Write historical fiction: Finding daily details

How to use historical objects in fiction without making them into fetishes
In writing historical fiction, there are two main traps to avoid. One is the bugbear of every historical fiction reader, anachronistic dialogue (Such as: “No way,” said King Henry VIII.) The other is being too showy about your historical research.

We’ve all bumped into a sentence that’s loaded with historical fact and pays no attention either to style or to the point of view of the historical character involved. That’s when we get something like this (I’m making up the example because I don’t like to embarrass other writers): Beethoven’s carriage turned into the courtyard of Schoenbrunn Palace, which Emperor Leopold I commissioned from his favorite architect Fischer von Erlach as a hunting lodge in the late Seventeenth Century.

Those are all things the reader of a novel would like to know. But not tagged onto a sentence that way. We’re all used to reading such sentences — they occur every day in the newspaper. But journalists are trying to cram as much information into a short space as they possibly can. They’re also not bound by point of view.

That’s the key. In this example, Beethoven wouldn’t think that way. He’d be thinking about his performance at the palace. Or he might note what he saw without knowing the historical details. We could have another character notice him noticing the details of the palace, and that other character could tell him what he’s seeing, for example. It takes longer, but it’s not going to jump out at the reader the same way.

This is also true of historical artefacts from a character’s life. When I wrote Mozart’s Last Aria, I was able to draw on a trove of Mozart’s belongings that still exist. There are also things that belonged to his sister (my main character) and his family and friends which are now held in museums in Salzburg and Vienna.

The rule I’ve observed above applies to those objects. But Prof. Cliff Eisen, who narrates the terrific BBC podcast A History of Mozart in a Dozen Objects, makes the important point that we should see these historical objects as they are, and not to fetishize them because they were touched by the hand that wrote Don Giovanni.

How does that apply to historical fiction? The thing some historical fiction writers forget is that while Mozart’s hairbrush is now an amazing object, antique and connecting us (when we see it) to the great man, it was just a hairbrush to Mozart. (Or more precisely to the hairdresser who came to his apartment every morning at seven to do his hair, of which he was rather vain because it was blonde and thick.)

The character in whose POV we’re writing should see the object in exactly that way.