In an article for Writer’s Digest, Catherine Hokin shares six tips for writing great historical fiction that balances the truth with imagination. Hokin’s lessons learned include:
- No matter how far back you go, you can’t escape the present. “History, or our perception of it, shapes how we deal with the modern world and is often where we turn to make sense of the chaos,” Hokin writes. Readers will approach your work with that comparison in mind, so you shouldn’t romanticize places and situations, particularly traumatic events. What happened then might be repeating now.
- You will fall down more research rabbit holes than you knew could exist. “The research is fun and it’s vital, but the weight of details can drown your book,” Hokin cautions.
- Almost everything you know has no place on the page. “You are so immersed in your time period, you could write a doctoral thesis about it,” Hokin writes. “Don’t.”
- The facts are the facts, and they deserve respect. You can play with some dates and places provided they don’t alter history, but some persons and events must be handled carefully.
- Your characters know a lot less than you do. While you know how events turn out in the long run, your characters don’t. You have to know your history and then forget it while you’re writing.
- You need to nail the details. “The battle plan might not matter, but how the sound of the carnage and the smell of the air really does,” Hokin writes. “As do the actions your characters can feasibly take.” Even unconventional characters need to act in accordance with their times.
