This sense of time as past, even lost, as something intangible and out of sync with what we see in the world around us today, would seem to capture many the challenges which face any writer (whether writing fiction or non-fiction) who seeks to recreate often elusive historic worlds.

• What did it smell like, look like, feel like?
• How did people speak to each other, understand each other, how did they travel from place to place?
• How did they spend their day to day lives?

So how do we start to rediscover those past worlds, and to build narratives within them in ways that feel authentic and anchored, but also accessible? My advice is to immerse yourself, as much as is possible, in the world you want to create. Here are some suggestions for where and how you might begin:

What can you read?

Find out what writing available from the period you want to write about. Are there novels or letters, diaries perhaps? These are incredible resources, not just for information, but for thinking about the voices of characters and the kinds of language they might have used.

Where can you go?

Are there places related to your story that you can go to visit? Museums, houses, or even streets that are well preserved, can all help you to feel what a time might have been like. For example, and author hoping to write about Anne Boleyn might head to Blickling Hall in Norfolk (where she was rumoured to have been born), Hever Castle in Kent (where she was raised), or the Tower of London (where she died).

What can you see?

What objects survive from the time that might give you an idea of how people lived and experienced their lives? These might be clothes in museums, or jewellery, furniture or books. All of this can help to build up a sense of what your characters might have seen day to day, and how they would have lived in it.

Picturing your characters.

If you are writing out people who really lived, are their paintings or photographs of them? If you are creating characters, find images of people from their time. What do they look like, how is their hair done, what do they wear? From this you can start to reconstruct their worlds.

Try taking just one of these prompts to begin with, perhaps an object that one of your characters owned, or that you can imagine them owning.

Write a paragraph imagining that character using the object and see how they start to come to life. Or perhaps imagine your character in a place, and describe them inhabiting this space, sitting, walking, writing. What does it look like, how might they respond to what they see and feel there? By immersing yourself in the fabric of the time and place you are writing about you can start to see it come to life.

Much of the material you imagine, and produce may not make it into your final work, but that’s ok. The more concrete your perception of the world you build, the more realistic and compelling your narrative will become.