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Author Topic: How to Write Historical Fiction: 7 Tips on Accuracy and Authenticity  (Read 12723 times)

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Ramandeep08

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Hello Everyone,
Today, I am giving you 7 tips on how to write historical fiction.

1. Have fun with the research, but do your homework. This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. Borrow some good reference books. Become comfortable with the time period.
2. Let the characters engage with the historical details. This goes along with that “show don’t tell” truism writers are told all the time. Rather than just dumping a bunch of facts on the poor reader, let your characters interact with these details with all these senses. Let them smell the offal dumped onto the cobblestone streets.
3. Allow your characters to question and explore their place in society. This will help reveal the larger political, social, cultural context of the time. What were the expectations for women? For sailors? For criminals? How did people from different parts of society interact with one another?
4. Use the internet wisely, to inspire and inform. The internet can be a researcher’s best friend, especially for arm-chair time travelers. Need to know how long it would take to walk from the Louvre to the Eiffel tower? Use the walking feature on mapquest.
5. The internet can be bad, bad, bad for historical research. Unfortunately, the internet is also full of flawed information, lies, plagiarized material and half truths. (I’m looking at you, Wikipedia! Which I do use, but cautiously). Check all “facts” against at least two sources when possible. If a story or definition is repeated nearly verbatim in more than one source, there’s a good chance someone simply copied the information without verifying the accuracy.
6. Don’t fret the details; let the story be told. Strive for accuracy, but when necessary, make your best informed guess and move on. And if you have to fudge something, well, that’s what the ‘historical note’ at the end of your novel is for!
7. Love the process, because readers will still find errors. And they’ll let you know about them. It doesn’t matter if those errors happened in editing process (as several of mine did. I collapsed some scenes together, and voila! A perfect recipe for timeline and geography mistakes). You can triple-check facts, hire copy editors and proofreaders, scrutinize every word for inconsistencies and mistakes, and I guarantee something will still slip by. At that point, you just have to laugh, thank your reader and move on.
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Alen91kane

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Re: How to Write Historical Fiction: 7 Tips on Accuracy and Authenticity
« Reply #1 on: June 26, 2017, 01:23:13 PM »

Hie Ramandeep08,

Thank you for giving such a nice 7 tips about " how to write a historical fiction " It is really helpful for Everyone. But can You or anybody else post about  " Paper writing " I need Some Pro Paper writing help to write an Assignments for my College essay writing competition. I have checked http://www.paperwritingpro.com/ But I Need more some thing like this...

If Any one have please let me know....!!!!
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