Books on writing often tell the author to find inspiration for stories in the world around her, in the everyday events of her own life. Read a juicy story on the net about a crime? There’s your next mystery! Got a friend who, widowed, rediscovers her high school sweetheart on Facebook and marries him before she goes in for cancer surgery? (I actually do.) The seed for a romance! But all the events of our lives take place today. What … Read More »

I have a friend who is not a fan of historical fiction (and yes, we’re still friends). She describes them as “those books about kings and queens.” That made me start to think about who makes the best protagonist for historical fiction: is it a real, factual person—who will generally be a public person, or someone in sufficient prominence to have left a record—or an everyday person, probably spun from the imagination? Perhaps there is no better or worse here, … Read More »

How do we write about music? This is a form of what the ancient Greeks called ekphrasis: the description of one art in another. Not all of us are musicians, but nearly everyone likes one kind of music or another. It brings something wonderful to our lives, punctuates our memories, stirs our emotions. And when I think back upon some of the most life-changing books I’ve read (Homer’s Odyssey and the Sirens’ song, anyone?), the magic of music played a … Read More »

This has no specific connection to historical fiction, but it might be worth thinking about anyway in this month of NaNoWriMo, when we’re all pushing ourselves to write as if the devil were at our heels. Is it possible to be too productive? I think it is, and I may have broken that sound barrier lately… to my detriment. A Case of Logorrhea We all know the cardinal rule of writing: butt in chair and fingers on keyboard. This sort … Read More »

Among all the problems of authenticity the conscientious writer of historical fiction must face is the one I call the Problem of the Plucky Heroine. By this, I mean a character who is out of character for his or (more frequently) her times. Whose values are strangely modern. Who is, in short, an anachronism, probably designed to attract the modern reader. Is this really a problem, or is it a legitimate way to engage readers who want to read about … Read More »

Good historical fiction is doubly hard to write. Not only are there the usual problems of writing good “fiction”: well plotted, richly detailed, stuffed with fascinating characters. But “historical” demands that whole additional burden of research, so that the end result is a convincing representation of a past time and often distant place. Why should we even bother? Now Feels Pretty Good In the first place, we and our readers find it entertaining, like a good History Channel program. It’s … Read More »