How to Write Historical Fiction (When the Past Won't Sit Still)

Hilary Mantel spent years walking through Hampton Court. Not as a tourist. She'd go alone, stand in doorways, put her hands on the walls. She was trying to feel where Thomas Cromwell had been. She said once that she'd stand in those rooms and try to sense the weight of a man who'd walked the same floors five hundred years earlier, a man who'd risen from nothing to become the most feared figure in Tudor England, and then had lost everything in the space of a few weeks.

She didn't start writing Wolf Hall right away. She read. She visited archives. She sat with the material for years, letting it accumulate the way dust settles on old furniture, slowly and then all at once. She said the past isn't behind us. It's beneath our feet. We're standing on it, always, and the job of the historical novelist is to press an ear to the ground and listen.

I think about that image a lot. The ear to the ground. Because most advice about historical fiction focuses on getting the details right, the clothing, the food, the politics. And those things matter. But Mantel wasn't in Hampton Court checking whether the doorknobs were period-accurate. She was trying to feel something. She was trying to close the gap between then and now, to find the human creature inside the historical record.

That's the thing worth paying attention to if you're writing historical fiction. The facts are available to anyone with a library card. The feeling is what separates a novel from a Wikipedia article.

Writing the past in present tense

Mantel made a choice with Wolf Hall that still surprises people. She wrote the entire novel in present tense. Cromwell doesn't remember things that happened. They happen. He walks into a room and the reader walks with him, seeing what he sees, in real time. Tudor England doesn't feel like a museum. It feels like Tuesday.

The effect is disorienting at first, and that's the point. History already happened. We know how Cromwell's story ends. We know about the scaffold. But present tense strips away that comfortable distance, that sense of looking back from a safe vantage point, and forces the reader into the uncertainty of the moment. Cromwell doesn't know what's coming. In present tense, neither do we.

There's something here for any historical fiction writer. You don't have to use present tense. But the instinct behind it, making the past feel lived rather than reported, that's the whole game. When your reader can feel the cold of a stone floor or the anxiety of a political dinner, the century doesn't matter. The human situation does.

I'm not sure why so many historical novels default to a tone of reverence, as if the past is a cathedral you have to whisper inside. Mantel didn't whisper. She let Cromwell be petty, funny, tired, calculating. She let him be a person. And the history became more real because of it, not less.

The inner life is the story

Madeline Miller's Circe is technically about a goddess from Greek mythology. It spans thousands of years. It includes Odysseus, the Minotaur, Hermes, and the Titans. And none of that is what makes it work.

What makes it work is loneliness. Circe is a minor goddess, overlooked by her family, exiled to an island, left to figure out who she is without anyone to reflect herself back to. Miller took a character who appears in a few pages of the Odyssey, a witch who turns men into pigs, and asked a question that Homer never bothered with: what does it feel like to be her?

The same thing happens in The Song of Achilles. Everyone knows the story of Achilles. The rage, the war, the heel. But Miller wrote it from Patroclus's perspective, the person who loved Achilles most and understood him least. The Trojan War becomes background noise. The foreground is two people trying to hold onto each other while the world demands that one of them become a weapon.

If you're working with historical or mythological material, Miller's approach is worth studying. The events are given. You can't change the outcome of the Trojan War or the fate of Circe. So the novel has to live somewhere else, in the emotional truth between the known facts, in the silences the historical record left behind.

Finding the novel in the archive

Geraldine Brooks was a journalist before she was a novelist, and you can feel it in the way she works. She doesn't invent her starting points. She finds them. Year of Wonders came from a real village called Eyam, in Derbyshire, where the residents voluntarily quarantined themselves during the plague of 1665. Brooks read the parish records, the burial logs, the court documents. She traced the names of real people who chose to stay and die rather than carry the plague to neighboring towns.

The novel she built from those records is fiction, but the bones are real. Anna Frith, her protagonist, is imagined. The village, the plague, the decision to quarantine, those are documented. Brooks found the story in the gap between what the records say happened and what they don't say about how it felt.

She did something similar with March, which reimagines the absent father from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Brooks went back to Bronson Alcott's actual journals and letters, the real man Alcott based the character on, and discovered someone far more complicated and flawed than the saintly figure his daughter had sketched. The novel lives in that distance between the daughter's idealized portrait and the father's messy, contradictory reality.

If you're writing historical fiction, primary sources aren't just research. They're generative. A single line in a parish record, a throwaway sentence in someone's diary, a name on a ship's manifest, any of these can crack open a world. You don't always need a grand historical event. Sometimes you need a small, strange, human detail that makes you wonder what the full story was.

When the building becomes the book

Ken Follett spent three years researching The Pillars of the Earth before he wrote a word of fiction. He visited cathedrals across England and France. He studied medieval construction techniques, the engineering of flying buttresses, the chemistry of stained glass, the economics of quarrying stone. And then he did something that I don't think gets talked about enough: he made the cathedral itself a character.

The novel spans decades. Characters are born, grow old, die. Political alliances shift. Wars break out. But the cathedral is always there, rising slowly out of the ground, and every human conflict in the book connects back to whether this impossible building will get finished. The physical construction mirrors the narrative construction so closely that you can feel the story gaining weight as the walls go up, and threatening to collapse whenever the walls do.

Follett understood that historical fiction needs an anchor, something concrete and visible that the reader can track across hundreds of pages. In his case, it was limestone and glass. The cathedral gave the novel a shape that pure human drama, with its tendency to sprawl and meander, might not have provided on its own. It's a useful thing to think about when you're planning a long historical novel. What's the physical thing your characters are building, crossing, defending, or trying to reach? That object, that place, that structure, it can hold the whole book together if you let it.

Historical fiction asks you to hold two things at once: what happened and what it felt like. The facts you can look up. The feeling takes daily practice, the habit of sitting with the past until it starts to feel present, until the people in the archive start to breathe.

That's what we send every morning. One idea to sit with before you open the draft. See what tomorrow's reflection looks like.

Stop staring at the blank page. Start writing with purpose.

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