The biggest challenge when writing an historically set story is make it feel it isn’t happened today. Sure, people is people, but history is history and nobody should expect people of nearly one hundred years ago to think and act exactly like us. Nor should their lives appear to be just like our own life.

Of course there may be exceptions. In fact, as a storyteller, you’ll want to have exceptions in your story. But in order to do this and to make these exceptions still credible in your historical setting, you need as an author to be aware of what the ‘standard path’ was and to make your reader aware of the same.

So you need to know your facts, of course, nothing comes before that, but you also need to know and be aware of the similarities and the differences in the way people would think and feel in the time period as oppose as to what people think and feel today in the same situation. And honestly I find this to be the most fascinating part of the research.

NOTE: I tried to track down the first ever edition of every book, because I think knowing when a book was written puts it in the right perspective.

I’m a fiction writer, so of course I want to know what others did and wrote in the same setting I’m using. History is extremely important for any writer handling an historical setting, but because we’re storytellers, it’s from other storytellers we learn the most. Better still if these storytellers wrote in the time period we’re interested into or told story set in the same time frame.

This is how I see it: facts allow you to see things from outside. Stories allow you to see things from inside. So you can’t do one thing and don’t do the other. And then, if reading history is interesting and educational, reading stories is just plain fan.

NOTE: I tried to track down the first ever edition of every book, because I think knowing when a book was written puts it in the right perspective.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I put in here everything that didn’t fit in the other sections of the blog. But hey, this is still interesting stuff. Besides, while researching I discovered I needed things I’d never imagined I would need, and I ended up reading book and watching films and documentaries I’d never imagined I would watch.

Now, isn’t that fun?