Itchy Bitesized 34: Ten Things That Go Wrong With Historical Fiction
And not only with beginners' fiction.
There’s nothing like getting stuck into the 120 or so titles entered for the HWA Gold Crown for Historical Fiction for a crash course in the best and the worst that my beloved Hist Fic can do. The other judges and I were really proud of that longlist for the 2024 prize, but the dark underbelly of such lists is, of course, the not-so-good books
A tiny handful of not-good books annoyed me by their absolute clichéd laziness, but there were armloads that I felt sad about, because they could so easily have been so much better. So this post in the Itchy Bitesized Series is a quick round-up of the most common things that go wrong in the historical fiction that I see in students’ work, in published fiction and my own early drafts.
There’s more on all this in my book Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction, and you might also be interested in the History Quill Writers’ Convention*, which is online Friday 7th-Sunday 9th February 2025. I’m giving a keynote presentation and Q&A, ‘Writing Compelling Historical Fiction’, on the Saturday, and it would be great to see you there.
Titles and Names. If you don’t know why novelist Harriet Vane’s married name is Lady Peter Wimsey, when her married sister-in-law is Lady Mary Parker, but the wife of Sir Harry Smith is Juana, Lady Smith, then please don’t put a famous general or a duke’s offspring in your novel. I don’t give a toss for the peerage’s feelings, but I do give a great many tosses for getting things right, out of respect for my readers and to help them to make that crucial trust-fall. This is a quick summary, and author Philip Womack here explains why what sounds like a ridiculously arcane bit of fogeyish fussery actually matters. It helps to sink into Georgette Heyer’s worlds: she never writes ‘my lord’ when the character should say ‘your lordship’, or ‘madame’ for ‘madam’.
Thinking that good research is the key to good writing. It isn’t. Good technique is the key to good writing, whereas good research is merely necessary, not sufficient. To riff on Graham Greene as quoted by Rose Tremain, the researched material is the historian’s to remember, and the fiction-writer’s to forget. Our job is to reimagine the material, and allow it to ‘rise into the orbit of the anarchic, gift-conjuring, unknowing part of the novelist's mind before it can acquire its own truth for the work in question’. What’s more, as I said here, what historians write needs treating with caution, because they’re in the business of synthesising a general picture from particular experience, but novelists absolutely must do it the other way round.
Not researching manners, mores and social codes. Writers who are superb in their physical world-building - clothes, transport, food, armies - often still go very wrong in the social and ethical side of things. It’s hard for us to imagine that two men calling each other by their surnames could also be devoted friends; that spouses or engaged couples in love still call each other Mr and Mrs/Miss; that good people could have a worldview which accepts class structures, colonialism or corporal punishment as not merely inevitable but actually desirable. If you don’t research these things and get them right, your historical fiction won’t have the sting of the real-and-strange that hist fic fans are yearning for. If you’re worried that your readers will find it alien, you’ll just have to work a bit harder, not to make them buy into those views, but to want to follow the characters who hold them.
No sense of the religious dimension of life and society. It’s incredibly difficult for 21st century humans to imagine themselves into a society where it never occurs to almost anyone that there just is nothing beyond the realm of material reality. But that is what you’re dealing with when you’re dealing with history, and you’re likely also to be dealing with many people who accept the necessity of, for example, the death penalty over theological issues like the Real Presence. Yes, there were always a few people who didn’t see how what the deity/ies were said to do, they could possibly actually do; there were plenty of others who didn’t feel anything that we would call spiritual. But until the 20th century, in every society, religion was stitched into every social, economic, political, educational, scientific and artistic structure, and you can’t build your world without some sense of it being in there, seven days a week.**
An inconsistently historical voice. Voice in historical fiction can work as hard as Paul Kingsnorth in The Wake to channel an Anglo-Saxon narrator, or be as cheerfully modern-sounding as Robert Harris’s Romans in Pompeii. But once the reader’s made their trust-fall into voices of a certain register and is happily reading narration and dialogue as if they’re real (for now), a jolt into a different register jolts that trust.
An inconsistent relationship with the historical record. This is a more global version of the same problem. Readers will accept pretty much any relationship of the narrative to what they know of the record - from Wolf Hall to The Difference Engine - provided you figure out your own rules of creative engagement; then help the reader to (unconsciously) learn what those are; and finally make sure the rest of the story sticks to them.
Too much historical information. Oh, dear, we do love this stuff, don’t we! Readers do too, but they don’t realise that a book with an agenda of transmitting non-fiction material is never going to work as well as a book written to tell a cracking story. The needs of the story is the stringent sieve you must put everything through before it gets onto the page; all the other informational darlings should be tipped into the bin.
Not trusting the reader to make the connections with our own time and place. Of course historical fiction is ‘always, however obliquely, about the
time and place in which it is written’, as Jill Paton Walsh puts it at the beginning of Knowledge of Angels. But you when spell the connections out explicitly - when you not only give the reader 2+2 but put onto the page the =4 of what you want them to understand, as Andrew Stanton puts it - it’s like explaining why a joke is funny. For the full impact, you need the reader to reach the 4, the connection, on their own.
Pointing forwards all the time. However much doom-saying you stumble across in your morning scrolling, we humans mostly operate on the basis of the past and the present, not what the future may contain: historians will always prioritise change, but most humans are usually much more aware of the continuities of their time. That was even more true before the Internet, broadcasting, newspapers, government mails and people who could ride from Aix to Ghent. So although you may be writing a certain time, place and people because they mean something to us, now, those people don’t know what is coming. Don’t make them unnaturally perceptive or farsighted, let alone clairvoyant: the reader will feel explained-at.
Imagining, reading and writing through a ‘Victorian’ lens. For example, forget the angel-in-the-house: until the Victorians came along, women’s sexuality was generally thought to be more licentious, demanding and uncontrolled than men’s, which is a very different kind of misogyny - and some women in a some places had the vote. And of course there were Black people in Tudor England, not to mention in Roman Britain, but their experience was very different from that of later centuries once the Triangular Trade began to shape hearts and minds and not in a good way. The point I’m making is that the general reader’s general sense of the past is often seriously out of date, wildly simplistic, and frequently whiggish (in the historiographical sense). Nonetheless, if your sense of the past is like that too, readers will smell the second-hand, off-the-peg quality of what you write, and be unable to make the trust-fall. Even if you’re not writing an historically or currently disadvantaged group, my post about how to write ethically without clipping your creative wings can help you to research and inhabit the otherness of the past and its people.
*That’s an affiliate link, which means I get a tiny bit of cash, and you get my thanks, if you book through this link.
**The best expression of this I’ve come across is actually by an unbeliever: when Charles Darwin compared his lack of belief to his wife Emma’s Unitarian faith, he said it was as if she could see a dimension of the physical world that he could not: as if she saw in colour, whereas he was colour-blind.
Emma Darwin, your advice on historical writing is consistently superb. I referenced it recently in a workshop on writing historical fiction. Your book 'Get Started In Writing Historical Fiction' is one I thoroughly recommend. That brilliant book should be, in my view every historical fiction author's bible. Thank you for reminding me of these salient points which I using it as a check list while ploughing forward towards my next historical novel. I am so very grateful for your generosity in sharing knowledge.
I’m deep into second draft of a HF novel, early 17th century, moving between the Jewish, Catholic and Muslim worlds of Venice and Istanbul/Constantinople.
My content editor/wife often commented early on that the scenes where characters suddenly asked others to convert, or themselves converted, almost on a whim, seemed outlandish. But it was a real thing. An at times obsessive concern for the spiritual welfare of others.