In my experience, historical fiction comes down to the flesh and the bones. You tend to start with one or the other.

Bones

Either you’ve got your ‘bones’; that is, the events. The character, date, inciting incident; the payoff. This makes a lovely sturdy framework for a novel but it’s bare and inert. Those bones need flesh. You add it with research, insight, and style: without these, your creature won’t learn to breath or move.

Flesh

Alternatively, you start with all the flesh – the wibbly squishy vibes-y stuff. You adore a specific era, place or historical figure. You know everything there is to know. You long to communicate the riches of this capacious period world you’ve discovered… but right now you have no plot to hang it on. It’s just a big soft blob, and it seems to be growing bigger and softer, beyond your control. You’ve written hundreds of pages and you’re still not sure what your novel’s even about

Here’s what I know: the soft stuff and the bony stuff need one another. Craft is what brings them together. Your plot and structure are there to draw the reader’s eye, and help navigate the world of the past. That soft squishy content must be paced and curated and sometimes ruthlessly culled (sorry!), but it’s no less important.

Stories aren’t discrete from their context. Convincing characters are products of time and place. So, while your plot showcases the bits of the past you love best, the past must infuse its sensibilities, facilitate its dialogues, and inform what is practically possible.

This sounds like a lot to incorporate but once you’ve built up your own creative toolkit, it’s not so insurmountable. You might even enjoy it.

Experiment

For now, here’s an experiment.

Ask yourself, what drew you to the era, character, or place you are writing? What would you most like to communicate about it to your reader? Perhaps there are films, books, exhibitions, pictures or buildings that embody the era for you, or which you’d like to emulate in some way?

Your version of a period or a story is going to be different from anyone else’s. You may want to create a mood board to bring those important elements together.

Imogen Hermes Gowar is the author of the bestselling novel The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, which won a Betty Trask Prize and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Sunday Times Young Writer Award.

She’s published a variety of short fiction as well as an augmented reality walking tour of medieval Norwich, Eleanor. She’s particularly interested in how we write the past, and the dazzling variety of form and style that exists within the genre of historical fiction. Imogen has taught creative writing for Arvon, The Literary Consultancy, and The Novelry, among many others.

Image © Jamie Barrs