Guest Post by Abby Murphy —
If you’re researching a historical novel, chances are you’ve exhausted the usual sources: scholarly texts, articles on JSTOR, interviews with experts. These conventional sources can offer great insight into the politics and social mores of your chosen time period and carry you through a strong draft of your story. But they can’t always provide the nitty-gritty details that will make your story come to life.
Here are three unconventional resources that can add needed texture to your novel and take it to the next level.
Memoirs and Biographies
You’ve likely already turned to memoirs and biographies if you’re writing biographical historical fiction, in order to trace the key events and beliefs of your characters. But these texts can also be immensely helpful for writers creating their characters out of whole cloth, if you study them closely.
The author of a biography spends years studying their subject in order to provide an accurate portrait. They situate their account within the historical context of their subject’s lifetime, examining social class, economic circumstances, and other lenses that can help the reader understand the subject’s life. Memoirs and autobiographies, by contrast, rely more on the author’s memory of their own life. The author will examine how they were raised, important turning points, and when they began to develop a sense of purpose.
By studying these texts on a macro level, you can build a fully-realized character. Look for memoirs and biographies of people from a similar social class and time period as your character. You’ll be able to figure out how your character might view their world, how they might feel about specific economic or political changes, and how they might respond to the challenges they’ll face in your story.
When I was writing my first novel about a girl in 19th-century Ohio who longs to become a painter, I studied biographies of middle-class women who bucked convention to pursue their dreams. A biography of M. Carey Thomas, the pioneering second president of Bryn Mawr College, suggested what middle-class families expected of their daughters and how challenging it might be to rebel against those restrictions.
On a micro level, you might also glean useful tidbits of information that can add even more depth to your narrative. Thomas, I learned, dissected dead mice as a child when she dreamed of pursuing medicine! This idiosyncrasy likely wouldn’t have cropped up in any other resource, and I happily gave it to a side character to make her feel that much more real.
Cookbooks
The history of cooking and food preparation can tell you a lot about a society. What foods were widely available? Which ones were luxuries? What spices could home cooks access, and how would they make food taste? Dishes from even a hundred years ago can taste and feel very different from today’s popular meals, and it can be well worth your time to find recipes from your time period and cook some to see how they vary.
You don’t need access to a period-appropriate range or open fire; just prepare the recipe in your home kitchen and you’ll still get a vivid sense of the tastes, smells, and textures your characters might experience. You can also use cooking as a window into other aspects of your character’s lives.
As a young college grad fresh from a memorable internship at a living history museum, I spent a few years blogging about my adventures cooking from historical cookbooks. This experience taught me so much more about American cultural history than I ever could have gathered from scholarly texts. I learned, for example, how many recipes from early cookbooks relied on salt pork, since it kept well without refrigeration and added needed protein, fat, and flavor to otherwise dull dishes. Most meals in early America consisted of simple preparations, and colonial dishes were mainly stews that could sit over a fire for a long period of time. From those realizations, I could extrapolate, imagining the barrels of salt pork a family might keep on hand or how the busy woman of the house might set a stew to cook for hours so she could look after children, spin wool, and attend to other household tasks.
Hands-On Classes
Sometimes you just can’t beat the physical experience of hands-on activities. Tracy Chevalier famously studied painting while drafting The Girl with the Pearl Earring, and her vivid descriptions of Vermeer mixing paints in his studio reflect this lived experience. I’m currently taking guitar lessons at my local arts center to better inform my work in progress, a novel set during the 1960s folk music revival in Greenwich Village. While I have musical experience, the act of playing the guitar myself is teaching me things I never would have considered. My fingers ache if I’ve played too long, for example (I have yet to build up calluses), and my ear, long trained to the piano, is paying closer attention to the tonal differences that arise when I press the strings too lightly or too hard. Working these details into my novel will help place the reader more firmly in my character’s body.
Consider the information your body gives you as you take a class. How does your mind work as you consider what paints to blend, for example? How do your muscles ache after practicing archery for an hour? As you translate these physical experiences to the page, you’ll put the reader more fully in your character’s body and bring your novel to vivid life.
Abby Murphy writes feminist historical novels for teens and adults. She is currently working on a dual timeline novel about an aspiring folk singer in 1960s Greenwich Village and the archivist who, more than sixty years later, uncovers the singer’s mysterious past. She also works as a book coach, working with writers at all stages to help them hone their ideas and sharpen their storytelling. Her work has appeared on Willow and Thatch, and she writes a regular newsletter about books and storytelling at Writing in the Kitchen Sink.
