How You Can Write Like a Historian Without Getting a PhD

I get it. You have a passion for the past. You love history. But you’ve seen a real difference between the type of books written by professional historians and those who are not. As a writer who wants to share your love of history, the entry seems daunting.

(What They Don’t Teach You in MFA Programs.)

But hey, there’s good news. You don’t have to write historical fiction or throw in the towel altogether. There are things you can do to write more like a professional historian without going to all the trouble of getting a PhD in the subject.

Frankly, you probably shouldn’t be getting a history PhD just because you want to write history. Professional historians spend a lot more time in the classroom—and mostly not as the tenured professors we imagine, with the tweedy elbow patches and pipe smoke.

No, if you want to write history like a historian, you should just write history like a historian. Here’s how.

1. Choose a topic that has historical significance—and personal appeal.

One thing historians do is make an original argument about an area of history that hasn’t been fully explored yet (or hasn’t been written about for some time). We’re often trying to “fill a hole” in the scholarship on a particular era. But that doesn’t mean you have to write about something boring. When I decided to write a history of Journey—my favorite rock band—I first assessed whether there was already sufficient writing to make the point.

I found plenty of rock history, but precious little on Journey: a book by a journalist in 2011 and a memoir by one of the musicians in 2018. As a fan, I knew there was an important story to tell that involved tensions between very human people as they worked to create what has been dubbed “the soundtrack of our lives.” But the 2011 book was written, it seemed, by an author who wanted to write a hagiography of his favorite guitarist. The 2018 book by the band’s main songwriter and piano player lacked knowledge of the group’s origins because he joined the band years after its founding. I knew that as a historian I could bring objectivity instead of hagiography, and a sweeping, yet detailed, perspective to the project.

2. Interrogate your sources.

This is the step many writers neglect, taking the statements of their subjects at face value. But to do professional history, you need to treat your sources as if they are witnesses on the stand at trial, and you the opposing council. It’s very rare that you can catch someone in a baldfaced lie, but by deeply analyzing the motives for each source, you can add important perspective.

This was a very important step in my book Livin’ Just to Find Emotion: Journey and the Story of American Rock. Celebrities, especially rock musicians, have a vested interest in their own version of the past, because it often plays a direct role in the money they make in the present. Journey’s Steve Perry tried to maintain a public persona of an “average Joe,” telling reporters that he enjoyed pizza and beer while touring with the band. In fact, as a professional singer attempting to hit very high tenor notes night after night, often with less-than-optimal sleep, he rarely indulged in such delights. Pizza cheese adds phlegm to the throat, and alcohol dehydrates. Diving deeper, I found that his preferred beverage on the road was hot herbal tea. This once caused a problem in Japan, where customs officials mistook the leaves for…something more potent.

Check out David Hamilton Golland’s Livin’ Just to Find Emotion: Journey and the Story of American Rock here:

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3. Write while you read.

Think you need to read all your sources before you can set proverbial pen to paper? Think again! What I do is put them in chronological order, and then read enough to cover a particular paragraph, page, or section. Then it’s lather, rinse, repeat.

(How to Research Topics Like a Journalist.)

Mind you, putting the sources in order is no small task. For my second book, the biography of affirmative action pioneer Arthur Fletcher, I acquired some 250,000 documents when his surviving son and I scanned his personal papers during one sweltering south Florida summer. Simply sorting them for basic identifiers like date and author took well over two years. For my Journey book, this initial organization took less than three months, because the vast majority were articles from online sources like newspapers.com, often with metadata attached.

4. Pay attention to context.

L.P. Hartley famously said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Just as a chef can’t truly understand French cooking without visiting France, a historian can’t convey the context of historical actions without immersing in a historical era. That means learning lots and lots about it—even when much of it seems irrelevant to the story.

Before Steve Perry joined Journey, critics often referred to the band’s music as “spacey.” Modern readers might interpret that as “flighty” or “dreamy,” as in “he spaced out during math class.” Actually, “space music” derives its name from the popular fascination with space travel in the years immediately following the first moon landing in 1969. It was considered the hot new thing—the wave of the future—until it wasn’t. Later in the 1970s, rock music reincorporated country elements, which you can hear in the work of Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd. A historian asking why—as I did while writing my book about Journey—might theorize that the oil shocks and inflation of the era made the mostly white teenage rock audience fearful for their economic future. Seeking a return to a mythical past, they found comfort in the conservative-sounding twangs of country rock.

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5. Edit ruthlessly—but carefully.

Fearing the sting of peer review, historians work extra hard to get their manuscript as close as possible to perfect before ever sending it to a publisher. That means you must read it through, again and again and again. Not just to correct typos and mistakes you’ve found because you’ve uncovered new evidence, but for something we call “tightness”—a combination of brevity and flow. You write a paragraph when you had a thought, but when reading it you realize that it belongs elsewhere in the chapter—or maybe even in another chapter altogether.

But don’t just cut and paste! Remember that every paragraph must have appropriate transitions from the previous to the next, so be sure to stitch it in nicely. Then read it again. And again and again.