Hidden History: Collecting Scraps to Write Compelling Historical Fiction
In the past, when women had leftover fabric from making dresses, they would create a scrap quilt out of the random bits. That’s how I approach gathering information to write historical fiction based on little-known characters, settings, or concepts.
(Unagented: My Circuitous Ride to Traditional Publication.)
A mistake people make when trying to find unique stories during certain eras is starting with the big idea. London during the Blitz, Occupied France, Pearl Harbor, WWI trenches, Russia during the Cold War. Those are all great, but they’re settings, not storylines. Trying to find an untrodden path into one of those will end in frustration unless you’re very lucky.
My advice instead is to think smaller.
Collect scraps.
First and foremost, to find that one narrative that no one else has stumbled across yet, you have to love history—which I assume most historical fiction writers do.
I know time is at a premium these days, but can you fit in some nonfiction books about historical topics that interest you? Even if it’s just listening to snippets while running errands? Can you squeeze in a few museums or historical sites on vacations? Can you pop on a podcast or a movie about your favorite eras?
If you can consistently find time for that, along the way you’ll inevitably collect scraps.
These can be throw-away lines in a book or an anecdote on a podcast. It can be the caption of a portrait at an art museum or a dress at the Met’s Costume Institute. It can even be a random social media post, which is where I got the idea for one of the main storylines in The Lost Book of Bonn.
Long before I even realized I wanted to write historical fiction, I stumbled onto a photograph on micro-blogging site Tumblr of a group of happy young people in the German equivalent of hippie clothes singing and playing guitars by a mountain lake. According to the caption, they were the Edelweiss Pirates, a hiking club turned anti-fascist protest group in Germany in the 1930s.
They were cool and interesting, so even as I scrolled on, the little scrap that had an edelweiss flower stitched onto it went into my pocket.
Years later, I was reading The Book Thieves, by Anders Rydell, which briefly touched on a place called the Offenbach Archival Depot in Frankfurt. There, Monuments Men and other workers sorted through plundered books with the ultimate goal of returning them to their rightful owners. I was already writing my debut, The Librarian of Burned Books, at the time, so I didn’t think much of it. But it had caught my attention, so I put that scrap in my pocket right next to the one with the flower.
In fall of 2021, I spent a month in Missoula, Montana, hiking and exploring the area. There was a fort just outside the city with an old boxcar parked on the lawn. In the 1920s, it had been turned into a library—which was used to take books to isolated mining and logging camps.
Another scrap, this one with a train on it.
In Washington, D.C., I spent hours in the International Spy Museum and learned how the way someone poured tea during World War II could give them away as an agent. In West Virginia, I went to a coal museum and learned how the workers were pushed into debt to reap more profit for the owners. In Pittsburgh, I went to a local history museum, and learned about the immigrants who made the city their home.
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Travel isn’t necessary, either. I’ve collected these scraps from a photo essay in The New York Times, from an old cover of Time Magazine, from a coffee table book my parents gave me for Christmas.
Not all of these will make it onto a quilt no matter how many books I write. But when I sat down to come up with an idea for my sophomore historical The Lost Book of Bonn, I had a pocketful of material to work with.
What if I stitched together the Edelweiss Pirates and the Offenbach Archival Depot? They’re both in Germany and can be used to explore similar themes. What would that quilt look like? What other scraps could I add to it?
My point with this tortured metaphor is the best way to find little-known nuggets in history is to not try to find them. Collect stories along the way and then figure out where they best fit into the trends of the marketplace when you’re ready to write the novel itself.
If you have a terrible memory, remember we all walk around with cameras in our pockets now. My photo roll is filled with museum plaques, lines from books, or screenshots of my Notes app. Most of them will just sit in there forever collecting dust.
But more often than not they can be useful even if they don’t turn into a novel.
For example, I wanted to give my librarian in Bonn an interesting backstory—one that would explain why she’s such a brave, adventurous lady. I remembered that boxcar outside Missoula, and thought, wouldn’t that be interesting if she grew up on it, with her mother as the librarian?
I added the detail as a one-paragraph factoid, a scrap of its own.
That then became the basis of the novel I’m currently working on, The Boxcar Librarian.
If you go in to every experience with the mindset that there could be a story to unearth, you’ll inevitably collect so many scraps along the way you won’t have to chase trends or templates set out by someone else.
You’ll have a quilt that is fully and uniquely yours.
Check out Brianna Labuskes’ The Lost Book of Bonn here: