Tanzanite's Castle Full of Books

It's my pleasure to welcome author Kate Quinn today with her thoughts on historical research.  Her debut novel, Mistress of Rome was released earlier this week (look for my review in a few days).


Researching (Guessing, Revising, Changing) History


Accuracy is the bane of any historical fiction novelist. Write a novel in the present day, and you’re free to make everything up. But write a novel in the past and you’re stuck with historical fact. In this respect, novelists have it worse than the authors of non-fiction: magazines employ fact-checkers to make sure every detail of an article about the past is right before it’s published, while novelists just have to pray they did enough research. Research is the other bane of a historical fiction novelist’s life.

I will admit something right off the bat: I am not Colleen McCullough or Richard Harris. These are novelists who spend years researching a single novel, whose bibliography at the end is nearly as thick as the book. Anything they write is going to be true to history, not one fact overlooked or altered, and it works for them. But it doesn’t work for me. I fall into the Bernard Cornwell camp: I do enough research to get the authentic feel of a period, and then I start writing. My bibliography isn’t nearly as thick as Colleen McCullough’s or Richard Harris’s, even if you count all the Wikipedia articles.

Research is essential, but it’s a tool that can turn around and bite you. There always comes a point when you are convinced you will never know enough about the historical period to write a book convincingly, so you keep on reading and reading and before you know it you’ve forgotten all about the novel you wanted to write in the first place. At some point, the research has to stop and the writing has to begin. I wrote a novel about first-century Rome, and in researching it I read books about Roman architecture, Roman fashion, the gladiatorial games, the Flavian Emperors, the province of Germania, a history of slavery, the building of Rome as a city, and the Jewish rebellion at Masada. That’s what I needed to get the book written. I didn’t bother researching about how crops were grown in ancient Rome, or how armor was made, because nobody in my book was going to grow any crops or make any armor. It wasn’t necessary, so I didn’t bother learning it.

Of course, research is never quite done even after you’re banging your way through the book. Midway through Mistress of Rome I somehow ended up with a subplot about Vestal Virgins – Vestal Virgins?! How did that happen? I had no idea – and I knew nothing about Vestal Virgins except that they didn’t date much. So I put the book on halt and went diving back into research mode to find out about these white-robed priestesses: what they did, where they lived, how they conducted their lives. (Turns out they could get married eventually. Who knew?) Once I had enough to write convincingly, the research books went back on the shelf and I went back to Mistress of Rome.

The most frustrating thing about research is how little it sometimes yields. I can get dates, facts, and figures for every major battle in ancient Rome, but where do I find out how a slave as opposed to a freedman would address his master? It’s those little details that are the hardest to smoke out of the sands of time, and unfortunately it’s those little details that make or break a book.

Another issue is reliability. Just because you find a period source doesn’t mean it’s accurate. Imagine a scholar five hundred years in the future trying to write a historical romance about Brad and Angelina, and all he had for sources was US Weekly tabloids. The best period source I had for Mistress of Rome was a memoir of the first twelve Emperors, written by an Imperial archivist named Suetonius. But the man was a first-rate gossip who largely reports on dishy rumors and superstitious omens; US Weekly would have hired him like a shot. Who knows if any of it was true? In the end, no matter how much a writer resolves to stick to the truth, there comes a time when the truth is so murky that all you can do is pick the most likely option and go with it.

And the discouraging thing? No matter how carefully you check and double-check, research and re-research, you will still get some tiny detail wrong. And as sure as the sun rises in the east, someone will write you an accusing letter about it. And then you will curse and ask yourself why you didn’t just go into writing chick-lit.




My thanks again to Kate for her very interesting post.  For more information on Kate and her books, please visit her website:  http://www.katequinnauthor.com/index.htm