At this point in my writing journey, I’ve reached the place where people now ask the questions I’ve heard before as a panel member or at an in-person event. Here are some of them:

Do you just make history up? (No, everything I write is based in some historical event.)

If someone didn’t like history in school, why would they read your book? (Because I had history teachers who made history a way of telling a story and not rote memorization, and my books are character-driven with an historical backdrop.)

How do you make history interesting? (See the answer above.)

Do you research? (Do I ever, since I was trained as an historian, and boy, sometimes the rabbit holes are so fascinating to fall into.)

Do you use real historical characters or just make people up? (Both.)

Writing About the Past

I was lucky to have a couple of teachers in high school and more in college who approached history as a story, not a list of dates and events. They emphasized the lives of people in a particular era and their position in the social, political, and economic background of the era. For example, in a decade where in the south the Civil War’s Centennial was being celebrated with parades and reenactments, I had a teacher who gave us the other side of the story, how enslaved peopled lived inside a system that treated them as mere property. Of course, that challenged what I’d been taught in elementary school, which was that enslavers treated their property like family and the enslaved were content and comfortable with their lives. That was the genesis of my looking at all the history I’d learned to date with a cynical eye.

When you’re taught history this way, the story of people and how they lived, writers have an unending source of inspiration. And readers are drawn to historical fiction for this same reason–interesting, believable characters they can relate to.

Of course, as the writer of historical fiction, you have to balance historical accuracy with telling a good story. They aren’t mutually exclusive. Because readers may have knowledge of the era you’re writing about, you have to include enough accuracy to keep them from putting your book in their DNF pile. I did that with a novel loosely based on the lives of women pilots in early aviation history, but not because the aviation aspects weren’t accurate. They were spot on. About midway through the book in 1920, the protagonist, a composite character of several early women pilots, decides to drive to Newport, RI to recover from a failed romance.

At first, I wondered why she didn’t fly, but I remembered, because I’d flown into Newport’s current airport many times, that a fully functional civilian airport didn’t open in Newport until 1929. So, the protagonist drove, and even though she was a pilot, she found herself fearful of heights while crossing the Newport Bridge (now the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge), a two-plus-mile suspension bridge that connects Jamestown Island in Narragansett Bay to Aquidneck Island, where Newport is located.

Remember, this was set in 1920, and because I’d spent so much time in Newport, I knew that bridge didn’t open until 1969. And that was a piece of information easily confirmed. Granted, this was pre-Google, but before Google there were encyclopedias and librarians who could point you to helpful books. For Newport in particular, it had a tourist information office. A phone call would have confirmed that the bridge didn’t exist in 1920 but that a ferry did, one that transported people, horse-drawn carriages, and early automobiles.

This was when I was still only writing sketches and disconnected scenes that I would later expand into my historical espionage fiction, and it cemented for me that whatever I wrote that authenticity, accuracy, are more important than using the right dates and facts. I could research and make my story as realistic as possible, but the story was more important. That’s what people would read and appreciate, the story, because the dates and facts would take them back to the boring, rote learning of their youth.

Even though I write about history that’s happened in my lifetime, I still have to research then figure out how my characters can fit into the event I’m focusing on. You see, I can’t put aside the historian or the history teacher inside me. I want to teach history and the lessons associated with it, but I understand that to fulfill that goal, no matter how interesting or relatable the characters are, the story has to be authentic.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll outline how I approach writing historical fiction, and I hope I answer a lot of questions about how one can write good historical fiction.