The Story So Far (or An Absolute Beginner’s Thoughts On How To Write Historical Fantasy)
Well, it’s been two and a half years since I started down this unexpected path. I stalled out briefly from March through September due to the pandemic and all the social unrest (liminality is the enemy of creativity). Not writer’s block — just no will to write in this incredibly uncertain time. Thankfully, the drive finally returned in recent months, and I was able to finish The Serpent’s Pearls, which is the first book in The Binding Pearls series. It’s with the first round of beta readers now, and so it seems like a good time to reflect on the journey so far. To that end, I took a look at my old notes and saved file dates and was surprised to see how quickly this all came together…
Spring 2018, I was getting back into reading nonfiction history. I’d mostly stuck to fiction for a lot of years (horror, SFF, literary), having burned out pretty badly on historical monographs in graduate school. We have a large world map on one wall of our living room, and I spend a lot of time just staring at it (probably looking like Puddy), fixating on the most remote parts of the world…The frozen arctic islands above Europe and Asia...The countless little islands in the Pacific…The vast expanse of Siberia.
The first season of The Terror was running on AMC (miniseries of the great Dan Simmons book) , and it got me thinking about the insanity of seafaring exploration — how much like space travel it must have been — and what a vast unknown the world was to the European explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries. I spent most of my time in graduate school studying 18th to 20th century history, and so my knowledge of the early days of European exploration and colonialism was spotty.
I picked up a book on Francis Drake’s expedition of 1578. That was the voyage where he managed to become only the second captain after Magellan to circumnavigate the globe. Along the way, the English privateer harassed Spanish settlements in the New World and captured their treasure ships, had interesting and sometimes deadly interactions with various indigenous people, and brought home a vast amount of Spanish gold and silver for the English crown.
The big picture context was fascinating:
The growing Catholic/Protestant conflict caused by the Protestant reformation that would explode into the Thirty Years’ War in just a few short decades.
The threat that Spain and Portugal, with their growing empires in the New World and Asia, would simply overwhelm England, France, and the Netherlands.
The fact that the late 16th century was a historical inflection point in terms of the African slave trade and of European colonialism in the New World and Asia, all of which was really just getting started.
But just as fascinating were the details of Drake’s voyage, particularly the characters. Drake himself, of course — who hated the Spanish (fairly or not) for events that had occurred on his prior expeditions to the New World, and because Spain was the foremost Catholic threat to English Protestantism (and sovereignty). But others on the voyage were even more interesting…
Diego, for instance, the escaped African slave who served many years as Drake’s manservant. Though he’s mentioned in the books about Drake and covered in a chapter of Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann, we really know very little about him. Imagining his back story and his motivations — and what he might do under the right circumstances — proved to be the key to unlocking the four-book arc of The Binding Pearls. In a story that’s epic in scope, it’s this single character who provided the way to grapple with the historical inevitability of European colonialism (Though it only feels inevitable in retrospect. Had certain events gone a different way, had certain technologies and motivations developed elsewhere, things could have turned out very differently. This being historical fantasy, we replace technology with magic, but the point is the same — change some of the inputs and you get a radically different output).
And Thomas Doughty, the gentleman ringleader of the near-mutiny that Drake had to put down. Very little is known about Doughty and his mysterious brother, Jack. They seem to have openly boasted of having dark powers at a time when fear of witchcraft and the devil was commonplace and such talk could easily get one killed. Bizarrely, after being sentenced by Drake to be executed, Doughty was down-right congenial and dined with Drake, seemingly untroubled by his fate. Having done so much to sow discord on the journey, Doughty appears to have gone to the block without much objection. What could have driven a man like that? Under the right circumstances, what could such a person do? As with Diego, trying to imagine the motivations of such a character proved critical to developing the story.
There are others besides Diego and Doughty on Drake’s voyage who in the histories are bit players but who were crucial to the development of The Binding Pearls — Drake’s teenage cousin John, for example, who is not particularly important in the real history of the expedition but who proved so important in developing some of the story’s religious themes. (And Maria — though I won’t say anything about her to avoid spoilers.) The creative work was in developing some of these minor players into significant characters — breaking them free from their historical shackles and allowing them to make new decisions that they never actually made in real life — decisions that could take the story far afield from real events.
By summer of 2018 I had a good sense of how the Drake voyage in The Binding Pearls series would differ from actual events, including how I was going to introduce magic into the mix. I also had done quite a bit of further research on the New World, the Pacific, Asia, etc. (significant aspects of the story that I won’t divulge here to avoid spoilers). But I realized that a key point of the story is how events on my fictional version of Drake’s voyage would ultimately impact Europe. So I began researching England, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands to fully understand what was going on in the period between 1577 and 1588 (the latter date coinciding with the Spanish Armada’s attempted invasion of England). But honestly, I didn’t know right out of the gate that I would have to research all those countries. At that point, I was pretty much focused on England — not really clear on whether the story would range beyond that. And so England was my entry point.
I knew, based on the Drake portion of the story, that this roughly ten-year period provided the temporal boundary for the first four-books in The Binding Pearls series (who knows if there will be more). Boundaries are good, particularly in historical fiction (fantasy or not), because “history” is a big place and you can quickly become overwhelmed by the mass of information. I started in England, because Drake’s voyage was in the service of the English crown, reading primarily biographies of Queen Elizabeth, Walter Raleigh, Francis Walsingham, and Mary, Queen of Scots, but also some broader works on English politics and culture and the Protestant reformation.
I found biographies particularly helpful for two reasons. First, biographies have to place the individual in the context of their time, so you get all of the details regarding political events, economics, war, culture, religion, and so forth that you would get in a broader work about the country. And second, like all fiction, historical fiction/fantasy is very much about character, and what better way to delve into a character who was a real person than biography. By reading several biographies of the same person, I was pretty quickly able to get a sense of their particular motivations and sensibilities, which became important as I developed the fictional aspects of the story. This was particularly helpful with the major historical figures — Queen Elizabeth, Walter Raleigh, and Francis Walsingham (who aren’t necessarily the most important characters) — but it wasn’t useful for lesser figures who don’t have biographies devoted to them but who nevertheless ended up being major players in the story — people like Anne Vavasour, Fulke Greville, and Mary Sidney, for example. For those sorts, I learned what I could about them from other sources and developed their characters by extrapolating from things I knew they’d done or simply from imagination. Remember, this is historical fantasy — not, strictly speaking, historical fiction — and so I don’t feel duty-bound to historical accuracy in every respect. Historically accurate in some places — historically plausible in others — always serving the story.
What quickly became apparent in reading all of this English history was how interactions between England and France were so critical to understanding this period, both in terms of marriage negotiations for the unmarried and heir-less Queen Elizabeth and in terms of the whole Protestant/Catholic conflict. Like England, the French were divided by Protestant and Catholic factions and were extremely worried about Spain’s growing empire. The Netherlands (on France’s northern border and directly east across the water from England) was controlled by Spain and mired in civil war between Protestants and Catholics. If Spain could bring the Dutch under complete control, there was every reason to believe it would then turn its attention to either England or France.
And so, I widened my research, starting with a number of biographies on the French royal family — the Valois — including works on their matriarch, Catherine de Medici, and then moving on to her children who were still living by the late 1570s — King Henri III and his two younger siblings, Crown Prince François and Princess Marguerite. This was an absolute rabbit hole. Having been a long-time Anglophile, I had no idea the French were so interesting in this period. And this led to a key realization about The Binding Pearls series as a whole — the French would be a full third of the story.
Just to pause a second, I think that’s the main point of this blog post — Use the process of research and discovery to develop your idea. Maybe there’s a little kernel of an idea to start — a particular historical figure or period or event that interests you — or maybe you have a unique idea about magic. (What if there had been dragons in the Napoleonic wars was presumably the starting point of the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik — In my case, the starting point was a particular element of magic that I needed to place in an interesting historical context.) Once you’ve found that kernel of an idea (that character, or setting, or magical element), don’t spend a bunch of time staring at a blank page trying to conjure something out of your limited knowledge of the period and setting. Start reading. Range here and there. Read biographies. Read historical monographs. Read about culture. Read about political events. Think about connections. What if two things (people, countries, technologies) that didn’t actually interact historically in that period actually did converge somehow in your story? What amazing things might have occurred?
Anyway, process-wise, from summer 2018 through summer 2019 I went through this iterative process of reading books, taking notes on what actually happened, and then thinking about how things would be different based on the divergent timeline I had established. There’s a break in the real-world timeline in the first book, The Serpent’s Pearls, where something happens differently than it happened historically. From that point on, various characters start to do things that push events ever-farther from real-world history. So as I researched each new piece — the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, etc. — I had to think about how they would be effected.
Not surprisingly, this quickly became very complicated. I had a dozen or more characters in England, the same in France, and also on the Drake voyage (plus more in Book Two through Book Four). The timeline was almost a decade across all four books. And I wasn’t sure yet who the POV characters would be. So, I created a spreadsheet to organize it all. Across the top (each column) was each and every character (not just POV characters). And along the left side was time — measured in months — starting with 1577 and running down all the way to 1588. That meant that every cell in the spreadsheet represented what a character was doing in any particular month from 1577 through the late 1580s.
I then began to fill it in. Remember, I have a break in the real-world timeline in my story, so for each character the first cells in the spreadsheet (the early months and in some cases years) simply reflect from a plot perspective what that character was up to in our timeline (real life — although I absolutely take license with certain characters and situations early on; it is fiction after all). At some point, each character is affected by the break in the real-world timeline. From then on, everything that happens with that character may or may not be fictional, a product of my imagination. Maybe that character’s actions track real-world events fairly closely, or maybe they diverge radically — depends on the character.
As I filled in the spreadsheet, I started to make even more connections between characters — in particular, I could see in any given month what was going on with each character and identify opportunities to develop the story in terms of character or plot. Over time, it became more and more clear which characters needed to be POV characters, and so I made those characters’ columns bold. And I organized the columns to keep secondary characters who were highly relevant to a particular POV character next to that POV character’s column. I sorted all the columns so that all the French characters were together, the English characters together, and the Drake voyage characters together (and others settings for future books that I won’t divulge here). I also added in a row below each character’s name where I put in key aspects of that character I didn’t want to forget — birthdays, relationships to other characters, motivations, etc. This made it easier to keep it all straight.
As I said, that process of reading/researching, developing the chart (which was my version of an outline), and really coming to understand the characters and the four-book story arc took about a year. By the fall of 2019, I knew the characters, I knew the story. I could literally tell you the story from start to finish as one might tell a story around a campfire. That is, I could describe all the details of who the characters are and what they do and what things happen and what it all means. But that’s not how novels work. Novels have dialogue and point-of-view and all the things we’re familiar with that make them more than just a campfire telling of an epic tale. And so, I was faced with writing it down. There was only one problem. I had never written anything — not fiction anyway.
Don’t get me wrong. I was trained to write — but in the fields of history and law, not creative writing. So I did the sensible thing. Well, not the sensible thing — that would have been to give up. No, I bought a couple books on creative writing, watched some videos on YouTube (novelists, screenwriters, etc.), watched Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, and David Mamet and a few others on Masterclass.com — and digested it all quickly, just to make sure I wasn’t overlooking some key part of the story-telling process. And then I started writing. Starting in September of 2019, I wrote steadily anytime I could. And somehow the words flowed easily. By February 2020, I was about 90% done. But then the pandemic hit, and the social justice movements, and all the upheaval that 2020 has been about. And I just stopped writing — for months. We quarantined. We marched. We watched CNN endlessly. We worked from home. We walked the empty streets of our neighborhood. We worried about our finances. We got a third dog. We fixated on our little lives.
Finally, in October, the will to write returned, and I was able to finish the last few chapters, did a round of editing, and sent it off to the first round of beta readers. And that’s it. The story so far. About a year and a half to research, develop characters, and plot four books — and then about six months to write Book One (not counting the six months of 2020 angsty paralysis). I think the writing part has gone relatively smoothly to this point because I didn’t get ahead of myself and try to start putting words on the page before I really understood the story and the characters and could tell it verbally from start to finish. I know that approach doesn’t work for all writers — some have to work it out on the page — but honestly I couldn’t imagine trying to tackle epic historical fiction (fantasy or not) any other way (“pantsing” for instance would be out of the question for me on a project of this scope).
I hope this inspires you to tackle a historical fiction or historical fantasy project you’ve been thinking about. If you’re interested in chatting about writing, feel free to use the Contact page to message me and we can correspond by email.
— Lincoln LMN