I’ve attended and taught workshops where this adage is the first thing mentioned, but for here, it’s Part 3 of Writing Historical Fiction.
“Research like an historian; write like a novelist.”
Research for me is as much fun as the writing. (And writing should be fun. If you find yourself dreading it, time for a break.) I learned to research at an early age. If I’d ask my dad any sort of “Why is . . .?” question, he’d lead me to the set of encyclopedias he’d bought me even before I could read. He’d select the volume pertaining to the question I’d asked and say, “Here. You find the answer and come back and tell me what you found.” I eventually reached the point where I didn’t ask him. I went straight to the encyclopedias.
Of course, being a curious kid, I’d go down all sorts of rabbit holes in those encyclopedias, and that was fun, too. This still happens to me except now the rabbit holes are on the internet.
Whether he realized it or not, Dad was setting me up perfectly for high school and college history classes. In my college Marxism/Leninism course, my proposed paper topic was Stalin as insane and not a communist. “But, he was a Communist! You’ll risk getting a bad grade if you pursue this,” said the professor. Me being me, I wrote the paper, an in-depth, well-researched paper with specific citations on Stalin’s behavior. I got an A.
Fiction is a different animal. The research is as important, but the writing is different. In nonfiction you aren’t supposed to speculate, and if you posit something that conflicts with a common belief, you better have your facts in a row to support it. Fiction lets your imagination off the leash, and the research comes in when that wild-a$$ idea you have can’t be placed in the era you’re writing about. (Like the Newport Bridge being placed in the 1920s; see Part 1.)
If you want an authentic story with relatable, believable characters, you don’t simply get an overview of the historical time period. You need to learn everything about that era: the politics of the time, the cultural norms and aberrations. What was the level of technology? What kinds of jobs did people have? How did religion come into play? What kind of food did people eat according to their social status? What kind of clothes did they wear? ( I really hate seeing zippers in Regency era or Civil War era TV shows and movies.) What was the level of medicine? And lastly, what was daily life like for a woman, a man, a child, a rich person, a poor person, etc.
Your story may focus on only one aspect or one event in a past era, but your story isn’t complete unless you enhance that story with politics, culture, etc. Because they all affect each other and the story and the characters.
Research finds you all those answers, and even in this current digital age, the primary sources you need still come from letters (emails), diaries (social media), newspapers, photographs, history books and monographs, documentaries, and legal records among others. A great deal of information about births, deaths, marriages, divorces, land sales, and so on are public record. Librarians are still the original Google or other search engine. The resources are endless, but you, the writer, have to make the effort to assure your historical backdrop is authentic.
Because some reader will know when it’s not and call you on it.
With so many primary sources and other resources, it can be daunting to keep track of everything you’ve learned. Inevitably, you’ll lose something, like the URL of a web site that had exactly what you needed to know and which you can’t find again. Even today, technology does have its limitations. This happened to me a lot before I started using a word processing program called Scrivener. (By the way, I’m not a spokesperson for Scrivener and not trying to sell you anything. I’m only a satisfied user.) On your composition page in Scrivener, in the left column you have a tab called Research.
In the Research tab I put notes I’ve made on characters, setting, and all that political, cultural “stuff” I mentioned earlier. I also include the URLs of the sites where I found this information, so that if I need to go back and check something I don’t have to hunt on the Internet for hours.
This is one way to keep your research notes organized. When I was in college, I kept all my notes and the primary sources for them on separate index cards. Before Scrivener, I printed notes, clipped newspaper and magazine articles, took screenshots of photos on the Internet, and collected books then stored them in large plastic bins. (A couple of them from my earliest books are still in my attic.) Other writers I know use Excel spreadsheets the same way I use Scrivener. You have to decide which method works best for you, but remember, good research is key, even knowing that probably 80% of what you discover in that research never makes it into your novel.
So, let’s talk about a couple of elephants in the room, Wikipedia and AI.
Wikipedia has its uses, only not as a primary source. I use it as a starting point, and even if it leads me somewhere, I go to primary sources to confirm what I’ve learned. Wikipedia definitely tries harder to provide footnotes and source material than it did when it first started, but there’s nothing quite like a primary source. The rule of thumb back in my college days was if you found the same fact in three different primary sources, take it as fact. Wikipedia does, in some cases, point you to some primary sources.
And AI. We can’t seem to escape it. Even on all the well-used search engines, there are AI “assistants.” I’ve found they’re much like Wikipedia except that Wikipedia’s overviews are more extensive. Most AI assistants do provide sources for the overview they provide, though they’re not necessarily primary ones.
At some point, you have to decide when it’s time to start writing after all that research. I’m a bit of an outlier in this respect. When I get an idea, I do some general research to get a feel for the topic. Then, as a scene comes to me, I write it. Before long I have a collection of unconnected scenes, and transitions between those scenes is often where I do my in-depth research. Some writers have to do every bit of research before they start to write. Again, it’s whatever works for you. And this is one of the most difficult things to learn: when to stop with the research and write the story.
Unfortunately, there’s always another fascinating rabbit hole, calling your name.
