Concept
‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ So said Lao Tzu 1450 years ago, and the experience of every novelist since then has illustrated it. When I was a journalist, I would often agonise for days over the article I was to write, only to discover that once I had written the topic sentence, the rest just flowed from my fingertips. The first step in a historical fiction novel is more creative, and you must find what works for you. Or, what doesn’t work.
When I started writing my third novel, I decided the story would begin in 1342. There were historical reasons why that specific year was interesting in terms of world views. But that is rubbish as a Concept. My fellow Bounds Green Book Writer and mentor Elaine asked me, ‘what is it about?’ And I said, ‘it’s about this girl in 1342, who…’ and she said, ‘No, what is it about?’ This was an absolute revelation for me. Wrongly, I had already written many 1000s of words before I addressed that question. I often whinge that ‘my process does everything in the wrong order’. So, if you start out by doing it right, you won’t make that mistake.
Characterisation
As with any fiction, you need to really know your protagonist. If she[1] is basically you, but just set in an ancient time, you’ll have an easier job. Just imagine what you would do or say in the scenes you are writing if you lived in x location in y period of history. The protagonist in my first novel is basically me, if I were a 1st century Jew, who joined a Nabataean incense caravan, then became an Essene, then a shapeshifter, then a Zealot, then an author. The hardest part of that was the Jewish bit, as I am not a Jew and I wanted her feelings about religion to be authentic.
I absolutely insist that all authors must have a third-party (someone who is not your friend) professional developmental editor. So, I looked on social media and found myself an editor who was Jewish (and thus could correct my Hebrew) and also knew about ancient history.
I never give myself an easy job, though, so with the novel I’m writing at the moment, I insisted on creating a character who is as far from me as a person could be.
I cannot recommend strongly enough that all authors try this. Put yourself in the mind of your character then take the test: https://www.16personalities.com.
The information this exercise will provide you with is empirically tested to be realistic to real humans. It’s astounding the ideas it provided me with about what she and her girlfriend would fight about, how she would interact with people at work, in what situations would she deal well or poorly. She is ENFJ, a ‘Protagonist’—I see her as an Alexander without necessarily the Great-ness nor the hubris/narcissism; her girlfriend is INTJ, an ‘Architect’. Then, translate that into whatever time and place you’re writing about. You can repeat the exercise for your love interest, your villain, your minor characters.
You should try taking the test as yourself, too. You’ll be amazed. I am INFP, a ‘Mediator’. I’m, no surprise, a ‘natural-born writer’. I ‘think in metaphors’. And all sorts of other fascinating and spot-on revelations.
There are 9 personality types, and your protagonist is one of them. Try the Enneagram test.
I am a ‘4’. I believe I am ‘fundamentally flawed’, and I’m driven by ‘envy’! So, not necessarily comforting, but nonetheless, spot-on.
Although you may never use the information, put yourself in your character’s head and do one of the characterisation questionnaires you can find on the internet such as: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/character-development-questions-to-ask-your-characters. This will fill out your picture on your protagonist in your mind, which will help you get deeply into her mindset and write her more profoundly, plus you may never know when you might want to use one of those details. I ended up giving my girl’s sword a grand, heroic name but she gives her horse quite a mundane one.
Any modern-day-set questions like ‘what brand of cigarette does she smoke?’ you can just translate into your timeframe ‘does she prefer ayran or kımız, or would she rather have a cup of water or chilled goat’s milk?’ ‘How would she like to celebrate her birthday?’ becomes ‘How would she like to celebrate her saint’s day?’
The details you do include, you can play with how you use them. You can Show them through another character’s eyes. My girl’s girlfriend, for example, loves the ‘crooked smile’ resulting from the serious facial scar she suffered in a swordfight. You can turn them into metaphors—she has such sexual desire for her girlfriend she wants to ‘wrap her tiny body in grapevine leaves and gobble it in one bite’.
Voice
Make it uniquely your own. Don’t make every character sound the same.
The protagonist in my first novel was basically me, so she thought long and hard about everything and everybody. My current protagonist is anything but. She jumps into action without a moment’s forethought (her Achilles’ heel) concerned with only what is going to happen in the next second. So, I did extra work on the characterisation questionnaires.
If she is a child, use simple sentences and simple emotions.
Explore Setting through action and reaction
You’re not going to bring the past to life with endless descriptions of settings (though you do need some). Show Don’t Tell. Show us your ancient characters in the midst of action and reaction. Use the senses. What is she seeing, hearing, smelling? Use action ‘beats’ to punctuate your dialogue so it’s not just a stream of ‘he said, she said’. In fact, if it’s clear from the context, you don’t even need ‘he said, she said’.
Instead of adverbs, use body language. Instead of ‘you cretin, she said angrily’, say ‘you cretin. She clenched her fist’.
Use physical props to have her dropping, throwing, walking around, reaching for—things that people of that period would have had lying around. That also adds to Setting, giving us a visual picture. ‘What would she do if she found a $100 bill?’ becomes ‘What would she do if she found a gold aureus?’ And again, you don’t have to actually use any of these details in your manuscript. You just need to keep them in your head as you write.
Make sure that Setting is ‘inherent’ to your story. What’s important to her about the setting. What is the mood your Setting conveys?
Emotions and metaphors
I am guilty of way too much Telling, I know, but I do try to write my expositions as if my POV character were the narrator. Instead of referring to her husband’s ‘mistress’, call her his ‘fancy woman’ or his ‘whore’. Of course, you want to do this in dialogue, but do it in your exposition bits as well. Use emotive language that would have been in her lexicon, metaphors from her world. If she lives by the sea, use fishing analogies. If she loves horses, use horse riding metaphors.
Symbolism
A potent symbol of your theme can speak volumes. One of my favourites is in King Kong—ok, not the same genre, but it’s my favourite example—when Ann Darrow takes that first step onto the ship which is to take her to Skull Island. The camera focuses on her hand on the rail, her shoe on the step. Her hand, her shoe, symbolise her decision (which we know will lead to etc.) Look for some physical object or action which can act as a symbol for what you are trying to say about your protagonist’s struggle.
Research
I cannot think of anything more fun to do than to spend all day researching what 14th century French visconte’s daughters ate for breakfast (she ate lampreys cooked in blood and red wine flavoured with cinnamon). Thus I spent an entire day for the sake of a ten word phrase—and I regret it not, say I.
What you must not neglect is the next stage, which is to ‘kill your darlings’. The point of the breakfast scene is for her to avoid responding to her mother’s announcement that she is to be sent off to live with her uncle in Scotland by stuffing her mouth with eels. Otherwise, I would just be saying, ‘look at these cool details I found about 14th century French breakfasts’.
If it doesn’t advance your plot or your character arc or add vitally to your setting—kill it. This is painful, I know. You can console yourself by storing them safely away in your ‘cool details I found’ file. It might not fit this novel’s plot, but you can promise yourself you’ll work them into a short story someday.
Even for minor characters, I will happily spend an entire day choosing someone’s name. This effort is really worth it. What people are named influences so greatly how you think about them and how they would have thought about themselves. I almost named my 2nd century Jewish Alexandrian scholar Citronella, before my sister said, ‘ugh, that sounds like mosquito repellent.’ I spent 3 whole days on that one and ended up naming her Shiphrah.
Your most valuable sources will be primary. Things that were written by people at the time, reflecting what people at the time thought, what shocked them, what did they admire. What did 14th century historians fear, admire, hate about the Mongols? They’re all dead now, so you can even plagiarise entire setting descriptions, or whatever. They won’t complain.
My first century zealot used vocabulary I cribbed from the Dead Sea Scrolls and was motivated by Essene religious concepts with which we are entirely unfamiliar today.
World view
My biggest goal—and this is why I became a writer—is to capture in writing a world view of people who were very different from me from a time when people had different customs, different priorities, different beliefs about things. This is perhaps why I write about ancient Jews, though I am not a Jew, and ancient Muslims, though I am not a Muslim, and lesbians, though I am not a lesbian.
My protagonist converts to Islam because, as she says to her girlfriend, ‘I want to see the same moon you see.’
Be wary of modern-day sensibilities creeping into your character’s world view. It wouldn’t work for her to be too confrontational about the hypocrisy of the Church 175 years before Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. She reflects instead early Ottoman feelings that the Byzantine Church was ‘corrupt’ in the sense of sexual abuses and heavy taxation of the peasants.
My protagonist has a lesbian love affair many centuries before it’s OK to be gay, especially in the Islamic world. I deal with this lightly (because I don’t like it and don’t want to deal with it heavily) by having only their best friends ‘knowing’ (and being OK with it).
I lived in Japan for many years, and I was passionately in love with how different the whole culture was from my native US. I found myself actually thinking differently when I was speaking Japanese.
I emphasise cultural differences by using some phrases in direct translation. You can use some strange spellings to portray dialect, but it’s more artful to do this through ‘word choice, cadence and grammar’[2].
Real-world/fictional world timelines
Immerse yourself deeply in a timeline of the real-world history of your time period, including even far-away events. Which of these events would influence your protagonist’s life?
I wanted to reflect that the whole world order was changing in the 1342-1345 time period of my novel. The Seljuks were finished; the Byzantines were on their way out; the Ottomans were still tiny, and it looked to absolutely everyone as if the Mongols were going to take over the world. So, even though she wasn’t there when the Genoese defeated the Golden Horde at Kaffa, it was an important event for her. I personalised it by having her witness the prison tent of the plague-ridden Mongol soldiers whose bodies the Horde later used as biological weapons, which started the westward progress of the plague from which she and her girlfriend are fleeing at the end.
Or, you can create a genius loci using a light touch. Ellis Peters of Brother Cadfael genius lets us know on page 1 what King Stephen and Empress Maud are up to at the moment, then forgets about them while Cadfael solves the murder, which is what we care about, and we come back to the royal civil war at the end. This device place us firmly in the time period, without going deeply into the whole history of the civil war, which we don’t really care about.
Follow your heart
Remember, you’re a writer because you love it. As you do your extensive, extensive research, make a note of the details that really turn you on. What is it about that ancient world view that you find so different and exciting that you want to pass on your passion to your fellow human beings?
I try to concentrate on the differentness rather than the sameness. 14th century visconte’s daughters probably thought a lot about who they were going to marry or which gown they were going to wear tomorrow. Been there, done that. I want to write about eating eels for breakfast.
Man bites dog
Some have said, ‘write about what you know’, but what’s the fun of that? I’m urging you to open up Pandora’s Box. Burst the bubbles of our preconceptions. Reveal to us something we’ve never seen before. As we learned in journalism school, ‘dog bites man’ is not a story. It’s only interesting if ‘man bites dog’.
Romance and excitement
Call it what you will, but we are writing novels, here. Not textbooks. 90% of the research I’ve read on early Ottoman history is about whether the administration system was ‘Oriental’ or ‘Turkic’ or ‘Byzantine’. I’m sure historians have their own fun, but I want to write about dark steel swords thrust into the blue sky, shouting ‘allah-hu akbar’.
Whatever you are writing, characterisation and plot must be central. You write because you love it; you want your readers to love it. Throw away the boring—if they want to learn about it, they can read a history book. Concentrate on the romance and the excitement.
Exotic, salacious or shocking
You could go for the exotic or salacious. Personally, I don’t write blow-by-blows of people’s sex lives, as I find that boring, but many readers love that, so if you want to do that, go for it. However, don’t put it in just for titillation purposes. In the days of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, readers may have found it shocking. Not now. You can even see people f***ing on TV. Don’t make it gratuitous. The sex scene should be Showing us something about their relationship, not just flashing us with body parts. And remember, admiring a woman’s bare ankles longingly is sexier than ripping her panties off. Refer to the eroticism of the situation, and let our imaginations do the rest.
Also, I know people in real life say f***, c***, sh**, d**n, etc a lot, but please don’t. Unless you’re writing a screenplay for Shameless, or if gratuitous profanity is central to your protagonist’s character. For one thing, we’re not shocked anymore. For another thing, they don’t add meaning. And it has more impact if one swearword is the only profanity in the whole f***ing book. Right?
Or just deep
Many have written about the swash-buckling or the shock-horror bloodthirstiness aspects of the golden age of piracy. I read a great book, Saltblood by Francesca de Tores, which instead goes deep into the psychology—what was in in their histories or personalities that led those pirates to do those bloodthirsty things? What was, in fact, unglamorous about their lives?
Proportion
Thomas Cromwell is walking in the palace gardens, conversing with Anne Boleyn [Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall]. Do we really need to know that ‘he woke up in the morning and then he got out of bed and then he received a messenger from the palace and then he jumped on his horse’? We don’t want to hear that sh**. We want to hear what dirt Anne is ready to dish on Henry. Mantel only includes the ‘jumped on his horse’ stuff when Cromwell got out of bed and corralled his son and ward to go with him, because Henry had summoned him at the crack of dawn to interpret his dream.
We really don’t need to hear all the disgusting details about how pirates went to the toilet, unless you’re making a point of dissuading us from our preconception that their lives were glamourous.
Don’t use too many flowery metaphors, no more than one or two per page, I would say. And make sure they are appropriate in context, or they detract from what you’re saying. Don’t wax lyrical about her sapphire-blue eyes, when what we need to be noting is how angry she is.
If you spend several paragraphs on a scene or on a dialogue, make sure that scene, that dialogue is a pivotal moment in her life.
If for no other reason, these days, you’re going to have to pay for all the extra pages your printer has to print. So, give us the good stuff.
[1] I refer to ‘she’ and ‘her’ because the protagonists I am writing at the moment are female, but everything here is equally valid for male characters
[2] Renni Browne, Dave King, Self-editing for Fiction Writers, Harper Collins (2004), p.110.
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