Creator1

When I write historical fiction, I follow a process. It’s not a fancy process or anything codified or well known, just something I found helps me formulate the events. Generally, I will start with a historical event, in this case it was the first attempted assassination of a U.S. President. When I read about it, there were these short blurbs about two to six paragraphs in length. They all discuss the timeline of the day of the attack and some brief motives.

But wait a minute! Surely, there’s more to this story? I mean, this was the first time a U.S. President had someone try to kill them! Only a few sentences?

If it passes this check, I start to do some research. I use sources from published books, edu sites, and reputable sites surrounding the material. I don’t want to go into this too much, because it seems pretty intuitive to me.

The research usually informs the last phase. This involves picking what I’d feel would be the most interesting perspective. I try my best to be true to that perspective and write to it. There is some fiction that comes into this, because it’s a necessity. Unfortunately, history and research will only take you so far, there are things such as, smells, cultural norms, dialogue, weather, etc., that get left out of history books and research unless it’s relevant. I try my best to stay as historically accurate as possible and weave them into dialogue even, while keeping the perspective sane (ironically here), and entertaining. For instance, in the Lawrence of America series;

Lawrence is a painter (fact), who works for Congressman Poindexter (also, fact). But, in the story he seemingly welcomes himself to the job site and gives himself work to do. Lawrence also has a conversation with Poindexter who cheekily suggests Lawrence is related to royalty in Great Britain. (this is all fiction, likely. I wasn’t there.) But it fits my narrative of telling the assassination and the lead up to it from Lawrence’s perspective and it makes the reader really understand the Lawrence was falling into madness during this time.