What inspired you to write a Historical Fiction novel?

For me it was the Bible based novels that included a lot of Ancient Rome history and customs. I was disgusted though to find my fav writer of that genre, Lloyd Douglas, butchered history in his novels for no accernible reason.

Where there's a wheel, there's a way.

I've always loved history, but I wrote historical fiction for the first time for NaNo 06. I had spent a few days searching for a plot, and was already half thinking about writing fantasy. Then I figured that my parents would probably not like it if I spent a month writing a fantasy story instead of doing my physics homework. So I decided to do historical fiction instead (because that would mean actually learning something at the same time). Something from Dutch history (I'm Dutch but I live in Norway and dad wants me to remember what I learned about Dutch history, language, geography, etc). I found a book called "De Nederlandse geschiedenis in een notendop" (Dutch history in a nutshell). I skimmed through it and found a line about the Batavian revolt. And it said that we can never be completely sure why Civilis started his little revolt against the Roman Empire. It was just screaming to be written about...

Basically, it's just a coincidence that I started writing historical fiction...

This year it was a passage from The Agricola:
"He [Agricola] took the decision to reduce the Island of Mona (Anglesey). (...) The general's resource and resolution got the troops across. Auxiliaries, specially selected from those who knew the fords and whose national practice was to swim while carrying their weapons and controlling their horses, were told to discard all their equipment. Then he launched them into attack so suddenly that the enemy were dumbfounded."

Yaay.

2006: "Sword brothers" (still not sure what that title refers to, but I WON and now I have 262 k)
2007: "Suddenly, ninjas arrived". A messy novel about the Romans in Wales, with a few mad celts and ninjas thrown in.

Last year it was because the person I was writing the book for, the daughter of a friend of mine, is totally into all things Egyptian. So, I set it in ancient egypt.

This year it's because, when I was at the bookstore this past spring, I happened to see a book on the history of the Pony Express on one of the On Sale tables, and the thought of writing a western novel set in the Pony Express was too good to pass up.

No idea what next year will bring...

Wiry Fellows
A lively tale of adventure on the Pony Express trail. Because the mail MUST go through, no matter what.

Well, history has always been a passion of mine...so it was only natural for me to write such. I've always written historical fiction too, since about the age of 12 when I wrote a "book" about an immigrant family. I love getting lost in history, too as is evident by my favorite quote: The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.--Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness

And that pretty much describes it ^_^

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.--Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness

Well, history has always been a passion of mine...so it was only natural for me to write such. I've always written historical fiction too, since about the age of 12 when I wrote a "book" about an immigrant family. I love getting lost in history, too as is evident by my favorite quote: The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.--Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness

And that pretty much describes it ^_^

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.--Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Really.
I wanted to know what it meant to "entail" property. So I ended up doing research on 19th-century English property law. From that, I got into the women's rights movement of the late Victorian era.

************
2007 NaNoWriMo novel: Uncovering Cathy [working title]
2006 NaNoWriMo novel: Radicalizing Lizzie *Winner!*

I've had a passion for New York City during the jazz era for many years. It was an exciting time. Duke Ellington and his band at the Cotton Club. Babe Ruth and a new kid named Lou Gehring knocking the horsehide around the ballpark. Dempsey and Tunney slugging it out in the ring. New skyscrapers going up and bridges being built. The old neighborhoods each had their endearing, and not so endearing, qualities. I would like to have been there to see it all.

So, writing about that time 'takes me there', if only briefly.

"You can go much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone."

Al Capone

Sitting down for 2 hours watching the History Channel's Documentary on pirates three times including the technology documentary, and my teacher from last year overloading my brain with historical war movies which I end up adoring xD Oh and can't forget the inaccurate movies!

___________________________________________________
Have I piratized you yet?

Well, I've always liked European history (No offense to the US, but I find our own history extremely dull), and it seemed like a great place to start. I never really considered writing a novel with historical fiction, since fantasy is such a big part of my life. But I've always enjoyed reading historical fiction, so I suppose it's just...natural to write about it. :D

Because a character that happened to be born in 1888 popped into my head? :p Honestly, that's the major driving point. I'm also fascinated with early aviation history and pre-1940 pulp fiction, so I tried to mush them all together.

NaNo'er since 2001 / 4 wins so far
2007: The Lords of Nowhere / Historical Adventure

This year's book is a sequel to what was originally a conventional fantasy, so it's more a question of "why did I make the switch?"

My first book's setting was basically Elizabethan London with the names and religion changed, because although I love the Elizabethan era, I didn't want to write about the religious schisms and persecutions that dominated the politics of the period. After Nano last year, I had the first few chapters critiqued by my offline writing buddies, and they commented that it would be even better set in the real London rather than a blatant copy. I thought it over, and suddenly I realised that throwing my non-humans into the mix would change the religious and political landscape, affecting the Reformation and the whole of European politics. So, my "straight" fantasy novel turned into alternate history with a fantasyesque swashbuckling flavour :-)

As for what inspired me to choose Elizabethan England:

* I was bored with generic medieval fantasy - I prefer settings where the magic is more low-key or combines with funky pre-modern technology (steampunk, clockpunk, etc) :-)

* Some of my favourite books, movies and TV series draw on the period, from E R Eddison's "The Worm Ouroboros" to "Blackadder II"

2006 Winner (undergoing revisions)
2007: Treasons, Stratagems and Spoils (alt history fantasy)

Three brothers, two murders, one stolen necklace - and a shipload of trouble!
~o~o~o~o~0~o~o~o~o~

I agree xD I guess because that's all I've studied in school, and when we studies Ancient Greece years ago it was much fun!

___________________
The pirate poem

I steal, I lie, I take away gold
I break, I kill, I can be bold.

I plunder, I pillage, I kill for the sakes
I have no remorse and take what I can take.

I am a pirate, I really don’t care
You should, though, I warn you to be awa

___________________________________________________
Have I piratized you yet?

For me it was a book I read over a year ago. Witch Hunt: History of a Persecution by Nigel Cawthorne. I finished reading it and thought that a story about the witch hunts how they really were would be a good idea. I only ever saw stories, fantasies, really, about the witch hunts and 'real' witches, not innocents with real families and real lives, being accused and tortured, etc.

So, here I am.

I only studied Ancient Greece in sixth grade, and then the rest just went downhill! Gah, I'm tired of learning about American History, I don't really care about it. Plus, Europe is much cooler, methinks.

wordcount widgets

I had had an Old West character sneaking around in the back of my head for about ten years, who finally got tired of waiting for me to ask him about his story. He snuck up on me and smacked me in the head with it, so I wrote most of his book, just prior to NaNo, this year. Then three other characters from that same story, who were not central characters, decided they needed their own book, too. That's the NaNo book, and I think it's actually a better story than the one that spawned it.

Beyond that, I'm always interested in history, and it doesn't matter to me what nation it belongs to. I love to do research. I'm fascinated by people and how they lived and what they believed and how they behaved, particularly the people who somehow went against the usual modes of society, or who were in some way outcasts. I like to pry into their heads and see what motivates them to make the choices they make, and investigate their lives to see why their current situation exists. Their historical period is irrelevant, really, other than those parts of it that have some bearing on their choices.

This time, I just happened to have characters who lived in the American Old West. I already knew a lot about the period, and, having grown up in Texas around horses and cattle and cowboys, was surrounded by elements of it all the time. I also lived for several years in the southern California desert, near Twentynine Palms, and came to understand just how big and lonely and hostile the lands of the West really are. I had just never considered the Western to be a genre that I thought I could write, but I'm finding it's as easy as any other genre, for me. It's all about the characters, anyway. That's what it's all about for me, at least.

Kai Starr

"The telling of your worth ain't in what you done nor in what you were, but in what you do, and in what you are." --Jim Hart, from my first Western, "Whirlwind."

Ooh, willing to share any of the reasearch or good (well researched) websites?

I hated history in school - it wasn't very well taught, I don't think. In fact I gave it up at 14 (back in the days when you could drop whole areas of the curriculum and specialize a lot earlier on), because the 'O-level' syllabus that I would have had to study for the next two years was basically 19th-century European politics - yawn!

I carried on reading about my favourite periods in my spare time, though - basically anything between about 1000 BC and 1600 AD - and discovered, for example, that the Wars of the Roses, which were desperately boring when I did them in school, were actually fascinating. Tall handsome womaniser Edward of York vs shy, pious and somewhat mad Henry of Lancaster*, and the scheming Warwick switching sides at the drop of a helmet - what's not to like?

* His grandfather, Charles VI of France, refused to go into battle against the English at Agincourt because he thought he was made of glass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_VI_of_France#The_King_goes_mad)

-------------------------------------------------

2006 Winner (undergoing revisions)
2007: Treasons, Stratagems and Spoils (alt history fantasy)

Three brothers, two murders, one stolen necklace - and a shipload of trouble!
~o~o~o~o~0~o~o~o~o~

2006 Winner (undergoing revisions)
2007: Treasons, Stratagems and Spoils (alt history fantasy)

Three brothers, two murders, one stolen necklace - and a shipload of trouble!
~o~o~o~o~0~o~o~o~o~

I'm new to NaNo this year, being invited by an author friend to check it out. I had talked with her about wanting to write down more than dates, names, and specific facts regarding my ancestors. I wanted to do their story as I believe it might have of occured, before they were forgotten in time. She encouraged me to join NaNo and just start writing, and even suggested I might want to start by writing about my 3rd g-grandmother, of which I had several pictures of her from the middle to late 1800's.

Since starting my family genealogy research in 1999, I learned more and more about my them... driving me to find out what caused them to tick. Not only having to look outside the immediate box of family, I had to look outside the familial box of the general area and to what was going on at the time she lived. That led me to the Civil War era and a little beyond, a constantly changing time in Kentucky. In searching events and life from that era, it has grown to become quite a story. It is my hope, that my family will treasure the story much more than my hard work once it's complete.

So while my characters, for the most part, are actual people, there are a few details regarding what happened to them other than mere dates. And with my ability to speculating how my 3rd g-grandparents met, it has been a blast writing my version of what may have happened in their courting and love affair. In developing what I believe Letitia may have been like, I realize that she must have been one heck of a strong woman to endure all she did at such a young age in life.

I've been into European history for a while now and last year I did my NaNo on Richard III which was fun if rather inacurate because I did not have time to do enough research... XD; So this year I was looking through a book having to do with Hundred Years War that dealt with other things that were going on/contributing to the war by not necessarily directly involved.. and I came across Pedro the Cruel of Castile and I decided that I just had to write about him. And yes, there is a lot of emphasis on the fictional part of "historical fiction".... I ran out of time for researching stuff too x.X;;

've been way more obsessed with history than fiction lately, so the history research was the motivation for writing a novel, and not the other way around. The question is more "what inspired you to write THIS historical fiction novel?" because I don't think I'd write another kind! It struck me as an opportunity to research a period and place I'm really interested in, eleventh century Constantinople and the cultural mixes and political issues there. Also, I get to set a lot of it on ships, which is always a plus. And I'm living in Turkey for a few months, so it's helping me learn about the place I'm in and imagine what its past was like.

Oh, and I totally sympathize with not having enough time to do research! I've butchered a lot out of sheer lack of time, and if I ever want to make this a serious project, it's going to take a lot of research and editing :)

I saw a show on Jack the Ripper and I became enamored with the idea of taking my plot that I was toying around with at the time and making it into a 19th century crime novel.

Well, it's not a crime novel now, but it is still in the 19th century,

NaNo '06: Flowers Of Blood (police procedural): Winner

My inspiration was the book and film "The English Patient" - but in an indirect way. The title character goes around everywhere with a copy of Herodotus' Histories, and since reading the book and then watching the film, I've wanted to read this. Finally got a copy from the library, read the exciting bits first, including Herodotus' account of the Battle of Marathon in 490BC, and that got me thinking - so my NaNo this year is about a boy who is orphaned by the Persians, and gets his revenge four years later in the Battle of Marathon.

Or, at least, it will be when I get round to writing the second half of the book :-)

Patrick Mahon
"Once a writer, always a writer"

What made me love history? My 5th grade teacher and "Johnny Tremain". What made me want to write historical fiction? I realized in the middle of college that all of my favorite time periods could be traced back to a fiction book I had read about them. I was also writing a lot of crappy fanfiction then, and my thoughts drifted to the idea that if I was writing, I should be writing about what I love - history.

My past two NaNo novels have been historical fiction, but both have been time periods that I've almost picked out of a hat. I'm too much of a perfectionist to do a novel during NaNo about any of "my" time periods because I'll get so bogged down in the details of speech and dress and mannerisms that the novel will never get done on time. So last year, I did Reconstruction South Carolina, because I've read very very litle fiction about post Civil War in the South. All the historical fiction I'd read was pre Civil War in the South or post Civil War in the West. I knew enough about the conditions and the time to not be completely floundering, yet not too much that everything I had wrong would make me pull my hair out. This year, same thing, only pre World War I England. It turns out I knew frightfully less than I thought, and what I thought I did know was, in some cases, terribly wrong.

But now I have two new time periods to research that I never would have cared about beforehand. Who knows when I'll write next year, but I have this feeling it'll be another of those random ones.

"I did, however, wish to write something that was, let us say, historically unembarrassing." -Robin McKinley

It was Stephen Biesty's cutaway book on HMS Victory, and the CD-ROM version, both of which the library seems to have got rid of. Even at age 7 or 8, I was struck by the sheer alien complexity of the Wooden World and although this was before I actually started writing my stories down (apart from one incredibly odd novella about a prairie-dog town evolving into something almost like Victorian England with tails!) I wrote sea stories in my head for years.
Fast forward 10 years, and I was in the library, just scanning the fiction section for anything that looked remotely interesting. I stumbled across "Tenacious" by Julian Stockwin, and reading it I felt like I'd come home. Really kind of weird. But I read the rest of the series, and just as I was getting desperate for something similar, I spied someone on the bus reading Patrick O'Brian. Another serendipitous discovery. Reading all these books, and then the Hornblower novels (which regardless of what the name makes you think, are not spoofs...yeah, I thought so too), I realized there is a huge degree of scope for character development. And many times the characters seem just to be able to sail away from their problems. (Often not so much, on second reading, but...)
So what if I gave someone a problem he couldn't sail away from? Something that happened ashore but seemed to follow him wherever he went? "The Sea Cathedral" was born...well, conceived. Oddly enough it lay in my idea file for almost exactly nine months before the labours of NaNoWriMo. (Excuse me...sleep deprived. Everything seems funny.)

I think I killed it!

Quite simply, the sort of story I wanted to write didn't belong in the here and now. I started with a village, and a family grew there, but I thought that I couldn't write the same sort of local story now. People travel too much, families don't do things together in the same way, all in all it seemed a rather old-fashioned story. I chose the second world war because although it was many years since I studied it in school, and only in the basics, I had a sense of what life was like then, and it fitted. The story just grew from there.

NaNoWriMo 2007: This Place Called Home - WINNER AND COMPLETE

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

This book may be the greatest piece of western literature. What he does, that is subtle, but becomes clears as day as the story lingers in one's mind, is he makes all of his characters guilty for a murder committed by one. One has the motive, the other gives the moral judgement, and the most benign has foresight and does nothing to stop it. Only the final character, who is technically a brother to the three, (or at least assumed to be,) commits the act itself. It raises a major philosophical questions. Are we all guilty for the crimes/"evil" we can prevent?

Furthermore he rejects Jesus, claiming that if he had truly loved us, he'd have not allowed us free will, which has caused man more pain and suffering than anything else.

amazing... if you have the time in your day to read an 800 page novel, fuck war and peace and anna karina. The Brothers Karamazov is the most powerful work I've ever read.

War and Peace and Anna Karina seem to be long for the sake of being long and not because the story demands it... Did anyone else notice that?

Watching Band of Brothers far too much. I may or may not have wanted to see if I could create a fictional Richard Winters ; ) (because it's actually harder to sell a fictional character who is just genuinely good, kind and dcent than it is for me to write a three dimensional bad guy and sometimes I like setting myself insane challenges).

Otherwise it was mostly just that my MC arrived in my head and refused to shut up. And if he wanted to be a professional cricketer in 2008 who ended up finding his self worth, going to war and falling in love with his best friend in 1930s/1940s Australia then well, I'm not going to stop him on what looks like an interesting journey. Also I'm actually writing about my own country's history for once in my life and that's a good thing.

Also because there aren't that many Australian novels set in that particular era of history. Lots of convicts, quite a bit of stuff in the post war era and some in WWI but beyond non fiction there isn't much on WWII.

"I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white." (Aaron Sorkin)

I got the idea for my 2006 NaNo from watching "Timeline"- for the sequel to it, I... borrowed a plot point. Just a tiny one.

But even if I hadn't watched "Timeline", I love history anyway. I think I was born two-hundred years too late, so I need to write about the things I could've experienced.

NaNo06 winner: 'To Gather Orange Blossoms', 60k
NaNo07: 'On Letting Go'