Personal Blogs

When writing historical fiction there is a temptation to spend hours, weeks, or even months doing research before starting, but is that really necessary? A novel should be about the characters, what they do, who they meet and how they react to events, so the historical setting can lead to specific conflicts but other than that may be mainly irrelevant. I could write stories about a waitress set in 1750, 1850 or 1950 and they could all lead to a similar character-led plot, with only the nuances of language, the environment, the clothes and modes of transport differing. So is it important to do lots of detailed research before writing a piece of historical fiction or is it more important to get the characters to write their story, and then do some research to check historical credibility? The risk of a lot of research - pages and pages of notes - are that the characters and the story get lost in the details. A novel written from a notebook full of detailed research can feel like just that - a write-up of notes that have lost all sense of joy and spontaneity. My technique is to 'write first, research second.' Having said that, I am interested in 20th century history so I have a fairly good grounding in my head of what year the war started and other such key facts. If I'm writing a story about the German invasion of France in the summer of 1940 I'll check if it happened in June, July or August to get that detail correct, but other than that I'll let the story flow. Then, when it's written, I'll go back over it and check the technical details - would the family really have heard about the invasion on the radio or would it have been in a newspaper? Would the planes that flew overhead be loaded with visible bombs and machine guns or would the family not be able to see that from the ground?  Would the road they took be heading to Auxerre or Dijon? Hopefully this approach leads to a good story without any historical howlers that have the true history buffs screaming at the page!