Below is a sample of one of the 25 lessons in The Historical Novel Course. I hope you enjoy it, and it gives you an idea of what you’ll find when you sign up for the course!
This lesson is from Module 3: Inspiration
Lesson 1: Finding that arc
Finding or creating a story arc out of actual historical events—or setting one against actual historical events—is one of the biggest challenges of writing historical fiction, especially biographical fiction. Often the big, dramatic events of history or a historical figure’s life don’t arrange themselves in a convenient arc. So how do you handle that? How do you corral your extensive research into a story that works?
What exactly is a story arc?
The word “arc” is bandied about a lot in writing craft. What I mean when I use the term is the way the story is structured so that it encompasses a change that leads your protagonist to a different state of being by the end. It has to have a shape in that the stakes need to rise continually (with moments of respite, but never a complete absence of tension) and the protagonist has to go through different phases before achieving that new state.
Your arc will have many broad sections. For instance, below is an outline of the arc traced by the often-used four-act structure:
- Setup/Exposition
- Introduce characters, setting, and initial situation—establish the story question
- Establish the normal world or status quo
(In historical fiction, you have to orient your reader to the time and place, and do it without overloading your opening with description and backstory.)
- Rising Action
- Build tension through conflicts and complications
- Introduce obstacles and challenges
- Develop character relationships and motivations
- Climax
- The peak of tension or conflict
- Major turning point where key conflicts come to a head
- Often features the most dramatic moment
- Falling Action
- Show the immediate results of the climax
- Begin resolving conflicts
- Characters deal with consequences
- Resolution/Denouement
- Tie up loose ends
- Show the new normal
- Provide closure
The important thing about your ending is that the change in your protagonist must be apparent. And everything between the beginning and end needs to be logical and true to the period.
You can have several different arcs in your story:
- Main arcs (spanning entire stories)—what we’re talking about here
- Subplot arcs (smaller storylines within the main plot)—essential to add complication and variety to the story
- Character arcs (following a character’s personal growth)—vital for your protagonist
- Series arcs (spanning multiple books/seasons)
The example above is by no means the only way to structure a story, but it gives a sense of what I mean by an arc. It’s important to understand, too, that the underlying structure—the chronological cause and effect—of your story may not be the way you actually tell it. But you have to know what it is no matter how you mess around with it in the end.
Story first
First, let’s establish the fact that the story has to work as a story, obeying all the demands of narrative drive and pacing, suspense, resolution, etc. that any story needs to keep a reader turning the pages. It has to have a beginning, a middle and an end, and something has to change. Even if your ambitions are quiet and literary rather than fast-paced and commercial, the story must have an underlying structure that honors those requirements.
And that begins with identifying the exact parameters of your story present—where it begins, and where it ends—as you started to do in the exercises in Lesson 3 in Module 2.
It’s all about identifying the right/best place to start
The purpose of that lesson was to get you to zero in on a specific point in time that begins the action of your story. Once you’re writing, you have to bring that moment to life with a specific scene—and sometimes thinking about your opening scene will make you reevaluate your initial decision.
This is one of your most important decisions when writing a historical novel—or any novel, really. Not only do you have to identify the time parameters of your story, but your opening scene has to meet certain criteria. The first thing that happens on the page should draw your reader in right away. And I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes you don’t identify that actual opening scene until you’ve written the entire manuscript. Still, thinking about it when you start is important.
→Start with the story question.
Ideally you should start your novel at the moment that raises the story question, the one whose answer the reader will be desperate to know. Will he save the world before the asteroid hits? Or on a more subtle level, will she overcome her lack of self-confidence and find her place in the world? These questions are never stated baldly. But they need to be implied, or at least prepared, from the very beginning.
I gave an example of this from The Marriage Portrait earlier in this course. O’Farrell all but states the question, Will Alfonso murder his wife? even before the story starts. That question is a great illustration of establishing high stakes. We know from the outset that it’s life or death. I wonder, though, whether she knew she would give the reader that information from the very beginning, or if she backed into it after she’d written a draft. Both are believable scenarios.
Stakes don’t have to be life or death to be high, however. They just have to be significant in proportion to the story. And the stakes have to be high enough to your protagonist that they go through hell and back again to get through everything.
A word about “setting the scene”
The world-building part of historical fiction is very important. But don’t be mistaken in believing you have to set up that world completely for your reader before you launch into the story. How much you do of this will depend on the story, but be sparing. Really think about what your reader absolutely has to know in order to understand the first scene and its context. Be brutal with yourself about this.
Now, back to the lesson…
→Identify a triggering event.
This is often called an inciting incident. There should be an event that triggers the story’s unfolding, that forces the protagonist to make a decision that has consequences, and sets off the chain of dominoes that drags a reader through to the end.
That means you should avoid starting with the deep background you believe your reader might need to know in order to follow it all. That’s backstory, and should be trickled in delicately as needed once your story is underway (as discussed in the previous module). At the beginning, you need to grab the reader and take them on a nonstop journey through your story until the point at which you choose to end it (more about that below).
The fact is that a real person’s life seldom follows a dramatic trajectory from youth through adulthood, or just through adulthood, so it’s up to you to excavate the arc from history—look for those turning points I mentioned, those events that caused a chain reaction. If you have to splice some bits together, leap over gaps in the real story, that can be a legitimate choice.
Here, too, your sub-genre matters. In a historical romance, the question is almost always will the right people end up together? In a historical mystery, it’s will the perpetrator be brought to justice/mystery solved? In both of these examples, you will have fictional protagonists, so you have more control over the story’s arc. The degree to which you embed it in the real history is what will make your task more or less difficult.
The matter of where to start the story is something I discussed with my wonderful best-selling, award-winning novelist friend Stephanie Cowell. I was privileged to read a draft of a novel-in-progress that she sensed had some issues but was too close to it to figure out. When I read her gorgeous prose, I realized that the biggest problem was that she hadn’t started in the right place.
Here is a recording of a coaching session we had. She talks quite a bit about the challenge of working around the history and finding the starting point.
I, too, have struggled with where to start a manuscript.
I will freely confess that many of my manuscripts have initially started in the wrong place. Even when I figured out that my novel about Adélaïde Labille-Guiard would not have three POV characters, I still had trouble finding the precise, best beginning, the inflection point that set all the other events of the story in motion. Quite late in my revision process, I cut the first fifty pages of the manuscript. Fifty pages.
You can save yourself at least some of that anguish by making sure you have a clear understanding of story structure and narrative drive—more about that in the next lesson. That relies on you not only finding that perfect moment to start the story, but then continuing it along the cause-effect trajectory that makes it keep moving, keep the reader wanting to know not only what happens next, but how the protagonist responds to what happens, the decisions they make.
I’ll give you an example from The Portraitist:
The first place I made the story start was very dramatic. It was my protagonist trying to finish her watercolor-on-ivory self-portrait for her first-ever public exhibition, the salon of the Académie de Saint-Luc. Her husband disapproves of the fact that she’s an artist (something I made up due to lack of any detailed information about him), and when he stumbles home drunk late at night, he beats her and breaks her just-finished picture in half.
Dramatic, right? Yes, except that it didn’t lead to an action that propelled the story. With that as the beginning, I had to have her find a way to fix the picture and have enough time elapse before the exhibition that it was believable, which slowed down the pace. I asked myself, knowing what I know from my research about her life and artistic career, what might push her to become the artist she was meant to be? An abusive husband is an inconvenience, certainly, but he didn’t care about art (at least not in my version of him).
The answer to that question, as I saw it, was Adélaïde discovering that she had a rival—a younger, prettier, more well-connected woman artist—who was showing her work in the same exhibition, also for the first time. Not only that, but her rival was a full member of the Académie de Saint-Luc where Adélaïde was only an agréé, an apprentice.
This beginning also had the advantage of setting up the story question that would underlie everything else in the novel: Would Adélaïde succeed as an artist despite the odds stacked against her in pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary Paris, among them a beautiful rival? The other beginning only set up the question as to whether Adélaïde would succeed in getting her work fixed and avoiding further confrontations with her husband in time for the salon.
So I had to fast-forward to the day the exhibition opens, and Adélaïde sneaks out to it after her husband goes to work and sees a woman artist she does not know who has several pictures in the salon.
Her dismay, her feeling of hopelessness and frustration despite her obvious talent, is (I hope) clear to the reader, who can then empathize with her as she struggles to find her place in a male-dominated art hierarchy, during a time of political turmoil.
→Make your reader care about the protagonist.
I’ve put this last in this little list, but there are ways in which it’s the most important factor of all. Although places change, details of dress and society change, human nature is a constant. Make sure that when you create a sense of place based on your careful research, when you figure out or create that story arc, you don’t overwhelm or neglect the human side. The best integration of research and character makes the character come to life through the period elements.
For instance, in The Marriage Portrait, the world of the Medici court is very foreign to the reader, and O’Farrell spends a lot of time and effort making it come to life. But she also creates a thoughtful, complex character in her young protagonist, giving her qualities that cause us to be sympathetic—especially her affinity for animals and her skill as a keen observer and artist. While Lucrezia’s situation is unique to the time, her responses and reactions are timeless. O’Farrell uses the restrictions placed on her to make us sympathize with her even more.
The satisfying ending
Endings can be just as hard as beginnings. Sometimes they might be obvious: The death of the historical character; the end of a war; a royal marriage; accession to a throne; etc. But even in those cases you have choices about which part, which moment to focus on. Here, too, you need to think of the answer to the story question. What’s the point at which the reader has that answer? Continuing beyond that probably isn’t necessary.
Another example from The Portraitist:
In my research about Adélaïde, I was unable to find out much in her career and life that happened beyond the Revolution. The events were sparse, and her life did not have the dramatic ups and downs of before the Revolution. At the same time, I didn’t want to end the novel at the end of the Terror when she and her lover moved back into Paris. It was no resolution. I made the choice to jump over several years. But how far? She married her lover in 1801 and died in 1803. The marriage itself didn’t answer the story question of her career as an artist. And her death—even if I could dig up any details about it, or even discover where she is buried—was also not a good ending.
But my research gave me the answer, as it sometimes does in the most fortuitous way. In 1802, the American artist Benjamin West gave a dinner party in his Paris flat, to which he invited all the leading artists of his day—including Adélaïde and her rival. I took that fact as my endpoint, even though no details exist about exactly what might have transpired at the dinner. It allowed me to construct a scene that answers not just the main story question, but all the questions that arose throughout the novel, and gives Adélaïde that last word in a way that is true to her character and maintains the reader’s empathy.
It may seem like serendipity to have discovered that such a dinner party occurred. But if you’re approaching your research in the right way, with focus and intention, such things can happen. And even if you’ve found a trove of fascinating material that would allow you to continue writing well beyond the point where your story is truly resolved, resist that temptation. Because—the author’s note. More about that below.
What comes between
Like it or not, sometimes you have to bend history just a little in order to make that satisfying arc. I’m not talking about changing major, generally known events, or things that would completely distort history (unless you’re writing alternate history, of course). If you watched the video above, you heard Stephanie talk about having to possibly change some facts for the sake of the story. She wasn’t talking about big things, but about altering some of the facts around Monet’s son Jean, who married Blanche, and about whom there isn’t much information.
I hinted at this above when I said you can elide parts of history, stick them together slightly differently or jump across time gaps in the action. As long as you do it with integrity (which means explaining in the author’s note and keeping it all believable), no one—except a high stickler, and there will always be those—will likely notice, or care if they do. They’ll be too involved in the story itself.
Finding the right scenes to begin and end your novel—the story present—can literally solve most of your structure, plot, and pacing problems. Doing that begins with research. But it also relies on having a sense of what makes a powerful story and trusting your reader to follow you there.
The thing is, your careful research will help you invent in a way that feels right, that doesn’t stick out or disrupt the setting or the characters.
Your author’s note is important. Spend time thinking about what you need to include. That can be sources, decisions you made, where you tinkered with history, suggestions for further reading, and more.
A note about the author’s note
I love reading author’s notes. I love finding out what was historical and what was made up. I appreciate knowing what decisions the author had to make for the sake of the story, what attracted them to the subject or the period, etc. Your author’s note is where you get to bare all about your research, what you had to change because it didn’t work with the story and why you thought you were justified in doing so. It allows you to tell your reader what happened to your protagonist before or after the span of your novel. Spend some serious time on your author’s note. Your readers will thank you!
The exercises on the attached worksheet will help you brainstorm starting and ending scenes that follow the guidelines above, as well as give you ways to think about getting your reader to empathize with your protagonist and eager to follow their arc.