The Great Book of Mostly Useful Writing Tips

The Importance of Being Historically Accurate

So what is it about historical romance? What is it that makes it so attractive to us?

Is it the muscle-bound, fearsome Vikings? Because, let me tell you girls, Scandinavia is still teaming with gorgeous, impossibly tall blonds.

Could it be chivalrous, battle-ready Knights? Surely not the impossibly chauvinistic, xenophobic, murderous series of events known as the crusades?

Maybe the unstoppable bloodbath lasting over 1500 years, during which the people of Europe practically couldn't stop butchering each other? That's plenty attractive.

What I find attractive (I believe I'm not the only one, but I'm only be speaking for myself here) about historical romance, is the different set of rules and conventions the men and women of the past had to deal with, and what it means—or so I automatically assume—for their love affairs. Moreover, it is the way this different set of forced behaviors (enforced by the social conventions of the time) refers to our current social conventions and play to our different kinks.

When I read historical romance I want to see a character that's forced to navigate the rules and restrictions of her time. What I usually see, though, is a secret agent of feminism, ages before feminism became a thing (and I'm speaking as a radical feminist).

Why do authors keep assuming readers dislike well-researched historical romance? Dianna Gabaldon did it. Joe Beverly did it. Both of them are tremendously successful. Sure, they may not be 100% accurate, but reading historical romance is all about escaping to another period.

So why is it so important to be historically accurate?

Fiction, like its name, is a sort of fabrication. Even the most realistic tale is, eventually, an imitation of reality. A carefully arranged set of stories meant to fabricate reality in a text.

What is this reality that we fabricate through text (or film, or tale)? It is reality as we see it, subjectively. Be it the reality of a teen first falling in love, a detective solving a murder or a knight riding to battle, it is the subjective reality of the person or the narrator reporting it.

I like strong heroines. I'd like to read about a strong heroine in a particular situation where she struggles against a society that's not only mistreating her because she's women (as is the situation today), but think of her as commodity. I'd like to read about a time when such a woman had to go to extremes in order to survive and express herself. I want to read about the kind of man who, despite his upbringing, would fall for that a woman.

Another reader, for example, might prefer a strong, domineering hero. An Alpha male who lives in society that expects him to treat his spouse like property – and instead, treats her like a queen.

Because he is a chivalrous knight.

Because she tamed him with her tenderness.

Despite being a wild Viking.

He/She is expected to do X. Yet chooses to do Y.

Either way, someone struggles against their periodical restrictions. That's where the tension comes from.

Be your premise as it may, your ACTUAL representation of the restrictions that prevents your heroes from acting, are—how surprising—periodical. You can tell me over and over that your heroine is a nun, your hero is a Viking and that both of them are somewhere at sea, on a plague ridden ship. None of this helps when right in the middle of things I am faced with a priest named Richelieu and told the ship was sailing to Estonia.

Richelieu, as far as I'm concerned, is the Three Musketeers' villain. And Estonia is a modern country. Your reader couldn't care less if they know what or where is Saaremaa (Medieval Estonia) and who the Oeselians (the then people of Estonia) are. As long as it sounds Medieval, it can actually be on Mars.