How to write a historical novel
The historical novel lives on a tension no other genre shares in quite the same way: it has to be faithful to an era the reader never lived through, while telling characters that same reader can still recognise themselves in. Lean too far toward accuracy and you get a treatise with dialogue; lean too far toward relatability and you get present-day people in costume.
Characters need to think according to their era
The most common mistake, and the hardest to fix in revision, is giving historical characters contemporary moral and social sensibilities — on gender, class, authority — without that sensibility arising from a real conflict with their context. A character who thinks "correctly" by today's values, without paying a price for it in their world, isn't a credible historical character: they're a contemporary reader in costume.
That doesn't mean characters have to share every prejudice of their era without friction. It means that if a character diverges from the dominant values of their time, that gap needs a narrative cost — isolation, danger, conflict with family or community — consistent with how that society would genuinely have reacted.
The universal desire under the costume
What makes a historical character readable to a reader today isn't making them think like us, but giving them desires that stay recognisable across centuries: love, ambition, survival, the need to be seen or to protect someone. How those desires get expressed changes radically with the era; the desire itself doesn't.
A character who wants to choose who they marry is understandable in any century, even though the consequences of that desire — and the tools for pursuing it — are completely different in the 1600s than today. Building the character from the universal desire, and letting the historical context shape its expression, avoids both anachronism and textbook coldness.
Research is a skeleton, not a dossier
Historical research exists to build credible scenes, not to demonstrate how much the writer studied. The sign that research is invading the page is a pile-up of details no character, at that moment, would have any reason to notice or think about — the same trap as fantasy worldbuilding, except here the details are real instead of invented, which makes them even more tempting to include.
A good test: if a paragraph of historical detail can be removed without the scene losing something the characters actually experience, it's probably there for the wrong reader — one who wants an essay, not a novel.
Accuracy in small details matters more than in big events
Historical novel readers forgive a liberty on a major event more readily — a shifted date, a historical figure made more central than they actually were — than an inconsistency in an everyday detail: what people ate, how they got around, what something cost, what was socially possible for a woman alone on the street at night. It's the small, repeated details, not the big facts, that build the feeling of genuinely being in that era.
That suggests where to focus the research: less on textbook events, more on material life — food, clothing, illness, travel, everyday social hierarchies — running through every scene.
Language: neither unreadably archaic nor jarringly modern
Faithfully reproducing the language of a past era would make the book unreadable for a contemporary reader; using language identical to today's breaks the historical illusion. The most common solution is a middle register: syntax and vocabulary slightly more formal or archaised than contemporary ones, without reproducing grammar or expressions that have genuinely fallen out of use.
This matters even more for dialogue, where the reader's ear is more sensitive: a blatantly modern phrase in the mouth of an eighteenth-century character breaks the illusion more sharply than an imprecise description does.
Real historical figures: how much to fictionalise
When a novel includes people who really existed, narrative freedom has a practical limit: documented public events constrain the plot, while private thoughts, dialogue, and motivations remain the writer's territory. Stating, even just in an author's note, where the documented history ends and invention begins is a practice many historical novel readers appreciate and partly expect.
Keeping research, chronology and consistency together
A historical novel piles up more background material to remember than almost any other genre: real dates that can't be moved, verified material details, the plot's internal chronology that has to interlock with the historical one. In NovLore, the work's story bible and the story timeline in the dashboard keep these two layers — the historical and the narrative — aligned, and the AI assistant reads them to help you check that a detail in chapter twenty doesn't contradict a date fixed in chapter three.
Frequently asked questions
How much liberty can I take with historical facts?
It depends on the contract you set with the reader from the start. Some historical novels follow documented facts rigorously and only invent what the sources don't say; others use history as a backdrop for freer invention. Both work, as long as the reader understands early which of the two contracts they're reading.
Should the characters speak in an archaic way?
A slightly elevated or formal register is enough to signal the era without compromising readability. Faithfully reproducing real historical syntax almost always makes the text laborious, and doesn't add credibility proportional to the reading effort it demands.
How do I avoid psychological anachronism?
Start from the character's universal desire, then ask how that specific society would have reacted if someone had openly pursued it. If the answer is "without consequences," you've probably given the character a freedom their era wouldn't have granted them.