Author, editor, attempter of this thing called life. Social anxiety warrior. Re-Connections, a collection of short stories, published with Ocelot Press, 15/10/2025.
As I’ve said before, sometimes, for the sake of the story, you have to deviate from known historical facts. When this happens, always include a historical note explaining it.
One of the best places to go to for some in-depth researching is a museum. You can find answers to your questions from the exhibits, on information boards, from computer screens, audio guides or human guides. Displays often show how ordinary people lived. Libraries contain books that provide specialised information and museum shops sell books and objects that can help you reconstruct the background to your novel.
I don’t want to compile a list of all authors who write/wrote historical fiction – just those I have read and those I feel I ought to read.
I haven’t actually read a lot of historical fiction. These are the authors I remember having read:
Which other authors should I read now? Any recommendations?
Some writers prefer not to mention famous people. They write about the unknown people. That way, the characters are formed purely by imagination… and knowledge about how people were and how they behaved at that time and in that place.
Others purposely write about famous people. They leave themselves more open to criticism, because they can’t always stick to the truth, but we’d be poorer without their stories.
Two very different sorts of travelling could feature in your story.
The characters will probably need to get to other places at some point – places that are too far to reach on foot. The time and place will determine the mode of transport they use. Obviously they won’t travel by car or bus or train in the sixteenth century. But it’s not enough to plonk your characters in a carriage. You have to know what the carriage looks like, inside and out. You have to know what it feels like to ride on the roads of the time, and how often they stop to give the horses a rest or to leave the horses behind and continue with refreshed horses.
![By Sipyardbelize (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://miriamdrori.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/horseandcarriage.jpg)
Then there’s the other sort of journey that traverses time. For some reason I haven’t managed to find the answer to this question: in a time-travel novel, who or what does the travelling? Is there one character (or more) who starts off in one year and find herself in another? Or does the story do the travelling by showing two or more different eras in which the characters are connected in some way? Could someone explain, please?
You start with ideas. A period in history, a place, an event plants an idea in your mind. How do you make it lead to a novel?
Then, when you know all your characters well enough, you use your imagination to weave a story around them.
———————————————————————
We modern day authors are so lucky. Whatever we might wonder, almost any question we want to ask will have been answered on the Internet.
Which songs were popular in England in January, 1922?
What was the world’s first postage stamp?
You can find all the answers at the touch of a button or two.
BUT
Sometimes there are mistakes on the Internet. Sometimes you need more detail than you can find on the Internet. The Internet is not enough. It can be very helpful and it can set you on the right path, but it doesn’t replace detailed and well-researched
BOOKS.
So you’ve done your research, you’ve asked experts and still there are things you don’t know.
Why did Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) fall out with the Liddell family?
How did the cliff dwellers of Montezuma Castle manage their days?
You need to answer these questions, but no one knows the answers. What do you do? You make informed guesses based on the information you have been able to discover. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that, because this is fiction.
I asked Nancy Jardine, whom I interviewed here and who writes – amongst other genres – historical novels set in Celtic/Roman Britain, for one example of when she had to make an informed guess. This is her response:
I’ve had to do a fair bit of that in my Celtic Fervour Series, the reasons being that the only source materials for the times are Greek or Roman – and biased at that. The Celts left no written evidence at all – save what’s found on stone inscriptions. In Book 3 of the series, I have a large battle at a place named Beinn Na Ciche (Gaelic for a hill range that’s nine miles from my home). Bennachie, as it’s currently called on the map, is only one possible site earmarked by historians for a battle between Romans and Celts that the Roman historian Tacitus wrote about. The thing is that Tacitus may only have been attempting to make his father-in-law Agricola seem like a greater general than he really was. None of the other Scottish contender sites – for what was later named the Battle of Mons Graupius by early Victorians – have provided conclusive evidence. I made my ‘informed’ choice and decided that the topographical information given by Tacitus matched the landscape around Bennachie, but even more important for me was that in 2006 local archaeologists decided that the Romans had had some 30,000 soldiers in Durno – a marching camp opposite the fooothills of Bennachie. The number of soldiers (which is drawn from archaeological evidence and not written evidence) was sufficient for me to use the site in my novel. In fact most of what I’ve written as historical facts on Celtic life is drawn from purely archaeological sources and is therefore all interpretative.
I’m interrupting the flow of daily A-Z posts for two reasons.
The first is that I have paid a (blog) visit to Ailsa Abraham at Bingergread Cottage. I had so much to say (prompted by her hospitality, or was it something else?) that she divided it into two parts: one and two.
The second reason is to say something about the festival of Passover. I don’t think I’ve ever posted anything about it, because it always comes at the same time as the A-Z challenge. There is so much I could say, but I’ll just tell you about the story behind our Seder plate.
The word seder means ‘order’ or ‘procedure.’ In this case, it refers to the ceremony and festive meal observed at the start of the week-long festival. On the Seder plate are six different items of food that symbolise aspects of the Passover story: the exodus from Egypt.
We never had a special plate for this until we inherited this one when my mother died in 2011. But I knew the story of how my parents had acquired it.
They were on holiday in Ilfracombe in Devon one year and happened to spot this beautiful plate adorned with pictures of the ten plagues in the window of an antique shop. It wasn’t expensive, so they went in to enquire. The underside of the plate shows that it was made in England by Royal Cauldon. The shopkeeper had no idea what it was. There were dishes to match the plate. Unfortunately, two of them were broken and had been glued together (or did my mother do the glueing – I’m not sure). Also, some dishes are missing while others are duplicated.
But they bought the set anyway, and now we use it every year. And each year we comment on the mistake in the Hebrew. One of the food items is salt water. In Hebrew, the word for water is always plural and the adjective (salted) has to agree with the noun. Here it doesn’t.
Never forget that what you have written is fiction. If people get too serious about how real the story is and suggest things might not have happened that way, remind them they didn’t happen in any way because the story is fictional. However much you tried to be true to history, the fact remains: it’s made up.
Have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
