Writing Recent Historical Novels
As an author, I’m always challenging myself. My first two books take place in the present time, but with my third novel, The Ancestor, a good chunk of the book is set in the 1890s, as a gold prospector in Alaska frozen on ice for 120 years recalls what led him to that uncanny predicament. The research for the era was nerve-wracking since I wasn’t sure I could write believably about such a long-gone time, but those chapters wound up being some of the best sections and led me to try my hand at writing an entire novel set in the past.
(5 Tips for Writing an Ahistorical Novel.)
To challenge myself more, I wrote a Young Adult series set in the 1990s about a girl whose home life falls apart and runs away from home to make it as a grunge singer, like her idol Kurt Cobain. I was a teenager during the ‘90s and drew on my love of music to recreate the era. It was crucial for it to take place before cell phones and the internet, since it’s a lot harder now to vanish completely, unlike it was for my main character Nico in 1994. She’s free to run away and find herself without the chance of popping up on someone’s social media feed.
Since then, I’ve written multiple historical books. This started around the pandemic when I wanted to take a break from our current era, and it was a pleasure to go back in time for my own mental health. Immoral Origins, the start of my five-book Desire Card series, is set in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, in the 1970s, replete with mobsters, Disco music, and a very different New York City than our current one. I was born in the late 1970s, so I don’t remember that time but do have memories from when I was a very small child about how different New York City looked, which I illuminated in Immoral Origins.
With a few historical novels under my belt, I chose the 1980s for my upcoming novel The Great Gimmelmans coming out this fall. Initially, the book was going to take place in the 1930s and deal with the Great Depression. It focused on a family of bank robbers who lost all their money in the stock market crash and became the most notorious criminals of that time. I’d been hesitant to start because the book felt too serious, and I wanted to write a mostly fun crime novel. Switching it to 1988, after the Stock Market Crash, made sense and fueled a different energy into the characters who are diehard fans of Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, and other 1980s rock stars.
What began as a sad tale of a family at their lowest point became a wild, pulsing novel. My main character Aaron Gimmelman, who was 12 at the time, was close in age to when I was a kid in the 80s. It was a pleasure to return to my childhood, and also write another book that took place in a time before social media and the internet and cell phones. There are a lot of scenes that would’ve been solved in a very different way had the book taken place in current times. The Gimmelmans would’ve not been able to stay as innocuous with anyone able to take a picture of them from their phones and blow their cover.
Check out Lee Matthew Goldberg’s The Great Gimmelmans here:
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What I’ve learned about writing recent historical fiction is that the author needs to find a balance between recreating the era, but also not overloading the book with historical info. No one wants to read something that feels like a Wikipedia page. A writer can pepper the book with references from the era, certain slang, but too much starts to read as overkill. You don’t want a reader to be distracted from the plot by a million nods to the time period.
For example, music is a huge part of the novel, so there are many references to what the characters would’ve been listening to, and the older sister Steph speaks with a lot of 80s slang like “rad, grody, and tubular,” but the core of the novel is about a family pushed to the brink and trying to become closer during the worst moments of their lives, something relatable in any era. Throughout, there is a sprinkling of history to set the tone. George Bush is president, the country is reeling from the Stock Market Crash of 1987, Miami Vice is huge: events that become a backdrop to the novel, rather than distract from the main thrust.
I’m currently finishing up a new novel, Sublime Evil, a book I finally set in the late 1930s during the Great Depression, which focuses on the dawn of Madison Avenue advertising firms in New York City along with the rise of Nazism and fascism as the world teeters toward World War II. It follows Sol Goldmann, the only Jewish man who begins to work for his dream ad firm and begins to notice subliminal Nazi messaging in the advertisements and uncovers a conspiracy. Because the 1930s was almost a hundred years ago, this required extensive research, the most I’d ever done for the book.
The complexity of what was happening in 1937 in America and in Germany and throughout Europe had a direct impact on the characters and had to be handled carefully, making it believable, and once again, not showing off the research. In subsequent drafts, I’m pruning some of the historical elements, focusing on only what directly relates to the characters and leaving out events that are peripheral. It’s important to make the reader feel comfortable in the era, but not repeatedly tell them what they already know. This requires a tricky balance that I’m still finessing.
When I started my career, if someone were to tell me that half my novels would be considered historical, I wouldn’t have believed them. I never set out to be a historical writer. But I’ve found that the element of researching a time other than the present has opened up my creativity in ways I couldn’t have imagined. A fiction author always is building a world when they write a book. While a historical novel pulls from events in the past, it is still a world that needs to be created every time, so the reader feels present in the story and not bogged down by details the author had to learn but didn’t need to include in the final draft.
Only the best historical novels can achieve this perfect balance.