{"id":1847,"date":"2021-03-04T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-04T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/?p=1847"},"modified":"2021-03-11T23:35:50","modified_gmt":"2021-03-11T23:35:50","slug":"writing-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/2021\/03\/04\/writing-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andi Smith \/\/ Blog Writer<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rachel Barenbaum, author of A Bend in the Stars<\/em>, told me that she wanted to be able to see her characters\u2019 worlds as well as they did: \u201cIf they\u2019re on a dock, I want to know what it smells like, what they\u2019re seeing.\u201d That\u2019s easy enough to do when you\u2019re writing about a place that you can visit for yourself; sometimes, though, the only way you\u2019re going to know exactly <\/em>what your characters are seeing is by using a time machine. Barenbaum\u2019s book, set in 1914 Russia, is influenced by Einstein\u2019s historic journey to prove relativity; naturally, when writing about such a topic in the twenty-first century, any first-hand accounts of the book\u2019s events could only be found in archives or diaries, not people\u2019s minds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historical fiction requires more research than likely any other genre of fiction, and starting that process isn\u2019t easy. But here\u2019s a tip you probably didn\u2019t hear from your teachers in high school: start with Wikipedia. Begin with the sources the editors link at the bottom of the page: use the sources those<\/em> sources list. You may not find the exact answer you\u2019re looking for, but you\u2019re certain to find something that will be able to help you answer your question in a different way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    Lisa See, bestselling author of books such as Shanghai Girls<\/em>, says that she often visits the places she writes about in person. The time periods of her work range from eras hundreds of years ago to the modern age, all set in East Asia or America. See meets the people who remember the events in her stories and tries to learn everything she can about the cultures, often through food. Ruta Sepetys\u2014author of The Fountains of Silence<\/em>, a young adult novel set under Francisco Franco\u2019s dictatorship in 1950s Spain\u2014does much the same. But if you\u2019re just starting out writing historical fiction, you might not have the funds to travel to a far-off country and absorb its culture. What to do instead?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    • Read works of fiction set in the time and place you\u2019re researching, both from contemporary writers and from writers who lived through it.<\/li>
    • Learn how people described what you\u2019ll be describing: places, people, senses, etc.\u00a0<\/li>
    • Look for photographic records of events. Old newspapers work wonders if you need to establish a timeline, see pictures of an event, or even learn what kind of ads were running during a time period.\u00a0<\/li>
    • Look through the indexes of books about the time period to gain more sources.<\/li>
    • Ask historians and researchers for any advice or about any further inquiries you have.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n

      Readers will want to question everything. They may read your work and want to learn more about your subject, meaning they might set out to come across their own information. Hopefully, if you do yours well enough, their research won\u2019t contradict your own. But chances are, if you look as hard as you can and can\u2019t find anything, then your readers won\u2019t, either\u2014the mark of a thoroughly investigated work of fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Andi Smith \/\/ Blog Writer Rachel Barenbaum, author of A Bend in the Stars, told me that she wanted to be able to see her characters\u2019 worlds as well as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1621,"featured_media":1848,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-about-writing","category-generalinformation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1621"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1847"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1864,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1847\/revisions\/1864"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}