction.

Do as much research as you can. In order to keep it flowing well you need to know a lot more than you'll use in your novel.

For example, my current WIP is set in ancient Babylon. One of my characters is a female scribe - uncommon for the time but perfectly plausible. I needed to know about scribal training. I needed to know what the 'school' was like, what they learned etc. Because these schools were normally attached to temples and my character works for the high priestess, I also had to have information on temple layout, temple protocol, the high priestess's dress and duties and on and on - all in my first scene! These are not things I could have inserted later or I'd be rewriting the whole darned thing.

Research often dictates how an entire scene is written and it isn't a simple matter of plugging in details later. For example, in my medieval novel I have scenes that reflect the plague and plague victims. How the plague was spread, how quickly it spread, how it presented in the victims, how they acted once infected and how soon they died, etc. were all things I had to know before I could even begin to write scenes involving plague victims.

Anyway, just some food for thought when considering how much research is enough when you want it to feel real and true to the time period.

While working on this project, keep in mind that regardless of what happened in history, this is still YOUR story. In such a work there is always room for the writer to tailor history to help make the story work.

emanny86 said:

Thanks. I guess I have a lot of work to do. I already have an outline and this allowed me to do research on the major issues (especially the main characters) but I feel I wont have an idea of what minor details I would need until I have a first draft.

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You're right. Those pesky minor details crop up as you go along and need to be looked into when you need them. It's amazing what small details readers hone in on to nitpick about but you pull them out of the story if they know something about your period that you don't and you get it wrong.

I agree with what everyone has said here. Yes, you don't need to be an expert in your historical period, but you need to be a student of it. If I wasn't constantly reading about Hadrianic Rome, I would have missed so much gold-dust. Then there are things like Ishtar-gate mentions, I'm can name a number of authors who when describing a Roman girl's clothing say she's wearing a palla. Major blooper only married women wore palla, it was a signifier of a respectable Roman matron.

And I also recommend reading HF, especially your period. Historical fiction comes in all shapes and sizes, and you need to determine what works for you and what doesn't. I'm a purist, and I don't like history being fiddled with unless you have a damn good reason, I certainly don't like fantasy-type insertions into well documented events.

I think one of the best things I was told a few years back was know your character well. Know what they were doing the moment before your story starts, where they come from, what they eat, how they dress, who their parents are, what annoys them, what are their quirks, who are their neighbours, what they fear and love and most importantly what they really want in life. They must have a clear goal and if they do, then plot falls into place easier.

Lots of good advice here. One other thing - be careful with your dialogue. You don't need to make it true to the time exactly, just a hint will do. I used an occasional "tis" and called it good. On the other hand, you don't want your characters to talk "modern." Pay attention to the rhythms of the letters and other primary sources that you read.

Have fun!

Get the fashions right. Don't rely on what you've seen on TV, like Gone With the Wind, or Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Hollywood always takes liberties! Get the styles right, get the details right, and get the terminology right. This can take 20 minutes of research or a quick conversation with a historical costumer, but it will make all the difference in how believable your story is. (But don't rely on the first website you stumble across. Not all historical costumers know what they're talking about.)

I recently read a novel set in the 1880s, where the female MC was constantly dealing with her troublesome "pantaloons." First, the author apparently didn't realize that ladies' undergarments were split, meaning they were open-crotched, so a woman could use the bathroom without having to pull her drawers down. (It's not as indecent as it sounds.) Second, women didn't wear pantaloons. (Pantaloons were men's trousers.) They also didn't wear bloomers, at least not as underwear. Undergarments were simply called drawers. Unless they were a one-piece deal, then they were called "combinations."

Probably more than you wanted to know, but this is a huge pet peeve of mine. Correct costuming details can immerse me in the story, making it come alive. But get those details wrong . . . nothing will ruin a story faster!

Wow, so much good advice. Feel like a kid in a toy shop right now . Like the original poster, this is my first attempt at HF, so it's an entirely different beast but from what was mentioned here, I have a better idea of how to tackle the research. I never thought about using newspapers or cookbooks from that time period as sources.

vraci967 said:

Like the original poster, this is my first attempt at HF.

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Welcome!

If you want a good general history of Antebellum America, I would suggest What God Hath Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe. It's pretty lengthy but it does give a good perspective on ordinary life in addition to the major events of the period.

Immersion. I think there is much to be said about immersing yourself in one period and knowing it inside out. Your writing just flows and all the little details come out naturally without it being an info dump.

Antebellum/Civil War South happens to be my specialty. I've been obsessed with it since I was a child. My focus is generally social history and women's history. Something very important to consider while researching this period is bias. A lot of researchers really harp on the slavery thing, and as such, don't give the south a fair shake. Catherine Clinton writes excellent Antebellum women's history, but has a rather unfair slant against the South. So take everything into context.

My self-published attempt is romantic historical fiction set in during the Civil War, but I put a great deal of time setting the scene and being accurate. Historical figures make appearances, etc. I try to visualize myself in the particular time and go from there. I actually was a Civil War re-enactor in college, so that helped tremendously in the visualization (plus I learned little details like split crotch drawers as Orianna2000 mentioned). I'm now writing in the 18th century and consequently decide to take up Revolutionary War re-enacting.

Something to consider though: the reason I'm self published is that after multiple requests for fulls and partials, the consensus from the agents was that the Civil War is not the popular time period in HF right now. For every Antebellum set novel you see published, you'll see ten European set historicals, and the Civil War era novels that are being published seem to feature real historical characters as protagonists. So if mass publication is your goal, you might want to investigate other time periods you find interesting.

Good luck!