Here’s a little promo I put together for PLW’s recently-release Crafting Stories from the Past: A How-to Guide to Writing Historical Fiction. This piece recently appeared in the Sisters in Crime NorCal newsletter, an incredible quarterly edited by Margie Bunting.
I love a good reference book and have lots of them on my bookshelves. Books like A Field Guide to American Architecture, How to Read Fashion, and the Notable American Women dictionary (yes, I’m that nerd) are amongst my favorites.
I love reference books so much that I even flirted with becoming a reference librarian. But when the time came to decide upon my graduate studies, I bypassed library science for my true love: the study of history.
I’ve been fascinated, curious about, and energized by history since my teen years, and it wasn’t surprising that years after grad school, when I sat down to write my first novel in the early 1980’s, it was set in Gilded Age New Orleans.
But what was surprising was that there were no reference books to tell me how to write historical fiction.
Although plenty of wise and encouraging how-to-write-all-types-of-fiction books have been published since the 80’s, there are still few useful books about how to write historical fiction. And that lack of trusted resources is one of the reasons why my historical fiction promotional group—the Paper Lantern Writers—decided to combine our expertise and write one.
The other reason was that after much discussion, our editors Mari Anne Christie and Jillianne Hamilton came up with a book structure that really resonated with us: in response to a specific writing question, each of us would write “how-to” chapters on aspects of historical fiction that we had explored, tried, tested, and mastered.
I’m happy to share that Crafting Stories From the Past: A How-To Guide for Writing Historical Fiction launched on May 1st. Written by twelve award-winning authors of historical fiction, Crafting Stories from the Past contains twenty-three how-to essays, and one deep reference section of how to start your historical fiction engines.
Here’s a sampling of our chapter questions and author responses:
- Q: My characters ride horses everywhere, but I’ve never even pet one. What do I even need to know about them?
- A: How to Bring Horses to Life in Historical Fiction by Anne Beggs, author of By Arrow and Sword and co-owner of Equisance horse boarding ranch in Watsonville.
- Q: I think I need to write a love scene, but oh my God, my mother might read this. What do I do?
- How to Write a Historical Sex Scene by Edie Cay, award-winning Regency Romance author.
- Q: I want to include people who aren’t like me, but I don’t want to cause offense. What can I do to show different cultures?
- A: How to Embrace Diversity in Historical Fiction by Edie Cay and Vanitha Sankaran, author of Watermark and former chair of the Historical Novel Society NA Conference.
- Q: The physics of time travel is getting in the way of telling my story. How do I avoid some kind of time paradox?
- A: How to Manage Time Travel Anomalies by Jonathan Posner, our time-traveling Tudor Adventure author.
- Q: I have two different stories in two different eras, but I want them to intertwine. How do I even start this?
- A: How to Organize a Dual Timeline Novel by Rebecca D’Harlingue, award-winning author and new Sisters in Crime NorCal member.
My contributions include How to Describe Places You Can’t Visit and How to include Real People in Historical Fiction—something I’ve done a lot of, beginning with my short story Kate Chopin Tussles with a Novel Ending, my contribution to SinC NorCal’s Faultlines anthology.
I also organized the in-depth chapter of Resource Recommendations. If you’re eager to start writing about almost anything that’s happened in the last two thousand years, our suggested books, maps, archives, and websites will get you going.
Crafting Stories From the Past was quite the labor of love for the Paper Lantern Writers, and I can’t wait to get my hard copy. I’ve already got a spot on my reference shelf waiting for it.