Read everything you can. Get to know the place you’re writing about. Know when to stop researching and start writing. Those are three of the lessons I have learned in the last quarter century as a writer of popular history. My first book was an oral history of the Vietnam war based on interviews with […]
Dr Darwin’s Writing Tips
Our resident agony aunt, Dr Darwin, answers a common question: what counts as historical fiction? Dear Dr Darwin, I told my grandmother that I was writing a historical novel set in the Liverpool of the early Beatles, and she laughed so hard she nearly fell off her motorbike. I told my brother the Beatles weren’t […]
In Search of Mercia
Annie Whitehead on research roadblocks, and writing history when the evidence is elusive. I spend my life writing about the characters who inhabited ancient Mercia. The history of this Anglo-Saxon kingdom is full of colourful characters, some familiar – Lady Godiva and Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians – and some not so well-known, but no […]
Why Historical Fiction?
Novelist Andrew Martin considers why he’s drawn to writing historical fiction. I have written fourteen novels, most of them wholly or partly historical. (I say ‘wholly or partly’ because my latest, The Martian Girl, is set both in the modern day and 1898.) I am happy to identify as a historical novelist. It seems a logical […]
The Widow with the Lamp
Liz Macrae Shaw tells how a tragic family tale inspired a novel. The human brain is a story-seeking missile. From early childhood we search out stories, starting with our own personal ones. That’s why programmes about genealogy such as Who Do You Think You Are? have such an appeal and why family history is a […]
Historia Interviews: Antonia Hodgson and M J Carter
MJ (Miranda) Carter is the author of three books featuring 19th century detective duo Blake and Avery; Antonia Hodgson writes books featuring louche but good-hearted 18th century gentleman, Thomas Hawkins. Both write as their male first person narrators, and both their first novels, The Strangler Vine, and The Devil in the Marshalsea, were shortlisted for […]
Reliable Libel
When using real people in historical fiction, how far must you be true to them? Or, rather, how wildly may you traduce them? William Sutton ponders a common concern for writers. Do you worry about misrepresenting historical figures? “You faithless writer,” cry my characters, as I attribute to them words and attitudes they would renounce. […]
Research and Reenactment
Christian Cameron on how experimental archaeology and reenactment influence his writing. I was recently in a panel that discussed the limits of authenticity in historical fiction. A wide variety of views were put forth, including some that might surprise; one author suggesting that it was impossible for any modern writer to accurately understand, much less represent, […]