Odds are, if someone is writing a work of historical fiction, they have at least a passing interest in that specific time period. Often, it’s far more than “passing.” They will go down rabbit holes of research, become attached to certain events and people, and be provided with a multitude of plot bunnies based on things that happened a few decades, centuries, or millennia ago. Considering all of this, how do authors make sure to keep the story they want to tell front and center?
When I posed this question to Beverly Jenkins, she said that she views her novels “as paintings.” The main characters are in the center, and the history serves as the backdrop.” If you’ve read her Black historical romances, you’ll know she invariably succeeds at this: in Vivid, for instance, Dr. Viveca Lancaster is a Black female doctor who lives against the racist and sexist backdrop of the United States in 1876. Viveca’s personality, her quest to establish herself, and her relationship with Nate Grayson, the small-town mayor of her new home, never lose top billing.
Sometimes the historical events become so interesting that it’s easy to forget that it’s the people who are actually the heart of any story. —Susanna Kearsley
But this can be hard to do. Susanna Kearsley admits that, “as a former museum curator, I’m probably more finicky with the facts than I need to be,” but, “I think the most important thing I try to remember with any of my stories is that the characters should always be playing in front of the history, and not the other way around. That’s the balance I need to get right in a book — sometimes the historical events become so interesting that it’s easy to forget that it’s the people who are actually the heart of any story, just as people are the most important thing to me in real life. So I strive to keep them front and centre.”
People over events. That seems to be the winning formula.
Research Is God – But There Is More Than One Way to Worship
Good writers of historical fiction do copious amounts of research. But contrary to what one might believe, research and writing aren’t split into two clear stages: you don’t finish the research stage and move on to the writing stage, never again to look up a piece of information. Kearsley says that “the research and the writing are intertwined, for one thing, because I never know what I’m going to need to know until I reach the point in the writing where I’m ‘blind,’ and can’t see what I’m trying to look at, and then I have to stop writing and go hunt down the information I need.”
If you’re wondering about research sources, it turns out they’re wide and varied. For Kearsley, they’re “a mix of online and offline — increasingly offline, now that AI has made Google useless as a tool for leading me to posts and articles.” On her part, Jenkins explains: “I conduct my research through books, articles, and sometimes diary entries tied to whatever period is pertinent to the project.” She adds that she’s “also mindful of the gaze employed. If I’m researching Native American history, for example, I make sure to incorporate the scholarship of historians who are of that culture.”
Kearsley agrees that you can’t take any research source at face value: “I had a great professor at university, for my third-year Political Enquiry and Analysis class, who brought in a handful of books on the Cuban Missile Crisis — one by a French historian, one by a Russian, one by an American, one by a Canadian, and so on — and tossed them all onto a table, and told us, ‘Now, read those, because somewhere in the middle of all those is what really happened.’ That’s still how I approach my sources.”
There is also a prevailing belief that primary sources are always better than secondary sources. Jenkins doesn’t agree with this: “Sometimes secondary sources can be as valuable as primary sources. It depends on the project.” But Kearsley does: “I believe in the Best Evidence Rule, which is a legal concept meaning that you shouldn’t submit a photograph of a hammer as evidence in a trial, for example, if you possess and can submit the actual hammer. You always go back to the best evidence available, and for me, that’s the original, primary document. Secondary sources already have a layer of someone else’s interpretation added onto them, and you can’t always see what’s been edited out of the original, or added. Small changes of wording or translations can make an enormous difference, as can the bias of the person writing the secondary source.”
“Sources written by historians of color have always been available but not routinely embraced by the majority culture because history is written by the conquerors.” —Beverly Jenkins
Still, that doesn’t mean she blindly accepts what the primary source says as fact: “When you’re doing historical research, you also have to take into account the bias of the person writing the original, and not assume that they’re telling you the absolute truth, either. And you have to realize that the voices of some people — women, Indigenous people, people of colour, LGBTQ people — are going to be much harder to find in most historical primary sources. You often have to search for them within the letters of other people, as when a man is writing to another man about what his wife is doing, or what his servant is doing. You can also look for those missing voices in poetry and art, if it survives.”
The voices of some being harder to find is something that’s echoed by Jenkins, but with one major caveat: “sources written by historians of color have always been available but not routinely embraced by the majority culture because history is written by the conquerors.”
Fact and Fiction Feed into Each Other
One of the first questions I jotted down when I started to work on this post was whether fact and fiction feed into each other. According to Kearsley, they do, to often fabulous results: “In my book A Desperate Fortune, I used a French Almanac from the year of my story to help plan the movements of my characters. Among other things, it very usefully gave the times of all my characters needed to get from Paris to Lyon, but the timing of events in the plot meant they would have been too late to catch the scheduled diligence, or stagecoach, that would take them there directly. I could have simply changed the time the actual diligence left Paris, but I prefer to leave the facts the way they are when I can, and work around them. So instead, I sent my characters on a different, more roundabout route, by a later diligence, that ended up adding a few extra days and adventures to their travels and, in the end, created a more interesting and exciting journey than if they’d gone straight from Paris to Lyon.”
Please tell me I’m not the only one delighted by the notion of an entire portion of a book being inspired by the scheduled time of a French diligence in 1732.
How Accurate Should Historical Fiction Be?
We have come to the crux of this post, the idle question that sent me down this particular rabbit hole in the first place. Yes, historical fiction is still fiction, and therefore largely about entertainment, but if you’re writing it, what’s your responsibility to the time period you’re writing about? How much accuracy do you owe to your characters? To your readers?
Author Elizabeth Chadwick expresses irritation with people who say, “if I want facts, I’ll look in a history book.” She believes that “the story must rest solidly on historical integrity.” But she adds an additional layer here: “I don’t say accuracy because that has different connotations. With the best will in the world, no author can get everything right.” It’s an astute observation, because the definition of ‘accuracy’ is, according to Merriam-Webster, “freedom from mistake or error: correctness.” Nobody can guarantee complete freedom from mistakes or errors about our own lives, let alone about periods of time when we were not even alive.
Still, I will continue to use the term accuracy here because that’s the accepted term in discussions about historical fiction. But keep in mind that I’m using it loosely, and with the meaning of “respecting and being true to historical fact” rather than being about “freedom from mistake or error.”
Chadwick states that “there’s nothing to stop us from obtaining a thoroughly good grounding in our chosen period and doing the best we can. Indeed, it’s essential. If you are twisting history to suit the story then you’re not a good enough writer.” Personally, and with the caveat that I’ve never written a work of historical fiction myself, I agree wholeheartedly.
We already live in a world full of lies and “alternative facts” (and boy, do I hate this term with a passion). With the rise of generative AI, mistruths and misinformation are a bigger problem than ever before. It is my belief that if you’re committing yourself to writing about something, you commit to writing about it as truthfully as possible. The general adage of “don’t speak about things you don’t know” — such good advice and so generally ignored in this age of thinking everyone needs to have an opinion about everything — is doubly true here.
And truly, as Chadwick puts it, isn’t “part of the absolute fun of being a historical novelist working out how to weave history and story together so that the facts are not distorted but the story remains so good that you’re going to make people lose sleep over it”?
English (US) · 