Historical fiction is not an easy genre. As you’ll see, there are challenges writing historical fiction.
Historical fiction is defined as a story taking place 50 or more years ago. Stories often include factual events and many times include real historical figures. According to Self-Publishing School, there are 21 subgenres.
Historical war fiction examines the impact of war and can be from the perspective of a civilian or a soldier. It also can be from the perspective of someone else involved in the war such as a political leader. My WWI Trilogy falls into this subgenre as it chronicles the experiences of a war nurse and her family.
Historical romance is, of course, a romance set in the past. The Unmarriable Kind is an historical romance, although barely. The plot focuses more on Lucretia’s thoughts regarding marriage (as well as her sister’s death and her best friend’s engagement) than it does on the romance.
Rose’s Assignment is Victorian historical fiction. It deals with the Underground Railroad, which, apparently, is not its own genre. Nor is antebellum fiction. They should be.
Journey of Hope is the most difficult story to categorize. It falls four years after the British Regency era, so it isn’t technically Regency fiction, although it is still the Georgian era. It deals with moving west, but it isn’t pioneer fiction either because that subgenre is set in the United States. Claire and Harold are Canadian and would have been called overlanders.
Writing Historical Fiction Challenge 1: Pleasing the Audience
There are three types of historical fiction readers:
- Readers who are amateur historians and know a great deal about history.
- Readers who think they know a great deal about history but actually don’t.
- Readers who simply want a good story.
The first two groups make me nervous. The amateur historian will be quick to spot any detail that’s wrong, and wrong details are like typos. One always manages to make it into the final draft. This group is why I research before I start writing and during the rewriting stage. I want to be 100 percent certain details are accurate; even then I stress that I’ve missed something.
The readers who think they know history but don’t are a vocal bunch. My only encounters with this group have been concerning Angel of Mercy. One reader said Hettie behaves like a rich woman when she would have been poor. That statement is inaccurate. The nurses who served in the Canadian Army Nursing Service were upper middle class, the daughters of professionals, and highly educated. Another said she kept waiting for Hettie to buck society regarding women’s roles. Hettie is a nurse, not a suffragette or a union leader, so her bucking society wouldn’t have been historically accurate. Plus, the reader missed Hettie’s real rebellion. She’s a married woman who works.
There’s also the fourth type who dislikes history, and historical fiction by extension, and never reads the genre.
Writing Historical Fiction Challenge 2: Societal Views
When you write historical fiction, you need to express the societal views that were common during your chosen time period. We can’t judge people from the past by 21st century standards, so the challenge is presenting these views as accurately as possible. Here are three examples from my books:
Racism: Rose is an abolitionist, but that doesn’t mean she would have thought blacks are equal to whites. She wouldn’t have. That wasn’t the predominate view in 1850s Canada. Canadians thought blacks were human and shouldn’t be kept in bondage, but they didn’t believe in equality. In addition, the majority of Canadians were not abolitionists. They were very anti-American at the time, for a variety of reasons, and felt that slavery was an American sin that needed an American solution.
Sexism: All four heroines face sexism. Claire’s desire to improve her reading and writing skills is minimized, Rose is criticized for being away from home too much, Lucretia questions why girls need schooling when society doesn’t allow them to use their educations, and Hettie doesn’t understand why men can have both marriage and a career yet women cannot.
Politics: Claire exhibits both an anti-French and anti-Catholic bias, illustrating the strained relationship Canadians of English decent had for generations with Canadians of French decent. Lucretia mentions a skirmish between Mounties and Metis (people of mixed French-First Nations decent), alluding to another strained relationship. Benjamin often voices that Canada is an independent nation and should be able to decide its own destiny, which was not reality at the dawn of the 20th century. And, of course, Rose’s involvement with the Underground Railroad is political. Escaped slaves were referred to as “refugees.”
Writing Historical Fiction Challenge 3: Period Appropriate Dialogue
Writing period appropriate dialogue is a balance between making the dialogue fun and easy to read while not having it sound too modern. This often had me checking various words and phrases’ etymologies and usage. This is why, for example, the characters in the WWI Trilogy use “okay” but don’t use “maybe” as a synonym for “perhaps.” Increasingly, though, I’m finding many historical fiction authors don’t do this research as the dialogue sounds too 21st century. I recently read a romance set in 1805. It was a cute story and well written otherwise, but every chapter was full of phrases and words that hadn’t been invented at the turn of the 19th century.
It doesn’t take much to make dialogue sound period appropriate if you first do your research. I found it enjoyable to work words that are no longer used, such as “fortnight,” “mustn’t” and “shan’t,” into sentences.
Finally, people spoke more formally in the past. For example, even when speaking with friends you would refer to your spouse as Mr. or Mrs. “Mr. Smith takes his coffee black.” Very few people were addressed by their given name. The challenge here is being formal while not allowing the dialogue to become so stiff and foreign that readers can’t relate.
Writing Historical Fiction Challenge 4: Period Accurate Settings
When I set out to write my historical fiction books, I wanted to create stories about ordinary people touched by extraordinary events. It started with Hettie and her immediate family during World War 1 and progressed to the subsequent books about her grandmother, the abolitionist, and her great-grandmother, the overlander. Only her mother’s story is devoid of external societal change. At least on the surface. The 1880s were a time of rapid industrialization, invention and changing women’s roles. After all, Lucretia is a teacher and no one thinks anything of it but, at the same time, they still expect her to quit her job when she marries.
It’s a common problem. Janie Chang told Writer’s Digest: “I look at a historical event, and I ask ‘What were the women doing?’ Because the answer is almost always ‘More than you think!’ Women’s deeds are rarely front and center in the historical record, but they’re there — you just have to go hunting around the edges, in the nooks and crannies.”
I used the same set of Canadian history books for my six novels. This allowed me to ensure the politics and attitudes of the day were correct. It also taught me many things that they don’t teach in American schools such as what happened to Loyalists during the American Revolution and American attacks on Canada during the War of 1812.
Setting, however, goes beyond a time and place and involves basic details. What inventions existed during the timeframe of the story? What was daily life like for various socio-economic classes?
Life for Claire is much different compared to life for Hettie. In the 1820s, there was little difference between the richest and poorest members of society. Existence in the wilderness was difficult for everyone. There was no medical care, roads were choked with rocks and tree roots, homes were small, postage was expensive, and starvation was one poor growing season away. Nearly a century later, Hettie lives in a home with multiple rooms, electricity and running water. She has post-secondary education, food is plentiful, transportation between communities and provinces is easy, and medical care is advanced.
In fact, each generation in the Appleton-Goodwin-Steward family advances a bit compared to the previous in terms of wealth, technology and finances. Claire and Harold are subsistence farmers who can barely read whereas their daughter Rose married a business owner and reads extensively. By The Unmarriable Kind, the family is among the wealthiest in Barrie even following the Panic of 1873. During the Great War, it took two weeks for letters to cross the Atlantic, considerably shorter than the four months it took Claire and Harold to travel from New Brunswick to Upper Canada (Ontario).
Clothing also needs to period accurate. Colonists in the 1820s often wore clothing decades behind fashion. Rose models a new fashion, the crinoline, to help increase sales in her husband’s store. Lucretia’s dresses feature a bustle. Hettie and her sisters cut their hair to chin length. Claire wore stays while Rose, Lucretia and Hettie wore a corset, although those varied by decade. Claire and Hettie lived in decades where dresses had short sleeves and low necklines while Rose and Lucretia lived in decades where it was long sleeves and high necklines year round.