O'Donnell's Historical Fiction Rules

Author Paraic O'Donnell has set out eight rules for effectively situating a novel in the past. The primer, published on Lit Hub, uses Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall as a near-ideal example of technical excellence.

O'Donnell acknowledges that literary craft is nuanced and rules are reductive. He argues that while literary giants break rules knowingly, most writers who break them are simply doing it wrong. The term 'dating' in the title refers to techniques for setting a novel in time and place.

Go Easy on the Period Diction

Language is what books are made of. There is a temptation to use pungently recognizable idiom from a period. Mantel's chosen milieu in Wolf Hall is Tudor England. She has a scholar's intimacy with Early Modern English.

Mantel cleaves to a felicitous simplicity. Her constructions achieve consonance with the period but stop short of mimicry. For now, Thomas Cromwell is just a boy cowering before his brutish father. His world has shrunk to a few miserable particulars. The words for such things are simple.

Spell Like a Normal Person

A writer might seek out unmodernized editions of authors like Defoe or Fielding. It is a worthy philological undertaking. Modern conventions of orthography took a long time to solidify.

There are perils, however. When your eye is caught by archaisms like Jane Austen's spellings, you might wonder what harm it could do. O'Donnell states this is not the way. You will not fast-track your way to an authentic Regency setting by putting 'chuse' for 'choose'. He notes that while Susanna Clarke did it, she did a lot more besides, and the writer reading this is not Susanna Clarke.

Don't Use Your Research to Accessorize

Writing a historical novel means putting in serious hours at the library. This is not optional. Having done all that research, a writer might form the view that none of it should be wasted.

The answer is usually no. You should read widely about your period. Read deeply about those particulars that naturally arise in your story. Most of that reading should be kept off the page. It should be confined to the gentlest cross-hatching.

The reader will then attend gladly to the details you do alight on. They will have come to trust that they matter. Treat the rest of your shiny trinkets like in that mirror-twirl trick when you're getting ready to go out. If it catches your eye immediately, take it off.

The Past Is Another Country, but Your Characters Live There

Choosing a point of view is a consequential decision. In historical fiction the stakes are heightened. Omniscient narrators were much more of a thing in centuries past. Managing such conspicuous anachronisms requires consummate skill, as seen in Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries.

In most cases, you will be using either the first person or the close third person. You will be relating proceedings from the perspective of a specific individual. That individual should want, care about and notice a closely circumscribed subset of things.

Her own clothing? Maybe, if some occasion requires it. The streetscape, the shopfronts, the hansom cabs? Unless she is new here, then not without some particular reason. Just like you, she is probably preoccupied with something. Just like you, most of what she sees every day is all but invisible. Choose carefully.

Stop Worldbuilding Like It's Westeros

O'Donnell admits to watching too many video essays on YouTube about fantasy fiction. He has developed a pet theory. The quasi-historicism of fantasy fiction has infected historical fiction with certain tendencies.

Among these are egregious outbursts of exposition tolerated in the cause of 'worldbuilding'. There is no excuse for wheeling in some talkative character just to explain why the townsfolk are acting skittish. Find a solution that is natural and unobtrusive.

This carry-on usually occurs under flimsy pretexts. 'We had all heard the tales,' someone will begin. The tales that follow will bespeak an oral tradition of near-miraculous efficiency. Decades, even centuries, may be encompassed by these surveys.

Some readers may welcome them on the grounds that it is convenient. That is no excuse. This is not a video game. There is not supposed to be a hotkey for lore. Reveal your world as someone experiences it, or do not reveal it at all.

**Stop Set-Dressing Like It's Downton Abbey**

O'Donnell does not issue this edict from a high horse. He states he still knows every single number in the musical episode of Buffy. The final rules caution against treating historical settings as mere backdrop for costume drama. The article concludes by urging writers to let their characters inhabit the past, not just wear its clothes.