Historical Fiction: The Story of Another Time

Historical fiction is set in a documented past and is bound by it. Its promise is a past that is entered rather than described, and its obligation is accuracy in the things a reader can check: dates, objects, technology, the way people spoke and what they could not have known. It is a genre of setting rather than of subject, so it overlaps with all the others. A mystery, a romance or a horror story may be historical, and when it is, two contracts are in force at once — the puzzle or the relationship must satisfy its own genre as well as the period. Its oldest difficulty is the modern mind in period clothes: a character who thinks in twenty-first-century categories will read as a costume rather than a person. Characteristic techniques - Research that shows in the choice of detail rather than in quantity: one tariff on salt tells more than a page of streets. - Period consciousness: what these people take for granted, and what they cannot possibly imagine. - The domestic fact over the parade: a kettle, a debt, a letter. - Invented characters placed among real events and kept out of the record's way. - A closing note on what was changed, for the reader's trust. An original example, written for this platform My sister was married in April and by June the register office had been given over to the counting of coal. She said it was a waste of a good room with good light. I said the light was the reason they wanted it, and she laughed at me, because I had said the sensible thing again, and she was nineteen and had already learned that sensible things are said by people who are not asked to manage. The clerk came on Thursdays. He had a ledger and a bad chest and a way of counting that never came out the same twice, and my sister stood at the window with her back to him, which was the only protest available in that building and that year. How the example works The period arrives through domestic detail — the coal, the register office, the ledger, the clerk's chest — and through the one line about protest, which tells the reader what kind of year this is without naming it. Nothing is explained historically, and the modern mind is kept out: the sister's grievance is a nineteen-year-old's as much as a citizen's. Practical guidance Write down what your character believes that people now would not, and what they cannot know. Choose two or three period objects and let them carry the date, and keep the plot's demands first, since a story cannot live on research. Exercise to try Write a page set before 1900, in which two people argue about money, using no word that would not have existed then and no sentence of explanation about the period. Revision tips Read for words that break the period, which are usually the abstract ones. Check that no character understands their own era's consequences. Verify the small facts you have chosen — the price, the season, the office — because one wrong detail costs the reader's trust in all of it. Finally, cut the history and keep the people.