The Kiss of the Muses: or, Where to Find Inspiration for a Historical Novel

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 about someone seeking an inspiration for a historical novel?

Translation, please

First off, some of those modern tales could translate perfectly well into a past period. Believe it or not, it was possible to rediscover old friends even before the internet. Set that autumn romance in the ‘forties…or the 1840s, or in ancient Rome. And since you’ll need to make the occasion of their encounter more ingenious than just googling the man’s name, it will probably be a better story in the past. So don’t stop looking around and combing your own environment for truths stranger than fiction and more universal than today’s headlines.

Emotional alternative universe

But of course, under every event lies the personal reaction to that event, the emotions. These are the “universal” part. “Today’s headlines” are full of heart-rending storied of displaced people trying to reach safety. How many times has that story been repeated throughout the history of the world! Tap into that strong emotion—the fear, the desperation, the alienation—and write about some past event that sent populations fleeing. War, with its emotional alternative universe, is a great source of ideas, because it churns everything around emotionally. But smaller emotional tales can also be translated. Have you ever experienced a sense of betrayal? Furious anger? Corrosive jealousy? Despair? (If you haven’t, my guess is, you’re not very old!) Use those; translate those universal emotions into the past. Even though they’ve left no records, you can be sure they were there. And all the odd or lovable or odious people you know or read about can put on their ancient costumes and show up in the past as well.

And the obvious…

The most obvious source of inspiration is the history book. Here is a record of the actual deeds of the past. Here we find civil wars, westward expansions, revolutions, conquests, the fall of empires. A history book is your Big Book of Ideas. A historical novel set against one of the upheavals of real history has everything going for it. But in most cases, that alone is not enough, unless you simply want to write another straight history book. Graft upon that world in chaos a heartfelt human story. Authors have been doing this successfully for centuries. Think A Tale of Two Cities—a love story set against the French Revolution—or A Sentimental Education, Flaubert’s story of a young man’s (never quite) coming of age during all the upheavals of France in the mid-nineteenth century. The examples written today are legion, many of them sparked by the anniversary of World War II.

So, the author of historical fiction can—and must—draw upon past and present to create real, fleshed-out tales of people in the past. Not straight history, which is the deeds alone. But the personal, quirky, this-can’t-be-happening-to-me, emotional HUMAN content of our shared past. And inspiration is all around.