I am delighted to host my first guest blogger. Jean M. Roberts, former nurse, voracious reader, ancestor hunter and occasional gardener, is the author of five historical fiction books. She maintains a blog, The Book’s Delight, dedicated to all things books. She lives near Houston with her family. When not writing, she’s thinking about writing.
When I planned my first book, I knew it would be historical fiction. The beauty of this genre is the freedom to incorporate almost all other genres into your story. Romance, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Paranormal, Suspense, Murder Mystery and more, all set in the past. Writing historical fiction is also a great excuse to read more history, dive deep into a time period, scour the internet and library for tidbits to fill the pages with authentic details. There’s nothing as glorious as a historical rabbit hole, spending hours lost in time, mining the past for clues.
As an author, writing historical fiction has also been a vehicle for me to tell the history of my ancestors. The genealogy bug bit me many years ago and found the fleeting traces of my ancestors fascinating but sterile. I wanted more than just names and dates. What were their lives like? How did they live, love and die? What were the major events that affected their lives? Writing Blood in the Valley, set before and during the American Revolution, took a deep dive into the Mohawk Valley of New York. I was lucky enough to travel to the area and spent a week exploring places where my characters live and fought for their country. I’ve written several books that include my distant ancestors. It brings them alive to me and my readers. Nothing is more satisfying than getting an email from an unknown distant cousin thanking me for writing the story of our shared ancestor.
Another love of mine is time travel. Du Maurier’s House on the Strand and Seaton’s Green Darkness captivated my imagination with their different modes of viewing the past. I’ve written several books with elements of time travel and it’s so much fun to put your modern day character into the past and watch them try to survive. In The Angel of Goliad, I plunk my main character down in the middle of the Texas Revolution and let her tell the story of the real Angel of Goliad, Francita Alavez. Of course, a trip to Goliad to see the sight of the massacre was warranted, and I got to walk in her footsteps.
I’ve always been a bit of an anglophile, aided and abetted by my years living in England. Covid allowed me to indulge myself by writing a historical fantasy blended with elements of Roman mythology. I reincarnated my poor main character over and over and put her in all my favorite moments of English history. The Frowning Madonna is my covid ode to England.
My current WIP, Midsummer Women, is a dual-time blend of history, suspense, with elements of witchcraft, and a whiff of the supernatural. Like most of my books, my main historical focus is early American history. It includes the story of the little known and ill-fated Popham Colony in Maine, settled at the same time as Jamestown in Virginia. That trip to Maine is in the planning!
I think my writing is a good example of the umbrella that is historical fiction. I write pure historical fiction, playful historical fantasy, gothic suspense, and exciting time-travel all while bringing history alive for my readers. I cannot think of a genre that allows such freedom and joy to write what the mind can imagine.
Blog Host Helena P. Schrader is the author of 25 historical fiction and non-fiction books, eleven of which have one one or more awards. You can find out more about her, her books and her awards at: https://helenapschrader.com
Her most recent release, Cold Peace,
was runner-up for the Historical Fiction Company BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
Award, as well as winning awards from Maincrest Media and Readers'
Favorites. Find out more at: https://www.helenapschrader.com/cold-peace.html
I so agree. I was teaching history in South America when I wrote my first book. It was a historical fiction about the city and a man that changed the history of the world. A city that was the must industrialized city in the world, yet few people know it eve exist.
ReplyDeleteAs a history lover and teacher, I concluded that the best way to get people interested in history was to present it in action form, where the reader could get involved and yet see people, events, and places that really existed. ROCHA'S TREASURE OF POTOSI was my first attempt and it was a bestseller in South America as well as the US. The success drove me to write a series about Bass Reeves the greatest US Marshal in history, who was also and ex slave. These three books were also bestsellers. The other thing that is great about historical fiction is you can spend hours researching the topic and
increasing you knowledge, which exposes you to other events which may lead you to another story. I think i got my encouragement in this kind of writing from Truman Capote's, IN COLD BLOOD.