Guest post by author Tessa Arlen
Tessa Arlen, the daughter of a British diplomat had lived in, or visited her parents in: Singapore, Berlin, The Persian Gulf, Beijing, Delhi and Warsaw by the time she was sixteen. She came to the U.S. in 1980 and worked as an H.R. recruiter for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee for the 1984 Olympic Games, where she interviewed her future husband in 1983 for a job. She lives in New Mexico. POPPY REDFERN AND THE FATAL FLYERS is the cozy, escapist read you will thank yourself for indulging in. Wonderfully atmospheric, Poppy’s second adventure delivers the ideal balance of intriguing mystery, picturesque setting, and charming characters.
Reading history helps us to understand what happened at a specific time and place. Reading historical fiction affects how we understand what it was like to live in a bygone age, and because we are moved by others’ experiences we continue to search for meaning to the lives of those who connect us to the past through fiction. Here are my five tips on achieving authenticity and atmosphere in your historical novel.
Creating a World
To make place and time believable the details of daily life are important. What did people eat and drink? How did they travel around their world? What did their cities, towns or villages look like? These are the questions that I ask myself as I write my novel to avoid an information dump at the beginning. The atmosphere of my created world is built layer upon layer throughout the story drawing the reader further in and immersing them in the world I have created.
Detail is vital. Authentic detail of the time and place your characters inhabit can be shown by how they interact with each other: their manners, the social norms of the day, and the customs and traditions of a country are built by using authentic elements. If a character is getting dressed for her day the details of her dress create a strong image of time and place. If she puts on a pair of new trousers that she has been daring herself to wear and worries that her mother will not approve, chances are she is living the late 1930s, or she is a rebellious teenage girl from a Mennonite family.
Dialogue has to be natural no matter what century you are writing about. There is no need to get mired down in the vocabulary of your created world. It is more important that your characters’ dialogue fits with their personalities, than utter a stream of archaic Georgian slang that you reader cannot understand. Reading the fiction of the time, if it is available, is a wonderful way of becoming accustomed to how people expressed themselves. Slang and accents are fine but limit yourself to a word or two.
Blending fiction and fact. Historical facts and events must always be painstakingly accurate so that your fictional characters and their lives are acceptable. Use real people of the time as anchors for authenticity and add fictional characters so that you can make your world more relatable to your reader.
Research is important, but don’t spend all your energy and time on it, so that you never write a line of your novel! Cross reference your sources when you are researching real events and places and use how events unrolled as a backdrop for your plot. We don’t have to have degrees in European History to write about a mystery set during the French Civil war, or be an anthropologist to write a romance set in the Bronze Age, but we must do our very best to be scrupulous about historical facts wherever we can.
