Researching for historical fiction can be intimidating. Where to start? What if I get it wrong? How much research is enough? Here are some tips I use when researching my books.
1. Start broad.
Think of researching your story like starting a painting. You want to collect references and do a set of rough sketches first. It’s not the time to sweat the details (that time will come.)
Get your bearings in the events and time period you want to write about, then focus on the story. The story will tell you where you need to dig deeper.
2. Keep an open mind.
Enter your research with an open mind. Almost every past period comes with a heavy burden of preconceptions that may or may not be based in fact. Be open to letting the research inspire your story and take you in unexpected directions.
The deeper you get into the story, the more fixed certain decisions will become. But at the outset, be open to the stories you might discover in your research.
3. Always check the bibliography.
The deeper you want to get into a subject, the more specialist the information you’re looking for will be. When reading a book on a broad topic, check the footnotes and endnotes for references that could provide more insight into specific details.
4. Seek out primary sources, but don’t trust them.
A primary source is a document or account written during the time period you’re researching. They are invaluable for the insight they can provide into the values, writing styles, and perspectives of people who were contemporaneous to or even witnesses to certain events.
But just as you can’t trust everything your uncle posts on the internet, primary sources are written by people with their own blindspots and agendas. In addition, the farther back in time you go, the more you will encounter inequities in literacy, which means that primary sources you find will tend to reflect the values of a certain narrow class of people.
Priorities and the way people use language have both changed over time. Just because you’ve found a primary source and read it, doesn’t mean you have fully understood what the writer was trying to say our how other readers at the time have read it.
This is why secondary sources exist: to collect evidence and offer interpretations for historical events, cultural trends, and ideas.
5. Universities are your friend.
Some universities let community members get library cards that allow them to access the library’s collections and interlibrary loan. This is a great way to access the kind of specialist texts that would otherwise be hard to come by or cost an arm and a leg to buy.
But you don’t need to become a historical expert to research historical fiction. You can also reach out to people who are already experts in the period you’re writing in. Historians and archivists can be valuable guides to where you should focus your precious research time; they’ve spent decades immersing themselves in study, but you don’t have time for that.
Historians can help you identify which secondary sources are worth investing time in yourself and they can also be valuable aids if, say, most the primary sources for your story are written in a language you don’t read.
6. Get out of the archive.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the archive. There are treasures to be found in the archive, if you dig deep enough and know how to look.
But if you want to tell a story, you need to move beyond what people thought about events and how they wrote about them and what the historians who came after those events think they mean and into the physical world of the past.
The people you are writing about had daily routines. They had little irritations they had to put up with everyday rooted in the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings of the world around them. When they entered a cathedral or when they crossed a field or when they dressed in the morning, it felt a certain way, they were greeted by certain familiar sights, they felt certain emotions.
If at all possible, visit locations in your story, or at least locations like them. Go to museums and spend time studying artifacts. Find the guides to various collections, which tend to be full of both photographs and valuable information about the items in the collections, how they were used, who would have owned them. Walk across the field yourself, through the streets of the town, find people who engage in old-fashioned ways of making things and let them tell you or show you how it was done.
Open your imaginative space to the material reality of your characters and how that might shape their values and actions.
7. Be a detective.
Follow your hunches. Pay attention to little details. Let them lead you to interesting discoveries. Seek out evidence to support those discoveries.
For example, a reference to the city of Ellwangen giving four Jewish families from Nördlingen permission to resettle and do business in Ellwangen in the 1640s was what first tipped me off that the Jews had been readmitted to Nördlingen during the Thirty Years War. They couldn’t very well move out of Nördlingen if they hadn’t moved in first! I followed this clue to find supporting evidence that this is indeed what happened.
8. Question your assumptions.
The farther back you go, the more you have to question your assumptions about how people thought and acted or even what technology they might have made regular use of.
A good story can withstand the occasional out-of-place detail, but if a plot point hinges on a medieval European character having an allergy to paprika, your reader will find it astounding that the character had access to the spice, which is made from the same red peppers that would not be known in Europe until after the colonization of the Americas.
It’s always best to check with an expert or do a little research, even if you think you know something, and especially if it plays a major role in the story.
9. It’s okay to make things up.
Historical fiction is a broad category, ranging from stories that are rigidly faithful to history to those that present alternate histories or even historical fantasies. Even when being faithful, it’s expected that some things will need to be invented. Readers are coming to learn something about history, but they’re also coming to be entertained.
What you invent and why is a topic for an entirely separate post, and you should understand that different readers have different expectations for how faithful their historical fiction should be. A good rule of thumb is that if you diver significantly from the historical record and you’re not otherwise advertising your book as alternate history, you mention it in an author’s note at the end.
But even the most thorough researcher will not find answers to all of their questions. There are some things we simply do not and will likely never know. That’s okay! That’s where you can use your imagination to fill in the gaps.
But if you’ve done your research, you can make more educated guesses and use that research to help your readers believe in your choices.
The 9th one is SUCH a cause for anxiety for me. I should have had this particular historical novel done last year but taking liberties with the lives of others is terrifying.