Let the characters engage with the historical details. This goes along with that “show don’t tell” truism writers are told all the time. Rather than just dumping a bunch of facts on the poor reader, let your characters interact with these details with all these senses. Let them smell the offal dumped onto the cobblestone streets. Let them squint in the fading light of the tallow candles. Let them feel the tingling sensation as the physician places a leech on their bare skin.
Allow your characters to question and explore their place in society. This will help reveal the larger political, social, cultural context of the time. What were the expectations for women? For sailors? For criminals? How did people from different parts of society interact with one another?
Don’t fret the details; let the story be told. Strive for accuracy, but when necessary, make your best informed guess and move on. And if you have to fudge something, well, that’s what the ‘historical note’ at the end of your novel is for!
Love the process, because readers will still find errors. And they’ll let you know about them. It doesn’t matter if those errors happened in editing process (as several of mine did. I collapsed some scenes together, and voila! A perfect recipe for timeline and geography mistakes). You can triple-check facts, hire copy editors and proofreaders, scrutinize every word for inconsistencies and mistakes, and I guarantee something will still slip by. At that point, you just have to laugh, thank your reader and move on.
Sweat the Small Stuff.
The authenticity of historical fiction depends on your knowledge and use of historical detail. It is not enough to say a character walked down the street. The reader has to be able to see the street, see the conveyances; he has to smell the smoke from the factories or the sewage in the gutter. If there are street vendors, he has to know what they’re selling. This is a new world: the reader can’t fathom it unless you give him images. These should be accurate and not recycled from old movies.
Dump the Ballast.
In order to write authentic historical fiction you must know a period of time well enough to disappear daily through a wormhole to the past and arrive at the location of your story. There you must understand the customs and use the manners perfectly enough to be accepted by people walking the streets (if there are streets) and to dress yourself, and make a living. This said, the major trick of writing good historical fiction is not in compiling research or knowing the details, but in knowing the details to leave out. Try to avoid overwriting. Keep perspective on what will interest the reader. Historical fiction writers tend to be overly conscientious and excited by minutia: if you succumb to excess, and put in too much detail, then go back later and take some of it out. Think of your novel as a boat that is about to sink from having too much weight on board: some of the loved items will have to go. Toss them over with impunity! Throw them out! If a rare, surprising statistic, or a moving anecdote, or an obscure reference you saw to an interesting thing that happened in the county adjacent to the one where your story takes place, does not advance your plot or provide your reader with important information about your characters, then it is irrelevant to your story and must go overboard.
Keep in mind that the care, and time, it took to assemble all that you have just thrown out has not been wasted. It was necessary to gather these facts and assess their worth in order to know which ones to save.
Keep Your Conscience Clean.
If your characters are based on real people and you are using the names, be reasonably responsible to the originals. You are probably going to have to fill in a lot of gaps in the historical record: you may know from the record what a person did and when he did it, but not why. It’s the “why” that defines his character. Ask yourself: Am I getting this right? Am I getting it close to right? Am I doing this person a disservice?
Resist Judging Your Characters.
We live in the 21st century with certain shared values: our society disapproves of prejudice and chauvinism and provincialism. But your characters are people of their own times; allow them to be bigoted or politically backwards. Don’t pass judgment on them, don’t apologize for their mistakes, and don’t attempt to make them all into free thinkers who are ahead of their times. You have to be able to see the story from their perspective, even if it offends you. If you judge your characters, you will date your book. Years from now when your own moral sensibilities are antiquated, your book will be too.
Don’t Get Bogged Down by Back-story.It is easy to be overly dutiful and bore your readers with too much background information delivered too soon. There is no surer way to lose your reader than to answer every question before he wonders about it. Don’t explain everything up front or set things up too thoroughly. Instead, let your story unfold dramatically. Clarity will emerge eventually. The trick is to delay telling back-story for as long as possible. You will find that most of it is never needed. It percolates up through the real story when the real story gets going.
Anticipate a Long Process.
Historical novels usually take several years to write, as they require research at every turn. You won’t always be able to anticipate what you’ll need to know for a scene, and will constantly have to be returning to your references. This is entirely different from writing contemporary fiction.
But if your character takes this journey in 1906, you will have to learn a few things before starting him out, and learn more things along the way. First of all, you need to know where the road is, and what’s on either side of it, and what kind of conveyance your character is driving. If it’s a flatbed wagon, what’s pulling it — a horse, a half-lame mule, two mules? How often do mules need water? How much traffic will there be? Any cars? What kind of food or luggage do you have along? And what if a wheel breaks, and you have to fix it, and you cut yourself with a rusty tool — how do you disinfect the cut? Do you even know about disinfection? When did people figure out where tetanus came from? And — assuming that you eventually make it to San Marcos, what’s in San Marcos, anyway? As for the Wonder World exit — when was the cave called “Wonder Cave” actually discovered?
But here is where the magic comes in: you begin to think, “Wow. The discovery of Wonder Cave. Now that would make a scene . . .” And then suddenly you have a story, and a book to write. The only problem, of course, is that you will soon find out that Wonder Cave was discovered in 1898 instead of 1906, so you will have to move your story back eight years and find out what sort of vehicles they drove in 1898 and along what road, and the rest of it, or else joggle the facts and sacrifice credibility in the name of literary license. Or ditch Wonder Cave.
Writing historical fiction is like trying to get to San Marcos when you have no car, you don’t know where the road is, and you have never in your life harnessed a half-lame mule to a flatbed wagon.