A big thanks to everyone who took part in the Aliventures survey over the past couple of weeks. The survey is now closed, but if you have any blog/newsletter topics you'd like to request, feel free to email me any time (ali@aliventures.com).
In the Aliventures survey, one person wrote:
"My current project is set in 1895 and references some genuine historical characters. How do I deal with that in a work of fiction?"
Lots of historical fiction includes real
people from history. Sometimes, the story might focus on those people and include them as main characters (e.g. Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall). But in other instances, those historical figures are merely part of the backdrop to the story.
Historical Figure as Major Character
If your main character is a historical figure, you obviously need to do a significant amount of research. You need to know not just the facts about the character, you also need a sense of what they were like: how they spoke, behaved, treated others, and so on.
However, not everything you write has to be drawn entirely from history. Perhaps you want to include
conversations that we have no record of ... but that might have happened. Maybe you want to dramatise a situation that might have been fairly dull in actuality. So long as the situation seems plausible, readers will probably go along with it.
Historical Figure as Minor Character (or Only Mentioned)
It's still important to do some research if you're just mentioning a historical figure in passing or if they appear briefly in a scene or two ... but assuming you haven't gone against any well-established facts, you're unlikely to lose your readers.
Writers often worry about the legal implications of writing about real people in their
books. The good news is that, if you're writing about people who are dead, they definitely can't sue you! (Their living relatives could potentially have a case against you if what you've written damages the relatives' reputation, though, and if you're writing something that might be particularly controversial, you may want to run it past a lawyer.)
It's very normal in historial
fiction to reference real figures from the past ... so don't be afraid to do so in your writing.
"Historical fiction" also covers a lot of categories. If you're writing a biographical history (a fictionalised account of someone's life), then readers will expect you to be as accurate as possible to the facts. If you're writing a historical romance or historical mystery, readers
may be content for you to lean heavily on the "romance" or "mystery" side of things, fictionalising the history as needed to support your plot.
You still want everything to feel true to the time period, of course: you can't have characters in 1895 watching television (unless you're writing an alternative history) or even using an electric toaster.
I don't personally write historical fiction, though I read it from time to time. So for more on this genre, I recommend taking a look at K.M. Weiland's detailed blog post Genre Tips: How to Write
Historical Fiction.
Happy writing,
Ali
P.S. If you missed last week's blog post, you can find it here:
Five Different Approaches to Developing Characters
