A must-read for those who write meat-on-the-bones historical fiction.
Don’t kid yourself about what you think you already know. Don’t delude yourself into thinking there are shortcuts regarding the search for historical accuracy. And for Heaven’s sake, don’t try to do all your research on the Internet.
HUH?
I know, I know, it’s the “World Wide Web,” it’s the “Information Highway,” it’s “millions of facts at your fingertips,” etc. etc.
All That Glitters...
Well, all of the above are true, and if you’re careful about vetting the sites from which you take information, you can do okay in many instances. However, if you want to do a deep dive and make sure every last detail in your novel is historically correct, there’s only one way to do it: hit the history books.
Whether you buy them, borrow them from the library, or download them, reading history books in their entirety is the only way to make sure you write a novel that is one-hundred percent period correct. There are no shortcuts.
No offense to sites like Wikipedia and Quora, but these are not foolproof sources of information. Articles or answers to questions found on these sites, and similar ones, may or may not contain mistakes and you’ll have no way to know the difference. Unless, of course, you are an expert yourself. But if you are, you probably wouldn’t be googling those things to begin with, right? Of course, websites of trusted historical institutions abound, but these often fail to list the minute details you may be looking for when writing your book.
Dates and Events Don’t Cut It
Additionally, it’s important to understand that listing dates and major events are only two small parts of making a novel period-correct. You can easily google the year of a battle or who was king or queen during a specific decade, but how easy is it to google phrases and figures of speech, specific to one, twenty-five year period or colloquial expressions that may have been used frequently in one part of the country but were obsolete in another during the same ten-year period? (Yes, it happened all the time.) Don't bother googling those things. They're not there.
What about how households were run? You may be able to get general information about the typical norms in a country during a particular century, but certain towns or villages may have done things altogether differently from the rest of the country. If your novel is set in one of those areas, you could be writing it all wrong by using general information you found online.
Image by David Connelly
Just Give in and Read a Book Already
My book was set in Cornwall, England, where many households swam upstream when compared with the way estates were run throughout the rest of England. Sweeping generalities would not have worked for me when writing Hot Winter Sun, I would’ve gotten a lot wrong. I read about eight, two-inch thick history books when doing research for my story, in addition to what I found online.
Topics such as food, how servants behaved, what was normal for men versus women are all things for which tons of general information is available online. However, decade-specific and area-specific information is exceedingly difficult to find that way. For example, Cornwall households (other than those that unfortunately ascribed to slavery) typically treated servants very well and did not want a reputation as being "hard on workers." Unlike the rest of England, staff shortages were common in Cornwall and estate lords would often ruin other estate lords by taking all their good help! So even having my estate owner being nasty to a servant was not a mistake I was willing to make in my book.
In fact, by the time I finished writing my novel, I knew more about Cornwall than I do about the town I live in, right down to the type of embroidery on the ladies’ petticoats and the fact that if pigeons reached pest level–as they often did in Cornwall–they would gather the younger men in the household for target practice sessions and tell them to take the pigeons they shot to the cottage people. (Yep. They ate pigeon stew in those days. Gross, I know. Historically correct? 100 percent.)
The Devil's in the Details
Even things such as making sure to mention the color of bell ropes are important if you want to be one-hundred percent accurate as I did. Bell ropes? Really? LOL. That’s something that you might be tempted to delete when you edit later on, but did you know that in Cornwall in the 1600s, manor homes typically had two, or even three, bell ropes in their master bedrooms? One for firewood, one for general maid service, and sometimes a third for an emergency! (You will NOT find that on a google search.) So it would be important to tell a visitor, “ring the red and black bell rope for the maid,” because otherwise they might be ringing about a non-existent emergency or requesting firewood in July. A casual reader may not care about that, but the history buff definitely notices those things. (And they WILL call you out on them.)
Therefore, depending on how perfect you want the history in your novel to be, and how authentic the flavor of your book overall, you may have to ditch Google at a certain point and just hit the books. Who knows? You may even like it once you try it! Write on!