What Does Historical Fiction Give Us? Part One

Part 1 of 2: Why bother?

Good historical fiction is doubly hard to write. Not only are there the usual problems of writing good “fiction”: well plotted, richly detailed, stuffed with fascinating characters. But “historical” demands that whole additional burden of research, so that the end result is a convincing representation of a past time and often distant place. Why should we even bother?

Now Feels Pretty Good

In the first place, we and our readers find it entertaining, like a good History Channel program. It's not so much what we learn (and I'm looking at you, History Channel, with your alien pyramid builders!) but the sheer pleasure of living for a while in an exotic time and place, imagining what it must have been like when a trip of a hundred miles took more than a day instead of an hour and a half. When doing the laundry meant beating the clothes on the rocks along the river, and not just pitching them into the washing machine for a few minutes. This isn't idle fancy. It's a healthy thing—especially for the young, who have never been without them—to reflect on the luxuries of our age and to picture life without them. To imagine life without modern dentistry and medical science, without cell phones and computers, so that everything was s-l-l-o-o-o-w-w and life was short. Students used to ask me which age I'd like to live in, and the answer was always, “This one,” the one in which disease, dirt and discomfort has been minimized. It's good to think about.

Additional blogs from NL Holmes have appeared on the Florida Writers Association website floridawriters.net.