We grow up being told to “write” what we “know”, but history is the unknown. You have to learn almost everything about a period and the social customs just to get your characters out of their beds, (or off of their skins,) and feed them breakfast.

Rule #1: Sweat the Small Stuff. The authenticity of historical fiction depends on your knowledge and use of historical detail. It is not enough to say a character walked down the street. The reader has to be able to see the street, see the conveyances; he has to smell the smoke from the factories or the sewage in the gutter. If there are street vendors, he has to know what they’re selling. This is a new world: the reader can’t fathom it unless you give him images. These should be accurate and not recycled from old movies.

Here are two suggestions apart from the usual methods of research.

1. Find experts on the topics you need to learn about. It’s easier to track down someone who knows about sheep ranching in the 1890’s or the origins of the New York subway system, and to call them up when you need to know about scabies or the early methods of blasting tunnels, than it is to find, in documents or on the internet, the exact answer to every question that comes up in the course of writing a book. If you're going to write a scene involving a train wreck in 1891, get some books on train wrecks, read enough to know what you’re talking about, google the authors and find out where they work. Call them up and see if they’ll talk to you. Latch on to the friendly ones. “What about the couplers?” you can ask them, having read enough to know that faulty couplers were a major factor in train wrecks. “If this is 1891, what kind of couplers would we have?” I once needed to know about Mormons in Mexico. I googled “Mormons in Mexico,” found a woman who had written a dissertation on a Mormon settlement near Juarez and tracked her down through the school. She spent two hours on the phone with me describing vividly the Mormon settlement that my characters needed to visit. Dozens of experts on a wide range of topics have generously helped me in similar ways.

2. If your story takes place after catalogs were in use, get hold of reprints of old catalogs. I have an 1895 Montgomery Ward Catalog that has descriptions of, and prices for, almost every personal item used by people of that time: hardware, books, stationery, toys, guns, toiletries, wallpaper, stoves, laundry equipment, harnesses and saddlery -- the list goes on and on. It represents the lifestyle of that decade.

Rule #2: Dump the Ballast. In order to write authentic historical fiction you must know a period of time well enough to disappear daily through a wormhole to the past and arrive at the location of your story. There you must understand the customs and use the manners perfectly enough to be accepted by people walking the streets (if there are streets) and to dress yourself, and make a living. This said, the major trick of writing good historical fiction is not in compiling research or knowing the details, but in knowing the details to leave out. Try to avoid overwriting. Keep perspective on what will interest the reader. Historical fiction writers tend to be overly conscientious and excited by minutia: if you succumb to excess, and put in too much detail, then go back later and take some of it out. Think of your novel as a boat that is about to sink from having too much weight on board: some of the loved items will have to go. Toss them over with impunity! Throw them out! If a rare, surprising statistic, or a moving anecdote, or an obscure reference you saw to an interesting thing that happened in the county adjacent to the one where your story takes place, does not advance your plot or provide your reader with important information about your characters, then it is irrelevant to your story and must go overboard.

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