"Do you sit down and write
your story first and then do the research later? And when you do
research and include it in your writing, do you reference those
historical notes on your manuscript (e.g. Bibliography)?"
A loyal fan,
Franca
Ah, research. Before, during, or after? In a word: Yes.
All of the above.
If you are writing a historical, then it seems to me that a basic
working knowledge of the period is essential simply to be able to
get your characters from point A to point B.
With the wide availability of books for historical writers, you
can usually get yourself up and running on your first story after
an investment of reading, say, three or four of them. The most useful
kinds of books to start with are those like the “Everyday
Life In” series that explore different historical periods.
(A favorite survey of historical oddments for many Regency writers
is Emily Hendrickson’s marvelous REGENCY REFERENCE BOOK. As
a veteran author of some scores of Regencies, she gives you the
kinds of specifics that writers need. Another good one is Daniel
Pool’s WHAT JANE AUSTEN ATE AND CHARLES DICKENS KNEW.)
While regular history texts usually explore political currents,
overarching societal changes, and so forth, what the historical
writer needs starting off is a working vocabulary in the hands-on
artifacts of everyday life: food and how people took meals, houses,
lighting, modes of transportation, what people did for fun.
I think it’s also very important to have a broad grasp of
the general rules of the society you want to write about before
you begin, especially (for a historical romance) social rules regarding
women—how they were taught to view themselves and what was
possible/permissible for them in their lives. Along with this, I
would add rules about courtship and marriage and, while we’re
at it, the basics of aristocratic life and the peerage system.
If you have been reading historical romance for years, then you
may have absorbed a lot of this “by osmosis,” but it
gives a writer so much more confidence to approach a project being
absolutely sure that you know what you’re talking about. So
I’d say, do some exploring of these items on your own.
Building that foundation of knowledge at the beginning can be a
lot of work, true, but once you make the investment of effort, then
you can avoid wasted work later; should you inadvertently base major
story plot points on historical impossibilities, then you probably
won’t be able to sell the book you’ve written, or if
you do, readers will find your errors (trust me) and may not buy
your second book.
Historical readers, especially Regency fans, are notorious for losing
patience quickly with writers who are too lazy to bother doing good
research. For example, to legions of readers, nothing turns a historical
romance into a wall-banger faster than the old illegitimate-son-inheriting-the-title
fallacy. (That could never happen, FYI. It was illegal. Yet occasionally
books that contain this mistake do get published. That’s because
the editors who buy them are experts in editing and helping writers
hone their storytelling; it’s not part of their job description
that they must be experts in historical accuracy. They, too, trust
their authors to do their homework.)
By first knowing the rules of a society, THEN comes the fun part—then
you can begin to bend them and manipulate them to achieve the effects
you want in your story.
But with that said, don’t let all this talk of historical
accuracy freeze your ability to write. I have seen writers get so
overwhelmed with fear of making a mistake that they can’t
move forward with their book. A mistake is never the end of the
world.
The most common type of error is the one where you think you absolutely
know a fact, so you don’t even bother looking it up, and later
end up with egg on your face.
I had this experience I am chagrined to say in my third novel, Prince
Charming—on page ONE no less. The hero, Prince Rafael, is
sitting at the opera in great boredom watching his mistress, a singing
starlet, performing a duet in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Now,
for the record, I am obsessed with Mozart; I listen to Mozart every
day; and if I had to choose whether to save a human being or the
last known copy of Mozart’s music from a raging house fire,
I would save Mozart’s music. So much do I think that I know
dear Wolfie’s music that I did not bother taking more than
a cursory glance to review Don Giovanni. If I had, I would not have
cast the role of Don Giovanni as being sung by a tenor rather than
a baritone!
This may sound like a small thing to you, but many historical readers
love the arts—after all, the Regency was the Age of Elegance.
Many of them are opera fans, and a number of them caught my error.
Sigh… Ah, well!
As someone once said, “Even Homer nods.” It’s
always comforting to review scholarly lists of the factual errors
in Shakespeare’s plays. And if I can make one further aside:
I recently learned that from the times of the Ottoman Empire, there
was a tradition among Muslim artists where they would deliberately
put a little mistake or two into their mosaics or other artworks
as a way of expressing the idea that only God creates perfection.
I like that.
It boils down to an issue of scale. I can live with having miscast
the role of Don Giovanni to a tenor rather than a baritone because
it is a small detail occupying one little line of text, indeed,
one sentence (though I really do wish that sentence did not appear
on page one!). If the mistake had involved the whole premise of
the novel, such as a bastard son inheriting his father’s title,
then I would have to crawl under a rock and not come out again until
I realized I had better switch to contemporaries! If you don’t
do a good deal of research before you begin story-making, then you
won’t know what the biggies are to avoid.
At any rate, beyond a general foundation of the accoutrements of
daily life in the historical era of your choice, each book will
have its own research topics to be explored. It’s a judgment
call as to how much you need to know first and what you can look
up later. I like to leave descriptions of rooms and clothing til
last, personally. These can take a LOT of time, and there’s
not much point bending my brain to do interior decorating on a Regency
drawing room, for example, before I know for certain whether the
dialogue and emotion of the story will work.
I would just caution people to do as much research as you can stand
to do up front because that way you can avoid writing in mistakes.
Once you begin to visualize your historical world, the longer you
labor under mistaken notions, the harder it is to change it around
later it in your mind.
By the by, we sometimes encounter readers who have built up mistaken
ideas about how an historical era really worked, based on the narrow
worlds of the novels they have read—this is unfortunately
common with readers who have read all of Jane Austen and Georgette
Heyer. Oftentimes people fail to realize these works only represented
a small sliver of the total society. That means that even when you’re
right, some readers will mistakenly believe you’re wrong.
Thus, it’s helpful to be able to back up your research with
documentation, should the need arise—which leads me to the
final part of your question.
You had asked about recording sources for the facts to be used in
the manuscript. Publishers do not generally require a bibliography
for works of fiction, at least not genre fiction.
My publisher doesn’t require it, and I have not heard of my
colleagues being asked to turn in their bibliographies. That doesn’t
mean that the author doesn’t have one, though. What you will
need is some handy way of recording where you found the particular
facts you’re using in a given chapter of your manuscript,
in case you have to go back and double-check things, or in case
you receive any future challenges from a critique partner, a copyeditor,
or a reader.
It’s very useful to be able to back your work up with a reference
book or two, giving specific page numbers to show where you found
the information. Like I said, it’s not required, but it’s
a great “C-Y-A” habit to get into (cover-your-a*s.)
Most word-processing programs include a “Comments” function.
This allows you to bookmark a place in your text and insert a “comment”
that won’t show on the screen unless you set it to View/Show/Reveal
Comments. The comments function is a handy way to record your sources
at particular points in your manuscript. You can always do it on
paper, though, separately. One way to do it is, at the end of writing
each chapter, go back and make a list of any specific sources that
you used in constructing that chapter.
But do note that this is for your own reference; the publisher probably
isn’t going to want to bother with it.
Thank you for the question, and I hope that you have found this
information helpful! Until next time…
All the best,
G.F.
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