#WE NEED TO GO DEEPER TIME TRAVELER SERIES#

These primary sources are what historians use to write their accounts they include letters and diaries, or things like a first-hand account of a balloon flight in 1783, and they are gold. Use historians’ bibliographies to track down documents from the period, many of which are available online or included in books. (I do this by importing links into Scrivener.) Know that you’ll probably come back to whatever you read, so be sure to take notes and save links to websites. You don’t have to start with the most complex one, either, unless it speaks to you.

Try biographies, social and political histories. Learning that Versailles crawled with rats and that anyone could wander its halls helped me see the glittering palace with fresh eyes-and devise a way in for my heroine. Learning that the pomade used in hairstyles in the 1780s reeked after a week gave me a powerful sensory detail. Weiland stresses in her great post on writing historical fiction, even more than getting the facts right (which you need to do), what counts is creating a feeling of authenticity.īut how do you do that? Here’s what I’ve learned so far: This wasn’t something I’d expected to happen, but I was thrilled when it did. Will readers care about the difficulty of producing hydrogen gas for balloons? I highly doubt it! But understanding it added another layer of authenticity to the story and helped me see the challenges my balloonist would face, which in turn sparked changes in the plot. I’ve read more about the period than will fit in my book in fact, what shows up in the novel is only the tip of the iceberg. Knowing this has helped me deal with the inevitable overwhelm that comes with trying to get a grasp on a historical moment. Research, I’ve discovered, is a spiral process: you can’t possibly know what you need to know at the beginning, so inevitably you’ll go back to the source many times. Then I researched again, this time with more focus because I had a better idea of what I needed to know. For me, this was enough to begin, to rough out a story arc. I’d listened to Antonia Fraser’s biography of Marie Antoinette. When I started, I knew a bit about the eighteenth century from my grad school days, but not much.

And all of that research is in pursuit of one thing: to make my readers feel that they are THERE, that they’ve traveled back in time and space. The magic I get to invent, but the details of life in the 1780s-the settings, historical events, clothes, food, economy, transportation and more-I need to research. My current project, Enchantée, is a YA historical fantasy, which means (at least to me) that it’s rooted in historical fact and touched by magic. This happened right before the French Revolution, which made me think about Versailles and its gardens and court dresses and then I knew: my protagonist would be the tough city girl who stopped the balloon from crashing-and fell in love with its pilot- and she would be the girl with the letter, ruining her expensive dress as she strode through the gardens of Versailles. At all! But then last fall, I happened to read about the invention of hot-air balloons and a real-life event in which a Parisian girl saved a balloon pilot from injury. This person didn’t fit into the book I was working on at the time. She carried a letter in her hand as she made her way toward a small building, a kind of folly, to read in private. I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear her breathing hard, because she wore a corset and the hem of her brocade dress was damp and heavy. This week, we’ll share our thoughts on digging into historical research.įor years I was haunted by a dream of a young woman walking through long grass.

#WE NEED TO GO DEEPER TIME TRAVELER SERIES#

Last week, we continued our series with an introductory post on research. Welcome to this week’s Master Your Craft post! Each Wednesday we’ll discuss prewriting and drafting a new book from the BIG IDEA to QUERYING.

We need to go deeper time traveler