A Few Notes on Writing Historical Novels.

"It must be easy for you to write your historical novels, " a friend said to me recently. "You know how your plot is going to end; who your main characters are, and if you get your facts right - no problems," he said, flicking his fingers with a dismissive gesture.
       "Not so," I replied. "There's loads of problems to deal with." 
       "Yeah? Like what?"
       Like what I'm going to tell you here.

One of the basic problems is: which angle are you going to write your story from? Which POV, point of view are you going to use? Are you going to write about Queen Elizabeth I's Tudor court from a courtier, say Sir Walter Raleigh's point of view or are you going to have one of the kitchen scullery-maids tell the story? And what about it coming from the horse's mouth - from Queen Elizabeth hereslf?

And then, once you've decided how to answer that question, how are you going to treat your narrator: as a hero/ine? a villain? a straight-forward raconteur or as someone who is telling this particular tale because they have an axe to grind?
For example, are you going to describe Colonel Blood, the 17th century adventurer who almost succeeded in stealing the Crown jewels from the Tower of London in 1671 as a thief or as a swashbuckling daredevil?

And if we're dealing with the POV question, how are you going to write your story? In the first or third person? Both are perfectly kosher. I have just finished reading a Philippa Gregory Tudor-flavoured novel and it is all in the third person. 
In contrast, Two Bullets in Sarajevo, my novel about the assassination of the Austrian Archduke and his wife just before the First World War was written entirely in the first person.
Sometimes you can use both first and third persons.

In my first Tudor novel about Henry VIII's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves: Henry's Luckiest Wife, I started in the third person and then half-way through, I switched to the first person, with Anne telling her own story. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. If you ook at amazon.com, you will see that among the 146 reviews(!) and still counting, some people like this and others didn't. It's all a matter of taste.

And if we're talking about taste, there is a trend today for historical writers to describe the past using the present simple. Both Philippa Gregory and Hilary Mantel have done this. I don't like it. Maybe I'm a bit square and old fashioned. For me the past is the past and the present is the present. An exception to this use of the present tense for relating to past incidents, for me at least, are the short stories by Damon Runyon. I think his descriptions of Spanish John and Harry the Horse et al and how they talk are brilliant. But then again, they are not historical novels. When he was writing them in the 1940's that was the present.

Then once you have solved this question, you must make sure that any historical fact is as correct as possible. If you write that the Declaration of Independence was signed in New York on July 3rd 1776 or that William the Conqueror invaded England in 1065 you are guaranteed in killing your readers' credibility in the rest of your novel. Similarly, you can't write that your medieval captain fired his musket during the battle of Agincourt in 1415. Two hundred years were to pass before muskets were used on the battlefield. In other words, every specific detail must be correct, including: dates, names and technology.

However, in your effort to achieve credibility, you must be careful how you use your historical facts and information. Too few may result in a weak story, but too many will lead you to sound as if you are writing a history textbook in disguise. I recently gave up reading an historical novel about a Scottish king (one of the Jameses) because apart from one or two lines of conversation, the rest was pure and unadulterated history. If I'd wanted to read about the history James I, II or II for light relief, then I would have bought such an historical book and not a novel.

Anyway, enough about this for now and I'll add a bit more in my next blog.

Looking forward to receiving some feedback about this either via my website:  www.dly-books.weebly.com or  wsdavidyoung@gmail.com

Keep enjoying your reading and writing of history,
David Lawrence-Young