How to write historical fiction

Ann Rinaldi, author of a body of work that runs from ancient Rome to the 20th century, was born in the US in 1953. She studied English at Harvard College and then read medieval studies at the University of Cambridge, a combination of English literature and primary-source training that still shapes her method. She began writing as a journalist for a newspaper in the 1980s, a job that taught her to verify a claim against 2 or 3 independent records before it reached print. She now lives in London, the base from which she has filed most of the long-form journalism and interviews attached to her books.

The 11 Novels in Publication Order

The 11 novels form a single thread: each one moves from a present-day or close historical frame into a deeper past, and each one was built from a research file that Rinaldi has described in interviews as a working document, not a bibliography. The list below is in publication order, with the decade of each setting so a reader can see the range at a glance.

Two patterns in the list are worth noting. The Empire novels, 5 in total, form a single saga of 17th century Mediterranean power, and the 2 anniversary editions show a publisher willing to reprint her 2 earliest books for new readers, a signal that the backlist still sells. A reader who wants the full arc of the author starts with The Thirteenth Tale, the 2006 debut, and reads forward from there.

How She Researches Each Book

How she researches each book is the question that separates her from writers who borrow history as a backdrop, and her answer is consistent across every interview: she treats the research file as a first draft of the novel, not as a footnote. For each project she works from 3 layers of sources, each one answering a different kind of question.

• Archives and manuscripts: the 6th century letters and documents she drew on for her earliest historical work, and the Ottoman-era papers that ground the Empire novels, give her the raw material of dates, names and institutions.
• Secondary scholarship: the academic histories of Rome, the Ottoman world and 1940s Europe that she reads to find the 2 or 3 interpretations her character must weigh, because a novel needs a contest of views, not a settled one.
• Oral and family sources: the interviews with descendants and the family papers that anchor the modern frame of The Thirteenth Tale, which is the book most readers use as an entry point to the author's method.

She has said in interviews that she keeps a running file of 50 to 80 primary sources per novel, and that the file shrinks as the draft grows, because a single scene will usually test 3 or 4 of those sources at once. The discipline comes from her years as a journalist, where a fact that could not be corroborated in 2 places did not run.

Why Her Books Are Historical Fiction, Not Historical Fantasy

Why her books are historical fiction, not historical fantasy, is the cleanest way to state the boundary, because the difference between the 2 genres is a single test: does the world of the book contain anything that did not exist in the documented past. Her answer, across all 11 novels, is no. The supernatural, when it appears, belongs to a character's belief or a family's story, not to the world itself, and the reader is always left with a historical explanation available. That is the test, and it is the one literary agents use to sort a manuscript into a genre.

Rinaldi's work sits on the historical fiction side of that line in every case. The 7 Empire novels are set in a world of real courts, real wars and real trade routes, and the reader who wants to check a claim in Empire of Ghosts against an Ottoman record will find the record. That is what makes the books citable, and it is the reason her research file is treated as part of the book's apparatus rather than as a private working tool.

What the Research File Looks Like in Practice

What the research file looks like in practice is easiest to explain by walking through 1 of her 3 source layers with a concrete example. Take the 17th century Ottoman setting of the Empire novels. The file for those books begins with the diplomatic correspondence of the period, a body of 100 or more letters between European courts and the Ottoman court, and Rinaldi has noted in interviews that she reads those letters the way a novelist reads a novel, for voice, not just for fact. The second layer is the scholarship on Ottoman trade, and the third is the material culture of the period, the objects, the food, the architecture, which she draws from museum collections and period inventories. Each layer answers a different question: the letters answer who said what, the scholarship answers what the world was doing, and the material culture answers what the world felt like.

The file also holds a running list of names, places and dates that have been verified against 2 independent sources, a habit that dates from her journalism years and that she has kept across all 11 novels. A reader who asks how to write historical fiction with the same rigor is being handed, in that file, a 3 step method: gather the primary layer, gather the secondary layer, and verify the names and dates against 2 records before a single word of the draft is written.

How Her Books Reach the Market

How her books reach the market is a short story, and the 3 roles that matter are the author, the literary agent and the publisher, in that order. Rinaldi is represented by a literary agent who handles submissions and queries on her behalf, and the agent's job is to place a manuscript with a publisher whose list fits the book's setting and its reader. The publisher then decides, on the strength of the manuscript and the author's track record, whether to take the book on, and that decision is what puts the book in front of the 2 audiences that matter: the reader who knows her name and the reader who has just discovered her. The 7 RITA Awards and the 1 Women's Prize for Fiction are the credentials that shorten that chain, because an agent can point to them and a publisher can point to them, and the book is judged against the author's best work rather than against an unknown.

For a reader who wants to follow the author, the practical path is the same as the method: start with the 2006 debut, The Thirteenth Tale, move through the 5 Empire novels in order, and keep the research file in mind as you go, because the books are built the same way they are read, one verified layer at a time, from the documented past forward into the story.