Immersive research for historical fiction authors

Read, listen, watch

Probably lots of reading, to begin with. Some broad reading about the period, some more specific stuff on the areas of society your story covers, such as aircraft or chemistry or veterinarians, or whatever. There will most likely be some choice finds on Amazon marketplace of the most niche of niche books, my personal favourite being a find I needed on a novel about Victorian brickmaking, titled The Cry of the Children from the Brickyards of England: And How the Cry Has Been Heard, with Observations Upon the Carrying Out of the Act. How the soul sings when you find something so precisely needed! You might visit the town archives or the Imperial War Museum Reading Room to look at unpublished letters from the Boer War, or diary entries from the Blitz.

So, you’ve done your reading. You’ll probably complement that with some savvy Googling – whether that be a Google search, Google Books or Google Scholar – and you’ll most likely save a bunch of articles and images on topics you need, like Victorian schoolrooms or Georgian era chandlers. Maybe you’ll be lucky and there’s some juicy BBC documentaries on your chosen topic, like shopgirls in the 1890s. Or a history podcast that has a brilliant series on the exact event you’re researching, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt moment by moment. This is all great stuff. You need all that stuff. You can write some super prose based on all those acorns of material, that will grow into mighty oaks of fiction based on reliable facts. But…is that it? Without a time machine, one might think that’s all there is to do. But there’s more…

Talk to me

We’d all love a time machine (as long as I still have WiFi) but the next best thing might well be talking to people who were there. So if you’re writing about anything within the twentieth century, it’s possible to talk to people who experienced those events at the time. Or possibly earlier, if they can talk knowledgeably about their parents or grandparents’ experiences as well. I found a WW2 Wren in her nineties who still had perfect recall of her days as a secret listener – a wireless telegraphist – during the war and I was lucky enough to interview her over the phone.

That kind of personal detail was invaluable in making my characters feel real, such as the fact that they sneakily wore men’s navy blue bellbottoms instead of the standard issue skirt on the nightshifts, as everything was more relaxed at night. Little gems like that are the kind of thing you’ll not always find in a standard account of what wireless telegraphists did. So, if you can, seek out people who were there, who lived through it, who can give you these tiny details that only a true witness can give.

Location, location, location

You might be writing about your home town in northern England, or about Vanuatu in the south-western Pacific. Either way, you’ll do yourself a world of good by visiting the locations you’re writing about, if have the time and resources. It might be an eighteenth-century town house in York, that still retains the original wood-panelling in the drawing room. Or it could be the dining table at Howarth Parsonage where Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights.

In my own experience, standing on the iron bridge at Ironbridge in Shropshire, gazing at the river Severn flow beneath my feet, that gave me the inspiration for a saga based on the poor folk living along its banks and the rich folks in their posh houses up on the hill, literally looking down on their minions who created the industrial revolution with the sweat off their backs. Standing in the actual place where real things happened, things you want to write about, can give you history shivers, that phenomenon where you can physically feel the atmosphere of a place vibrate with history.

In other cases, it may be that you notice a detail you’d never have seen in a photograph. I wrote about a Victorian hop farm, and decided to travel several hours to visit a hop farming museum in Kent. I went for a quiet, slow walk alone along the hop lanes, reached out and touched one of the hop bines. I found that the stalks were sticky and the new growth was soft as eyelashes. I’d never have found that golden nugget of information if I hadn’t travelled there and touched the hop plants myself.

Doing the thing

Last but not least is the most immersive of research techniques and that is to do the thing you’re writing about. So you can’t be a civil war soldier…but maybe you could take part in a reenactment. You’re no seamstress, but perhaps you can go to a sewing club, interview the people who regularly go, hang out with them and listen to the gossip, and have a go at sewing something yourself. In my case, I visited an artisan brickmaker and learnt how to make bricks by hand, then imagined doing the same thing thousands of times a day, as my characters would have had to do for little pay and with no breaks.

I once wrote about early pilots, from Edwardian England through to WW1. A pilot I interviewed told me I had no business writing about vintage flying if I hadn’t been up in a light aircraft. As I was cowardly about flying, I ignored this for a year, until he finally persuaded me to go. I went up with him in a Cessna, and then in a Pitts Special (all donated free, very generously). I’d had no idea about the initial terror of light aircraft flying, which soon gave way to exhilaration at the danger, then joy at the godlike view. When I got home, I rewrote all of my flying scenes, because I knew they were all wrong.

We may not have time machines available to us as historical novelists, but with a bit of effort, we can make our own.