When I’m not actually writing my own fiction, one of the things I do that I like best is to mentor other writers. I’m working with a couple right now who are truly wonderful, and when their books come out it will be my great pleasure to shout their praises to the skies and do whatever I’m able to help promote them and their work. I also, however, frequently run into others whom I believe to be trotting down a path that will end in frustration - often because of a misunderstanding about the intersection between fact and fiction.
A prodigious amount of research goes into the writing of a book set in an earlier time. All the shorthand that’s available to the writer of novels set in our own times, or even the recent past, is unavailable to the writer of historical fiction. It is not possible to call on shared experience. The job of that writer - my job - is to sketch in the world of the characters with enough care and detail so that you are able to picture them and their settings, despite the fact that you have no personal experience of - for example - the 1830s in New York City. That, however, is just one of the challenges. We who write these kinds of books have also to make sure that we do not let the history, all that prodigious detail we’ve spent so long studying and cataloging and obsessing over, does not get in the way of telling a crackerjack story that is first and foremost about the characters and the situations in which we’ve placed them. As readers we all care more about whether Pauline escapes after being tied to the railroad tracks then about the nature of the engine that powers the train racing toward her. As the writer I have to know about that engine, probably in a fair amount of specifics, but what I leave out is more important to guaranteeing a wonderful experience to you as a reader than what I put in.
This was brought home to me recently when I was reading the manuscript of a hopeful new writer of historical fiction and found that it’s huge (and virtually unpublishable) length can be blamed on his having fallen in love with his research. He knew how those people dressed and what they ate and where they slept - even what they smelled like. And he wanted we as readers to know that he knew. And we wind up plowing through endless detail saying ho-hum, where’s the story?
Another common error is thinking that the history leads, rather than the story. Here is what I wrote to another writer who has been worrying about whether she can bend the facts of the historical incident that was the inciting point for her novel: