Guest Post by Deborah Williams –
Imagine you’re walking with a friend and you see a self-driving Tesla coming towards you. Would you say to her, “hey there’s an auto-pilot Tesla, those cars produced by the company mostly owned by Elon Musk, that nutty billionaire who ruined Twitter, a prime example of why we need to tax the billionaires?”
Probably not. Your friend already knows these things, and even if she doesn’t, none of that information is relevant to the fact that the self-driving mechanism has gone awry and the car is heading straight for you.
When we’re writing historical fiction, it’s easy to think that conversational factoids like these can help develop both character and context. But all too often, the little facts turn into much bigger info-dumps, as if we want to demonstrate to our readers that we’ve done our homework. Info dumping is hard to resist: look at all the cool stuff I know about how the banking system worked in nineteenth-century Philadelphia! You’ll never guess what was served for breakfast in Elizabethan England!
Putting those details into conversation can be a great way to develop both world and character—but it requires finding the right balance between the diction of the past and the minds of our contemporary readers. If we tip too far in one direction, our novels sound like pale imitations of that era’s prose; tip too far the other way, our books are riddled with anachronisms. Now, perhaps you want that jarring juxtaposition between eras—think Sofia Coppoloa’s “Marie Antoinette,” for example—but if not, then we have to find ways to capture the flavor of the era without devolving into pastiche. That’s where developing your character’s historically accurate voice comes into play.
If I’m writing something set in Elizabethan England, for instance, having my heroine drop a “forsooth” here and there isn’t going to create voice: adding “forsooth” doesn’t tell us anything about the person talking. I might instead remember that voice and character are shaped as much by what people don’t know as what they do. My heroine could worry about an impending sea voyage because she’s worried about falling off the edge of the earth; or maybe she makes sure to close the windows at night, even on the hottest days of summer, because the night air is unhealthy and if she gets sick, she would need a visit from the surgeon, who will bleed her to release the ill humors. These concerns don’t have to be articulated in Elizabethan-sounding syntax: it’s the content of her thinking that creates the voice, helps shape the character. And depending on what’s happening in the novel, these concerns could emerge in conversation or surface as part of an interior monologue.
Historical fiction can help reveal how people in the past saw the world, allowing us to feel connected to the past, even as we recognize how perspectives have changed. We are no longer worried about falling off the edge of the world—but we do understand what it means to be anxious before a long voyage. As we try to shape the voices of these past eras, regardless of whether or not the project is inspired by actual events, looking at collections of letters or diaries can be a great resource. Visual records, like photographs and paintings, can show us the external world of a particular era, but it’s in private documents like letters, journals, and diaries, that we get a sense of how people talked, what they talked about, and to whom.
A character’s voice also emerges through what sorts of comparisons they make, through their go-to analogies. A character who says that the chances of something happening are as rare as the Cubs winning a World Series has a different voice than a character who expresses the same idea by comparing it to the chances of Kim Kardashian appearing in public with no makeup. Same idea, different voice—and in each of these comparisons we discover something about the world the character inhabits.
Sometimes, as I try to create the worlds in which my characters live, I’ve been using what I think of as the CIA method: what’s the “need to know?” What do readers need in order to understand my character and her choices? In my current novel, set in 1910, a female character living in France owns a car. Do my readers need to know about Henry Ford, the assembly line, or union-busting? Nope. For this character, readers need to know if cars were expensive, what a woman wore for car rides, and the condition of the roads. That’s it. A few details, in other words, not all the details, no matter how fascinating.
Let’s return to the two friends about to be plowed down by a self-driving Tesla. As they jump out of the way, one of them says “Stupid billionaire’s invention! Billionaires are going to be the death of us all.” And the other one says “No way! We need electric cars so that we can stop using fossil fuels.” Now we know a bit about our two friends, the world in which they live—and that there are likely to be bigger disagreements in their future.
Deborah Williams is a literature professor at NYU; her essays have appeared The Rumpus, The New York Times, Jane Friedman’s blog, and The Markaz Review, among other publications. Her academic book, The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction (Oxford) came out in 2023. She is currently working on a novel about Edith Wharton’s midlife (and menopausal) reinvention.
