This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the six hundred, sixteenth episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, Genre Tips, How to Write historical fiction.

All fiction is a contemplation of human existence.

And this is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the historical genre, which purposefully looks back in time and seeks to create context for

and find meaning in the events that have already happened to the human race.

Learning how to write historical fiction

requires all the usual techniques of good storytelling combined with excellent

research skills. Good historical writers must also prove

empathetic enough to understand and dramatize characters whose lives were

often very different from our own, while still evoking the humanity that they

share in common with us.

Historical fiction was my first love, counting unpublished books. I've gleefully explored historical settings in

seven out of my 11 completed novels. Although I consider myself primarily a speculative novelist at this point. The main reason I hopped

from historical fiction to fantasy was, as I mentioned in the previous episode, how to write fantasy.

It was simply because I wanted to grant myself a little more leeway from the facts while keeping the historical settings. And even now there is no fictional

element that draws me in more surely than that of historical

settings, people, and crises.

In response to the episode on Fantasy, Reader Sylvia commented on the blog, I suppose part of me thinks that

any fiction is fantasy in a way because we make up the characters. And I couldn't agree more. To me, historical fiction has always seemed fantastical, whether it's

set in medieval times or in the 1980s. Even when exploring the darkest epochs in human history, there's a certain magic to seeing a world

filled with strange clothing, vocabulary, and culture.

And then to see the people in this world brought to life just as vividly as if they

lived right next door to you or me.

...