Historical Fiction is a delightful genre to write in, my personal favorite and area of expertise, but there are a few things you have to know before jumping right in headfirst. So if you are working on your very first historical fiction novel or you are currently writing one this series is geared especially toward you.
In this first post we will be covering Location. One of the first things you need to do when writing a story is build the world and this is all too important in historical fiction. When writing about true events/stories there are two options for the choosing of locations after you know what kind of story you want to write and where in the world you are basing your story. Either a fictional location is created based on a real place, or a real place is used. There are pros and cons to both.
Fictional Locations: This is the method that I use most often. It is slightly simpler and leaves less room for your research to be questioned, and it will be questioned at some point in this journey. For example, if I was writing a story about what it was like to live in Russia during the communist regime and my character was not living in one of the big cities like Moscow or Saint Petersburg I would make up a town using information from other real life towns in the area I was placing mine. The first thing you do is decide where, geographically, in the country you want to place your town/city, so for the purpose of this example I am deciding that I want my Russian town to be located twenty kilometers east of Moscow. Mytishchi is a real, non fictional town that lies 20 kilometers east of the capital and so my next step would be to do some research about Mytishchi and figure out what the landscape is like, are the towns in that area bigger or smaller? Are there natural resources that can be harvested in the area? How affected was Mytishchi by communist rule?
After you find out some basic facts about real towns surrounding the location you want to put your town in (don’t forget to take plenty of notes) you’ll want to come up with a name for your town. (These two steps can be swapped in order if you would like, this is just the process I typically use.) Now comes a question that I always ask myself when naming my towns: Is there a specific word that describes the town or the people living there? Let’s go back to our Russian example. If the word Hostile best describes my town then I will go and translate that word into the native language of whatever country I’m writing about, in our case Russian, and then, depending on whether the word is pretty easily pronounceable and I like how it sounds, I’ll use it as the name for my town. Alright, we’ve covered geographical location, the first layer of research, and naming your town, so now we’ll move on to the second option when choosing a location.
Real Places: One other reason why I like to create fictional towns in my stories is because I can take a little bit more creative licence than if I were using a real location, however, in every Historical Fiction piece I’ve ever written I have either mentioned or used real towns/cities/sites. Let’s go back to our Russia example. Say we have our fictional town where our characters live and grow but we know that our town is 20 kilometers away from St. Petersburg which means, seeing as St. Petersburg is one of the biggest cities in Russia, it would make sense for us to at least mention it and/or have our characters go to the city. Keep in mind that we are writing Historical Fiction not simply Fiction so we need to be researching events that happened in our chosen time period all around the country/area of interest so we’re well informed. But enough about that, we’ll talk more about historical accuracy and artistic licence another time.
Say we chose to base our story in St. Petersburg instead of outside. If we did that we would need to do even more research (which is super fun so don’t feel daunted by that process!) because when an author is writing about a specific place in the world many readers (myself included) will feel inspired by the story to go and do some of their own research on that place and time which means that, if we wrote a wrong date into the story or an event that actually happened in Moscow instead of St. Petersburg those fascinated readers could catch it and then we’re on a whole loop of confusion and chaos that was caused because we didn’t do our research or took too much artistic liberties.
Now is when we can remember that we are still writing Fiction even though it’s based off of real events. Most Historical Fiction authors (such as myself) choose to create fictional characters that live in the real, historical world (You can totally use real life historical figures if you so choose, I do love reading books like that, however that gets even more tricky. Another subject for another time.) but this, in my mind, is the best part. Character development is something I could do and talk about for forever and a day, this is when your characters come alive! The fun part about Historical Fiction is that you can create your own, special, lovely characters and then place them in that world. You can make one character a French resistance fighter, another an exiled duke or duchess, and yet another a German soldier who’s trying desperately to escape the army. But you need to make sure that your characters have a thoroughly researched world that they can live and breathe in. Remember to take copious amounts of notes as you’re doing your research so you can go back to them and check yourself as you continue to weave your story.
Alright! We’ve now had a crash course in locations for Historical Fiction novels! Every author is different and has a different writing style which is partly what makes books so beautiful, so remember that this is only my method, you don’t have to follow it explicitly, in fact I would encourage you to take what you want from it and then build your own. Find out how you best do your research and build your world and let yourself take off and fly!
Happy Writing!