GU Creative Writing Society 2014
Week 8: Writing Historical Fiction
Points of interest:
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Aiming for realism?
Accuracy: getting your facts right. Can you think of any examples of literature that
succeeds or fails here?
Mood: how are you going to capture what it felt like in this period?
Dialect, accent, language: rather than engaging in lengthy descriptions of the
character which verge upon an encyclopaedic narrative, try establishing them
through dialogue
Clothes, architecture, technology and other objective details – the little things count
in giving your reader a sense of authenticity
Educating readers: how are you going to write without falling into the trap of
attempting to ‘educate’ your reader about the historical period
Using research: you may have compiled a ton of information on the Mayans, or
evacuees during WWII. That doesn’t mean you have to use all your facts and details;
think of them as a kind of bank upon which you can draw if you need to, but also
which sits in the back of your mind and helps you unconsciously when you write,
shaping your tone and descriptions to the stuff in your research
Establishing setting: it might help to reference real places, like street names, cities,
parks, train lines
Using real life characters: it might be interesting to take famous characters from
history and fill in the gaps of their lives, things you didn’t know about. These might
be weird, unexpected things which you can take as a kernel for your narrative and
then build upon: a suffragette with an addiction to shoplifting, the secret life of
George Washington’s dogs, the illicit affairs of Aristotle, Marx’s guilty pleasure of
online gambling (okay, that one is probably anachronistic – but that’s something you
should watch out for, unless you’re deliberately meshing together things from
different time periods).
Textuality: might it be useful to intersperse your text with ‘authentic’ documents:
fragments of diary entries, letters, stamps, a piece of a discoloured map?
Tip: go through a historical novel and pick out details about the time period. How
does the author ‘show’ them rather than ‘telling’ them? (Dialogue, setting etc). Can
you use similar techniques in your own writing?
Encyclopaedic fiction: a work of fiction which employs a variety of forms to
explore its subject exhaustively. For example, novels that include lectures on
particular topics, extracts from other non-fiction texts, historical artefacts etc.
Relating the past to the present: Perhaps try imagining the past as a prologue to
the present rather than a self-contained moment in history. How might the
characters in your novel imagine the future? For example, in Tom McCarthy’s C, one
character, who works with telegraphs, says that one day, “there'll be a web around the
world for them to send their signals down", thus predicting the internet.
The Historical as discourse/text:
Realism is all very well and good, but after all we know the past only through history, which
tends to be written. And where writing is concerned, bits of fiction, manipulations of the
GU Creative Writing Society 2014
‘truth’ creep in. History, they say, is always written by the winners. But what does this
actually entail about how we conceive of our past and its impact on the present? How can
fiction play with the subjective nature of historical narrative? Are you going to foreground
the discursive nature of history (something constructed in discourse rather than an objective
knowledge) or are you going to attempt to mime a historical ‘reality’?
Linda Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metafiction’:
‘What historiographic metafiction challenges is both any naive realist concept of
representation and any equally naive textualist or formalist assertions of the total separation
of art from the world’ (Linda Hutcheon)
‘Histiographic metafiction is particularly doubled […] in its inscribing of both historical and
literary intertexts. Its specific and general recollections of the forms and contents of history
writing work to familiarse the unfamiliar through (very familiar) narrative structures […] but
its metafictional self-reflexivity works to render problematic any such familiarisation’ (Linda
Hutcheon).
Key points: intertextuality, pastiche of registers and modes of discourse (historical, pop
culture, fiction, fantasy etc), metafiction (texts that foreground/reflect their own textuality),
postmodern scepticism of ‘truth’
Some useful advice:
‘It goes without saying that you’ve researched your historical facts, and that includes
manners and morals as well as stage-coaches and corsetry: how people behave in matters
of sex or smoking must be as accurate and convincing as how they cook or bet or fight.
You’ve kept a sharp eye out for things you didn’t know you had to check: don’t make your
medieval peasants eat potatoes or your Regency heroine tell her fiancé to ‘step on the gas’,
and don’t forget that everyone always wears a hat outdoors. You’ve read writing of the period
and found a voice for your novel that’s neither incomprehensible, nor twee pastiche, nor
crashingly modern.
And then you must leave it all behind, because you’re not writing history, you’re writing
fiction, and fiction is all about what you can make the reader believe you know:
not what you’ve learnt in a library, but what you know as naturally as you know your own
house. The worst writing you’ll ever do is what you write when you’ve got a history book in
the other hand. The best is when your characters and their points of view are so alive to you
that of course you write what they see and how they see it, their voices filling that panelled
room or smoky alehouse.
And all of that must happen without you once letting the reins drop. Your readers want
to live and breathe history but they won’t keep reading if the narrative grinds to
a halt on a hill of historical detail. So find it all out, get it right, and then, in a sense,
forget what you’ve found and write. You’re telling stories, not histories’ (Emma Darwin)
http://www.historicalnovels.info/Writing-Historical-Fiction.html.
Exercise [individually or in pairs/groups]:
GU Creative Writing Society 2014
1) Pick a historical figure and attempt to reimagine a scene from their life. (Here are
some ideas to get you started: Henry VIII, Marilyn Monroe, Virginia Woolf, Churchill,
Hitler, Marie Curie, Leonardo Da Vinci).
OR
2) Pick a particular time and place in history and write a scene set within it.
Further Questions to consider:
How successful have you found historical novels in evoking the past? What literary elements
do they employ to effect this?
What television dramas/films could be classed as historical? To what extent do they recreate
the feel of the period, or do they feel too self-indulgent? Consider the popularity of the
‘costumer drama’: why do people like watching these things? How can you appeal to readers’
desire for a nostalgic, prettified or indeed goreified past?
Titanic, Braveheart, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Pride and Prejudice, Gone With the
Wind etc.
Some good examples of historical fiction and/or historiographic metafiction:
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Alasdair Gray, Poor Things
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Margaret Atwood, Penelopiad (rewriting the Greek story of Penelope: historical fiction as
feminist rewriting)
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies
Sir Walter Scott, The Waverley Novels
Tom McCarthy, C