'For the past to truly live for us, we have to fall a little bit in love...'

From the cover of The Things We Did for Love

Author of The Things We Did for Love, Natasha Farrant writes about the challenges of bringing the past to life in historical fiction

I’m going to level with you. I’m rubbish at history. My brain is wired in such a way that it doesn’t remember names, dates, or the order in which events take place. I couldn’t tell you which kings came before which, unless they had the same name and a number attached, when the Romans left Britain, the date of Queen Victoria’s death or even the name of our current Queen’s father (George, yes, I know – I saw the King’s Speech. But which one?) 

And yet,  and yet… I read Victor Hugo, Dumas, Tolstoy. Sebastian Faulkes, Hilary Mantel, Patrick Rambaud. I may not remember when they took place but I can talk quite knowledgeably about dawn at the battle of Borodino, and field hospitals at Austerlitz, and that uprising in Les Misérables.  I know it’s not the same as remembering the dates of France’s five Republics but it’s so much more interesting!

There is, and there has to be, a common accord between the writer of historical fiction and its reader. The writer must strive for historical accuracy. Historical accuracy is VERY IMPORTANT, but if the reader is merely after bald facts, then he or she must go to a history book. If a book calls itself a novel, Fact must serve the greater purpose of Story.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by fact, when you are writing historical fiction. At the back of your mind lurks the idea that you will never do justice to the event which inspired you. My own novel, The Things We Did for Love, is based on the much-written about German destruction of the village of Oradour sur Glane in June 1944. Throughout the writing process, I was conscious of a dual need: to be respectful of the events which inspired me, whilst using them to construct a fictional story which would resonate with modern readers. The challenge was to create a story which fitted into a structure and time frame set in stone. Of course I took liberties. I changed the name of the village to make clear that I was not writing history. I gave the Germans a tenuous motive where there was none. Most importantly, I invented new characters.

At its best, by addressing truths about the human condition throughout the ages, historical fiction can illustrate how relevant the lessons of the past remain today, often while teaching us about events and periods of history we may previously have known nothing about. But writers must remember: once our research is done – our travelling and interviews and reading - once it has become a part of our consciousness so that we feel not just that we know about our period but that we have somehow lived it, that is when we must start do our job as writers of fiction. Historical fiction, for obvious reasons, tends to focus on the more quirky, tragic, heroic, extraordinary elements of the past, but to capture the imagination of readers we must bring our pages to life, and the way we do this is no different from writers of any other genres. We construct plots. We weave in suspense. And I say it again: most important of all, we create characters.

Natasha Rostov and Prince Andrei. Captain Corelli and the lovely Pelagia. Stephen Wraysford and his comrades. Scarlett O’Hara and her Mammy. Everybody in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. Characters who endure in the mind and heart of the reader long after we have turned the final page. They are the single most important element in bringing the past to life, whether you are writing for adults, teens or children.

For the past to truly live for us, we have to fall a little bit in love.

Read our review of The Things We Did for Love