In an article for Writer’s Digest, Shelly Sanders shares tips on balancing history and story in historical fiction. “Making characters relatable, focusing on events that have the greatest impact on protagonists, and engaging the senses are key to captivating historical fiction that is not weighed down by the past,” Sanders says.
Character is your key to historical fiction, Sanders says. “How people react to events is crucial to balancing history and story,” she writes. “They have to be compelling, with quirks, flaws, needs, and secrets, and they must resonate with readers.” When she wrote her novel, Daughters of the Occupation, Sanders put aside her research and focused on her main character. “If she was going to live through pivotal historical events, if she was going to be authentic, I had to know her inside and out,” Sanders notes.
Once she understood her hero, Sanders built her character arc by merging the turning points of her development with the major historical events of the German and Russian occupations of Latvia. To do this, Sanders:
- Drew a straight line with significant historical events noted
- Added a bell curve above this line to indicate spots where her heroine encounters obstacles
- Compared her character’s journey with the sequence of events, making sure that the internal growth of her character corresponded with the external occurrences
For example, the first crucial historical event – the unexpected Soviet occupation – occurs at the same time her heroine is on the way to the hospital to give birth. “Readers are immediately invested in Miriam, who becomes physically and emotionally traumatized by the Soviet occupation,” Sanders says. “By interconnecting the past with a distinctive personality, the reader understands how and why a character reacts to certain events. Decisions and interior thoughts feel more believable, more authentic within the context of history.”
Once your character is established, it’s important that you choose the right historical events. “If you think about best-selling historical fiction, you’ll see that writers don’t jolt readers from the story with info dumps,” Sanders writes. “Rather, history, plot, and characters are woven seamlessly together.” She recommends focusing on the big turning points and avoiding the tangential occurrences that you might find during your research. Because there were so many atrocities committed during the Nazi occupation, Sanders had to pull back on her anecdotes, lest she overwhelm the reader with horrifying details.
“If you understand the importance of remarkable people, set amidst a place and time that come alive through words that evoke the senses, then you are well on your way to writing historical fiction that balances history and story,” Sanders concludes.
