3 Tips for Writing an Alternative Historical Romance
Put your characters first.
If you’re writing historical, then your characters must have deep, driving goals related to the time period, right? In my experience, no!
(5 Ways to Enhance World-Building for Your Historical Novel.)
Character building feels the same to me whether I’m writing a book set now or in the past. Creating nuanced, layered characters your reader can root for is easier said than done, but the good news for historical writers is that a good character is a good character no matter what period they’re living in.
Research, but not too much.
Since you’re writing about a real time and place with real people, it’s important to research for your historical—to an extent. The potential pitfall of research is that there’s always more to learn, and it’s very easy to feel like you haven’t learned enough to start writing and/or allow the fear of getting something wrong to scare you away from the page.
But there’s a point where you’ll need to stop researching and start planning or writing your story. If your book starts feeling more like a report than a story, it’s probably time to stop researching and start brainstorming!
Choose one thing to change.
If you could change one thing about the time period you’re writing in, what would it be? For me, the answer is usually “make it explicitly queer.”
I loved history in high school, but it was taught to me as if queer people didn’t exist until the 1980s when they emerged, fully formed, from the staggeringly cruel response of the Reagan-Bush administration to the AIDS crisis. As a closeted queer kid, learning that all the historical moments I studied and loved had had all the queerness scrubbed from them felt like a betrayal. But learning later in college about moments when queer people lived freely and existed as themselves? It was a balm to my little baby-bi soul.
Making my historical stories queer now is a response to that feeling from years ago, and every time I give a queer couple a happy ending, I like to imagine handing that book to my younger self. I don’t know that it’s a “change” to the historical period, per se, but it is a change to how the period gets talked about and represented. Queer people have always been here, and I want more books to show that.
Check out Erin Cotter’s A Traitorous Heart here:
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