How Not to Mess Up Your Historical Fiction
People love historical fiction because of how it blends the known with the unknown. They come to it expecting the backdrop of a historical era, while anticipating the thrill of surprise from the unique story set upon that stage. It’s a powerful one-two combination when done well.
But it’s also a tricky needle to thread. Getting that right balance of meticulous research versus creative improvisation, of detailed depiction of known events and trends versus keeping the narrative moving, can challenge the best authors. Today we’ll discuss the most common mistakes people make when writing historical fiction, how they most often turn up, and how you can best avoid (or repair) them.
8 All-Too-Common Historical Fiction Pitfalls
1. Missing Simple Anachronisms
Anachronisms happen when you portray an element in a story set in one period, but that element did not exist at that time. For example, the Eiffel Tower was built in 1887. If your musketeers adventure fiction set in 1650 includes a thrilling fight scene at its top, alert readers are going to call BS.
There are several species of anachronisms:
- Timeline anachronisms, like the Eiffel Tower example above, where you place a person, object, or event in a time it wouldn’t be there.
- Knowledge anachronisms, such as two characters discussing continental drift in ancient Rome, over a century before the theory was advanced.
- Technology anachronisms, like giving Greek Hoplites access to stirrups, or a medieval plague doctor understanding germ theory.
- Eponyms, where a character uses words that haven't come to usage yet. A Mongol horseman won’t say “right on”, or give a thumbs-up gesture.
- Habitual anachronisms, where characters display habits that weren’t part of the human condition during the period you’re writing about. For example, a Greek philosopher would not agree to meet somebody “in five minutes”. Timepieces that measure that accurately weren’t in common usage, so people did not think of time in that way yet.
All of these can be fatal to the quality of your story.
There’s another type of anachronism, surrounding period attitudes about topics like race and gender. See below for a more detailed discussion of this tricky point.
Avoid This With…
…extensive research. If you have access to a historian, that’s the best route. Without one, you can go a long way by tagging any potential anachronisms and double-checking. You’ll also be surprised to discover how many simple guides to writing for (insert period here) you can find on Amazon.
The good news here is you won’t mind the research. If you weren’t fascinated by the time period, you wouldn’t have written a story set in the middle of it.
2. Oversimplifying Historical Context
I blame this on our middle school and high school history teachers. Generally speaking, history is taught in the broadest of terms. The American Revolution was a simple good versus evil, freedom versus tyranny battle. Medieval serfs lived terrible lives of drudgery and repression. Everybody hated to be crushed beneath the boot of the Roman Empire.
History is nuanced, with many opinions and sides to each story. Simplifying the context of your chosen historical period makes for a bad story, and in some ways insults the humans who lived during that time. Of course, you want to avoid turning your novel into a treatise on history and political philosophy, but most writers err toward the side of oversimplification rather than overcomplication.
Avoid This With…
…thinking about life right now. Consider any issue on the political scale, or in current events. The level of complexity and nuance involved today is pretty much the level of complexity and nuance that existed for every issue in every era.
One way to strike the needed balance is by carefully considering your narrative point of view. Even if an era or issue is deeply complex, with considerations on myriad sides, your narrator can only see the parts that best serve your story. That makes the simplification not a matter of author error, but of narrator bias.
3. Inconsistent Tone or Style
This appears in two different ways. The first can happen in any genre, where the tone of narration varies at random throughout the manuscript. This is an unavoidable aspect of writing novels over time. For one writing session, you’ll be focused and happy. Another will happen while you’re mad at your partner. A third will come like pulling teeth. It’s natural to see this in first drafts, and gets handled at the editing stage. Historical fiction is not immune to this.
The other is unique to historical fiction: a written tone or style that doesn’t match the tone of the period. Sometimes, this expected tone is largely fictional. Read some Shakespeare and you’ll find it’s just as bawdy as your favorite episode of Beavis and Butthead, but historical fiction written in that period is expected to have a tone with more erudition. Likewise, the “feel” of the prohibition era or Summer of Love lends itself to a much less formal style of narration.
Avoid This With…
Deep reading in other historical fiction set during your era of choice. Find the trends and tones within the genre, and do your best to abide by them. It can help to ask beta readers familiar with the tone to look specifically for this during that stage.
It’s also possible to write against tone, for example intentionally opting for a rustic groundling’s voice in that Shakespearean-era story. See Christopher Moore’s Fool for an amazing example of this. But if you opt for this it has to be intentional, and you absolutely must “stick the landing”. Anything other than A+ results reads sour.
4. Getting Too Nerdy With the History
Yes, you have to know the history, trends, and personages of the era you’re writing about. Yes, readers of your works will expect a level of historical accuracy, and know enough to catch you when you’re wrong. Yes, I understand that half of why you’re writing historical fiction is because you’re fascinated with the era and know a lot about it.
No, none of the above is a reason to go so deep into the history that your readers get bored. They’ll have more tolerance for this sort of thing than people reading fantasy or spy novels, but you still want to stop short of something that reads like a textbook.
Avoid This With…
…the 80/20 rule. Of all the facts and information about your chosen era that you learn while researching for your book, 20 percent should show up explicitly on the page. The rest either stays in your head, passively informing your writing, or shows up obliquely.
By “shows up obliquely”, I mean it appears on screen but without exposition. For example, suppose you found out about a cool fashion trend that showed up during the year your period romance is set in. Rather than spend a paragraph explaining this, have a fashionable character wearing it while the other characters don’t. It’s “show, don’t tell” in another form.
5. Focusing on the Top Tier
Although it’s science fiction, part of the appeal of Firefly and the Alien franchise expresses this concept very well. Most science fiction focuses on the big players of their imagined age: rebel generals, great emperors, senators, wealthy traders, and the like. Even Star Wars and its focus on rag-tag rebel fighters focused on those at the center of a massive drama on a galactic scale. Firefly was about a bunch of broke outcasts making very little imprint on the sands of history. Alien is decidedly blue-collar. When big players come on the stage, it’s to ruin the protagonists’ lives.
It’s tempting in historical fiction to focus on the major historical figures and key events of the era. After all, these are what drew many people — maybe including you — to that era in the first place. However, doing so often leads to a one-dimensional narrative and ultimately underwhelming book.
Avoid This With…
…simply including the common perspective. If your story centers on those major people and events, include the presence, attitudes, and needs in their considerations and in the background. Maybe consider telling the story through the eyes of ordinary people, providing a perspective beyond what can already be found in textbooks and documentaries.
6. Romanticization of One Era Over Another
It’s easy for authors so interested in a specific era to romanticize that era and gloss over some of its harshest realities. This creates an unrealistic picture of the time you’re writing about. Savvy readers will spot the omissions. New readers will be deprived of a more nuanced, real, and genuine understanding of the era you care so deeply about.
It’s also easy to do the opposite, romanticizing the present at the cost of your depiction of the era you’re writing. Most reasonable people will agree that the modern age, with its clean water, comprehensive medicine, and improved record of human rights, is pretty nifty…but if you hold up previous eras against it only to their detriment, it makes for equally bad fiction.
Avoid This With…
…a “just the facts” approach. When you catch yourself editorializing, in one direction or the other, scale back the prose to simply depicting what’s happening in your story. Since most authors are bad at catching their own errors, it can be useful to ask beta readers to keep an eye out for this, then to fix it during your editing phase.
7. Indulging in Presentism
Presentism is the mistake of applying modern thought, politics, and sensibilities inappropriately onto another era, and it’s another error that appears with two faces.
The first is about the era. If you’re writing a novel set in the 1950s Midwest, a whole town accepting an openly gay police chief will raise eyebrows. By contrast, a story set in Haight-Ashbury in 1969 won’t find much tolerance for people who loudly voice racist opinions. No matter how unfortunate (or enlightened) an era’s attitudes are, they’re as much a reality of the era as technology, language, and education.
The second is the reader, and might be better described as “ignoring presentism”. Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn was lambasted at its time of publication for portraying Jim and other black Americans in such a positive light. These days it takes flak over its use of the N-word. Modern audiences will be turned off by natural and realistic word choices from many characters in certain eras and regions.
Avoid This With…
…picking your battles. Generally speaking, handle social issues with care. If your novel centers around such an issue, make individuals an exception to the rule of the era and wrap the story around those people. For issues that aren’t core to your tale, find ways to touch on them lightly, or not at all.
8. Missing the Minor Details
In all sorts of writing, the minor details of description are what turns a flat narrative into a memorable, fully-blooming scene. Your hard-bitten detective is simply more colorful if he drinks a vodka gimlet than if he just wants a generic beer. Your romantic lead’s outfit is more romantic the more fully you describe it. Your refugee’s flight across the Eastern Front is more compelling when the reader can follow their progress across an accurate map.
This becomes an issue when writing historical fiction, because those same details are opportunities for anachronisms and other errors. Like with events and individuals, most of our knowledge focuses on the big picture. We knew what day Napoleon crossed the Rubicon, and what happened after, but it takes some digging to find out what his troops ate for breakfast.
As with anachronisms, the same fascination that brings readers to your era means they’re the most likely people in the world to catch you in those tiny mistakes.
Avoid This With…
…some kind of internal coding. Whenever you write descriptions that include small details, add a @ or other symbol. When you’re in the mood for research, do a search for the @ symbol, and double-check those details. Better yet, just stick in the @ instead of the description, then write the description after you’ve done the research.
Final Thought: The Balancing Act
Writing excellent fiction of any sort requires the author to balance opposing priorities and forces. Writing excellent historical fiction requires more of this balance than any other genre.
Take for example presentism. It’s a mistake to make every character in a story set in the post-civil-war South have the racial sensibilities of a college sophomore in the 2020s, but to use the racial language of many white southerners of the time will put many readers off. As I said: balance.
I don’t promise striking this balance will be easy. But if you keep in mind the thoughts here, and apply them proportionally to your manuscript, I do promise the effort will be worth it.
