CS Ford
Winston Churchill is often attributed with the famous adage that “History is written by the victors.” Perhaps true, but what about historical fiction? Who writes that? And how? Someone also once said that the spoils go to the victors. Do the spoils of victory include late nights in dimly lit libraries researching obscure facts about characters from long ago? Do they include endless clicking and clacking on typewriters and keyboards postulating the microscopic details of the past, which are often ignored in the pages of scholars writing about the macroscopic endeavors of nations and their leaders? Do they also entail criticism from those same scholars and their less learned but overly hubristic pseudo-scholar counterparts, cynically nitpicking the writer’s story? None of that sounds like spoils to me. Nonetheless, historical fiction writing can be rewarding, but getting there takes work and effort. The following insight should help.
Where do I find sources?
A historical fiction writer must also be a historian, and being a historian does involve following the rules of writing history. First, one must find their sources. But where, and what sources? Academic writing is a good place to start. Libraries, though often seen as relics of the past in our age of the internet, do contain a wealth of academic books, encyclopedias, biographies, and journals from which to gather your facts. And since putting words onto pages and putting pages into print does involve some level of economic burden, physical copies of books can be some of the most reliable sources to begin with.
Luckily for the modern researcher, we do have the internet, and a great deal of those books have been translated to the world wide web. Access to an academic library’s digital databases can make one’s historical research much more efficient. Still, look for sources with academic credentials to ground one’s research.
How do I know if a source is credible and appropriate for my project?
Again, academic writing, both in books and journals, carries a lot of weight, but biases can still exist. Having a good understanding of the historiography regarding your topic will go a long way. If your story takes place in ancient Rome, understand that the perspective of Roman historian Suetonius writing about the early emperors in first century after Christ is going to contain a much different approach than Edward Gibbon writing about them nearly 1600 years later. Both types of sources can be valuable but be sure to investigate the scholars of the current day to capture any recent changes, as new perspectives on history are always being discovered.
How do I incorporate sources in my writing?
This is where the fun of historical fiction begins. Now you get to take all the mundane fact gathering and get creative without the burden that comes with dry citations and footnotes. Take the research you have so painstakingly completed and shift your mindset from historical scientist to historical artist. The dates, foreign place names, and theoretical conjecture become the framework for your narrative, which you now color with the feelings, emotions, and ambitions of your characters. If your reader wanted to know what happened, they would just read the same stories you did and be done with it. But that is not why they hired you, is it? No, you were brought in to make the history come alive. Use the source material as a springboard to a great story, balancing the plight of your carriers within the larger framework of the past. Be careful not to violate the truth, but don’t be afraid to use your characters to question it.
Your reader may also find it interesting to understand what inspired you to write the story that you chose. Use an author’s note or some other type of literary device at the end of your tale to give some insight into the sources you did use and how they influenced the characters and events that you put into print.
Additional Sources of Information
Good writing requires good reading, so writing historical fiction should be preceded by reading it as well. One author of the genre who comes to mind is Steven Pressfield, author of many historical novels including one of my favorites, Gates of Fire (2005), which fictionalized the infamous story of the 300 Spartan warriors defending ancient Greece from the overwhelming forces of the invading Persian Empire. In addition to his many works of fiction, Pressfield has written several non-fiction books on the art of writing itself and publishes a weekly newsletter on overcoming the “resistance” that writers often face.
For a more practical guide to historical fiction writing, Susanne Alleyn’s Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders: A Writer’s (and Editor’s) Guide to Keeping Historical Fiction Free of Common Anachronisms, Errors, and Myths (2012) is a great place to start. The book’s whimsical title accompanies an entertaining read that helps aspiring writers embrace historical research while avoiding inaccuracies that will quickly turn your readers into critics.
Overall, while historical fiction may be one of the most time-consuming and structured genres of fiction to engage in, it allows the author to embrace their creative skills to transport the reader into the past and hopefully reward them with some of those aforementioned spoils of victory.
Works Cited
Alleyn, Susanne. Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders: A Writer’s (and Editor’s) Guide to Keeping Historical Fiction Free of Common Anachronisms, Errors, and Myths. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012.
Pressfield, Steven. Gates of Fire. Bantam, 2005.
Additional information on Pressfield’s works can be found at https://stevenpressfield.com/
The Christian War Journal 