Historical Fiction

Historical Fiction

Historical fiction does not illustrate the past: it brings to life people who do not know what comes next. The entire difficulty sits in that point.

1. Reading contract

The reader demands: a period held, characters who think according to their time, a plot that does not depend on their knowledge of the facts, and a declared honesty about the liberties taken.

2. The rule of the present

Characters do not know what is coming. They never say they are living through a pivotal age. They worry about the harvest, the rent, a child's health, not about the historical significance of events.

Corollary: great events are seen obliquely, through their local effects, through rumour, through the price of bread.

3. Mentalities

• Reconstruct what went without saying, what was unthinkable, what was scandalous.
• Do not turn the protagonist into a contemporary conscience lost in the past. A character may be ahead of their time, but they must then pay the social price, and the reader must see that price.
• Religion, superstition, honour and hierarchy are real motivations, not accessories.
• Relations to the body, to death, to childhood and to time differ deeply and must be researched.

4. Research

Level 3 mandatory on: the chronology of the facts used, the legal framework, currency and prices, means of transport and durations, social hierarchy, clothing and food, the techniques of the trade represented.

The research-director anachronism check applies to every chapter, dialogue vocabulary included.

5. Language

• Neither archaising pastiche nor contemporary speech. A readable language from which impossible words have been removed.
• Ban terms drawn from later concepts: stress, motivation, planning, trauma, outside a deliberate use.
• Use the concrete vocabulary of the period for objects and trades: it is the names of things that date a text, not the syntax.
• Forms of address and familiar pronouns follow the social hierarchy.

6. Real historical figures

• Attested facts are not contradicted.
• The gaps in the record are the ground for fiction.
• No invented slander about a real person, no attribution of an undocumented crime.
• Liberties taken are declared in the author's note.

7. Cliches to turn or prohibit

• The modern woman before her time, with no social consequence.
• The character who explains the historical context to another who knows it.
• The dirty commoner and the clean noble, or the mechanical reverse.
• The battle told from the strategist's view rather than the combatant's.
• The character who meets every celebrity of their age.

8. Exit checks

• No character anticipates the facts.
• The anachronism checklist is run on every chapter.
• Great events are seen through their local effects.
• The author's note lists the liberties taken.
• Dialogue vocabulary is checked word by word on the key scenes.

9. Auto-critique

The eleven constitution axes, plus four genre axes: documentary accuracy, accuracy of mentalities, language held, honesty of the paratext.

Threshold: no axis below 4 on documentary accuracy and mentalities.

10. Interfaces

• Upstream: research-director, immersion-director.
• Neighbours: genres/political-fiction, genres/adventure.